Governor,
Now that you made your address to the Democratic National Convention endorsing Joe Biden over Donald Trump you might be feeling proud of yourself. You have an illustrious career. But, in many ways, your career is built on illusions.
You won election to Congress in 1982. That was a Democratic wave year. You were the only new Republican. That seems impressive but it isn't. You beat Bob Shamansky, a 1st-term Democrat who was so irritating that the Ohio Democrats were willing to sacrifice him when reapportioning the state.
You made your name by being a pro-defense budget hawk. Within a few months of you arriving in Congress you made headlines after finding $100 hammers in the budget. Most of these weren't really over-prices items. They were a side-effect of cost-plus contracts. With those, the price of everything is added together, the allowed markup is figured, divided by the number of items and that is added to each item. If there's two items, one costing $1 and one costing $99 and the mark-up is 6% then the $1 item will be charged $3 and the expensive one $102. That looks bad for the cheap item but the whole contract is $106.
You eventually topped out in Congress, retired then reentered politics and ran for Governor. You had another stroke of luck. The incumbent was Ted Strictland who had won during another Democratic wave. He turned out to be a very poor governor and you ran during a Republican wave. You got even luckier when you ran for reelection. You opponent self-destructed during the Summer and you essentially ran unopposed.
I suppose that every governor pictures himself running for president but that reelection gave you a lot of buzz. A governor from a swing-state who was reelected by a landslide. Most people outside the state didn't understand how weak your opposition was.
Then came your run for president. And it all fell apart. Your strategy was to enter the race late and take advantage of the polling bump from declaring, going into the primaries. You planned to win New Hampshire, try to hold on until Ohio then leverage a win there to take Michigan and other midwest states, giving you momentum.
None of that worked. Everyone knew you were running months before you formally announced so there was no bounce. A lot of the big-money donors were already committed. You did well in New Hampshire but didn't win. You did win Ohio but that was your only win. Regardless, you hung on until the bitter end. A lot of people think that you acted as a spoiler, splitting the anti-Trump vote with Ted Cruize and allowing Trump to win the nomination.
A lot of people are still angry with you for that. Many of them are Democrats.
Then you positioned yourself, trying to somehow keep Trump's delegated from voting from voting for him and settling on you as a compromise candidate. That never got off the ground but it showed that you placed yourself ahead of your party.
You spent your last two years as Governor semi-retired. You were on talk-shows every week and only in the state part-time. And yes, we noticed.
Then came your retirement to the Sunday-morning talk shows. You have a niche with them as a Republican who hates Trump. That puts you in demand and your short speech to the DNC burnished your credentials.
But you are trying to get Joe Biden elected! I get that you hate Trump personally but do you have any principles? You stood there and told us that Biden will not lurch to the left. Shortly after that Bernie Sanders came on and assured us that BIden would indeed move to the left. Even the Washington Post commented on the cognitive disconnect between what you said and what Sanders said. You're both probably engaging in wishful thinking but I've read Biden's platform. It's very far left.
So, someone is lying. Either you are lying to us, Governor, or the Biden campaign lied to you. Or maybe you lied to yourself. It doesn't matter. Biden has always been left-of-center and the center has moved far to the left.
There's something you should know about your new friends, Governor. I'm sure they shook your hand and told you how courageous you are and how you are helping your country. But they never voted for you. And they never will vote for you. They don't even like you. Some of them absolutely hate you. AOC complained about your stance on abortion. Others blame you personally for not dropping out of the race early and allowing Trump to win.
Here's something else that you should know: they don't really hate Donald Trump, at least not the way you think they do. They hate him because he's a Republican president. They hated George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon the same way. They hated Romney when he ran (remember Biden saying that he'd put blacks back in chains). They love McCain now and have his daughter telling us hw terrible Trump is but they hated him when he ran (he was going to turn society back 60 years and reintroduce segregation and Jim Crow). Since Ike there have only been two Republican president that the Demcrats didn't hate with a passion: Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush. Both of them were defeated.
If you had run a better campaign and managed to win in 2016 then that's how they'd feel about you. You would be the divider-in-chief and the most divisive president ever. That's because it's not the person they hate, it's the office when occupied by a Republican. Heck, if you were president then they might have even gotten Donald Trump to tell the nation about how divisive you are.
Look at how the Democrats have acted. Trump isn't the one telling people to harass members of the other party if they dare to go into a restaurant. It's nancy Pelosi who refuses to negotiate, not Trump or the Republicans. It's irrational to blame Trump when it's the Democrats who are acting so childish.
That's who you've thrown your lot in with, Governor - a party that detests you now and would hate you if you were president. I certainly hope you failed in your efforts to put them in power.
