Betty Sutton & Debbie Wasserman-Schultz Help Open Parma Obama HQ

Congresswoman Betty Sutton

Hundreds of enthusiastic Democratics wedged into the storefront office building at 5734 Ridge Road in Parma Monday afternoon to kick off the Obama campaign in that city. Cars were parking up and down surrounding side streets, as the ample parking lot beside the building filled quickly.

Mayor Tim DeGeeter opened the program by welcoming everyone to Parma — and it’s clear that more different types of people are welcome in Parma now since back in the day when it was known for cross-burnings and white power meetings in German bars. There were a lot of black faces in the crowd.

DeGeeter introduced Congresswoman Betty Sutton who, thanks to GOP gerrymandering, now represents the southern half of Parma as well as other southwestern Cuyahoga cities not currently in her district. May the GOP live to regret their trickery! Sutton is a dynamic speaker who got the crowd fired up and demonstrated her warmth by mingling comfortably and chatting with people afterward. She hit all the right notes, focusing on jobs and the importance of manufacturing to the region.

The special guest speaker was the tiny but feisty Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, now also chairperson of the DCCC, the group tasked with electing Democrats to Congress. A head shorter than the tall, lanky Sutton, Wasserman-Schultz stood on a folding chair so people in the back could see her. She was there to get people even more revved up for Sutton, emphasizing what a tough fighter she is.

She and Sutton both played off how heavily auto-industry dependent this part of Cuyahoga County is. Of course, she mentioned Sutton’s Cash for Clunkers legislation, which saved many area jobs, along with President Obama’s auto industry bailout, which prompted a man in a UAW jacket standing behind me to call out, “It kept me employed!” I had to wonder what someone like him — probably in his 50s — would have done if Mitt Romney let American auto companies collapse. After the program, I saw the man in the UAW jacket make his way over to converse with Sutton, perhaps thanking her for keeping him on the job.

Scanning this crowd — mostly slightly tired-looking, blue-collar working folks in jeans, T-shirts, and windbreakers — I found myself once again astonished at the direction the Republican presidential campaign is heading, foregrounding the most extremist version of religious culture wars we’ve seen yet. We’ve sometimes heard that this would find fertile ground in places like the heavily Catholic Parma. I wonder if that’s a miscalculation. It seemed to me from the reactions to the speakers that, like that auto worker behind me, most people’s minds were on something more basic: job security.

Parma Mayor Tim DeGeeter