Janet Reitman produced a blockbuster piece of close-focus
reporting on some people from and around Lima, Ohio who have had
some hard times, made some bad choices, used welfare, complained
about others using welfare, and had kids, and for some reason
framed it as being about the "Tea Party"'s dire effects on
America.

The Tea Party hook, in the story's title and cover headline
("Where
the Tea Party Rules"), comes strictly from the fact that Lima's
congressman, Republican Jim Jordan, is by her telling a serious Tea
Party small government ideologue. (One
of Ohio's senators, Sherrod Brown, is a Democrat.)
As Reitman writes of Jordan, he has a record of:
opposing virtually any government-spending proposal: the TARP
stimulus package, the auto bailout, the repeal of the Bush tax
cuts, raising the debt ceiling, even emergency aid to the victims
of Hurricane Sandy. He has voted to defund the Affordable Care Act
52 times.
She lays out some of the overarching facts about Lima. Average
home price $39,000, 34 percent of citizens below the
poverty line with an average household income in Lima of $28,000
(much lower than $53,000 national average) and an unemployment rate
of 6 percent (pretty much the national average).
She explains that state-level budget balancing has left
cities with less money for services, though the overarching sadness
of crummy towns with opportunities drying up is not easily solvable
by slightly richer city governments, nor does she try to claim it
is.
Reitman does find, and tell, a handful of stories of people
disappointed in their income, mortgages, or job prospects. They are
well told enough, and a bit depressing. If you wanted to scan them
for times when maybe it was choices and not just malign fate (and
certainly not their congressman's record of failed votes) that made
things harder on her subjects, you could do that.
Turns out leaving your six-figure oil industry job for reasons
of scruples to teach college chemistry might leave you less well
off later on than you want to be. And while you can retrain
yourself for new careers, like in wind turbines, if you get a good
job in that field out of state but then leave it rather than
relocate your family, you might end up working a maintenance job.
Turns out if you run a "specialty wine and beer shop" in this
desolate sad wasteland, some customers might make you feel
uncomfortable for being Democrats by things they say.
Lots of women have kids young, even though abortion is
theoretically legal though hard to get in this state. The
uncharitable might get the sneaky feeling that Reitman is sorta
implying some of Lima's current infant class would have been better
off never having been born.
An unredacted excerpt:
Most of the young middle- and working-class women I meet in Lima
had children very young, many before they were 18; Allen County has
one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in Ohio. And yet, Ohio has
been at the forefront of recent attacks on reproductive rights. The
state has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the
country, and its most recent budget placed $1.4 million in funding
for Planned Parenthood at risk, while allocating money to
Christian-based ''crisis pregnancy centers.'' Lima's one
family-planning clinic offering limited abortion services recently
closed down; today, a search for abortion clinics in Lima will turn
up a pro-life organization called Heartbeat of Lima. Though the
county health department offers free birth control, a woman wanting
an abortion must travel more than an hour to Toledo, to a clinic
that, thanks to restrictions that have closed almost half of Ohio's
abortion clinics in the past year, may soon be forced to shut its
doors. ''People don't talk about abortion in Lima,'' says
Carissa.
She's just sayin',perhaps, but it's kind of a weird way to lead
into your completely disinterested discussion of the availability
of abortion in grim Lima.
You will learn the basics of the politics of these people she
profiles struggling through hard times, and they will be neither
surprising nor interesting, except maybe for the woman who wrote in
"Mickey Mouse" for president, or the "What's the Matter with
Kansas?" 33-year old "aspiring writer who blogs in verse and
writes reviews for a small culture website, -TheCultDen.com, [and]
has spent much of his adult life in the service industry"
(currently working a tech support call center), carless and
spending half his meager income on child support.
He calls himself an anarchist disgusted with politics
and:
he insists the system is being manipulated. His divorced father
worked sporadically during McKenzie's childhood, and since 2009 he
has received disability, which McKenzie thinks he doesn't need. ''I
love my father, he is one of my best friends, but he is lazy. He
gets disability, food stamps, and he has a plasma TV with all the
HD channels.'' Several of McKenzie's relatives are also on
disability, which he blames on the welfare system itself. ''They've
all been ushered through the process of how to get it, and so they
take advantage. It's become the American dream to get everything
for free without having to do a lot of work.''
Reportorially, despite some diligent work in painting its
sad picture, this is the kind of story that troubles to repeat that
a "Lima Democrat" referred to the way state Republicans
gerrymandered the state to lock the Democrats into only four
statewide House seats as leading to a district that
''kind of looks like a deformed salamander."
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