Several thousand Ohioans packed the Cleveland Public Auditorium Saturday for a rally featuring former President Barack Obama. Several Ohio Democratic officials and allies warmed up the crowd and the party’s entire down ballot slate appeared on stage briefly to wave at the crowd. The main focus of the event was Democratic nominee for governor Dr. Amy Acton and the party’s pick for U.S. Senate, Sherrod Brown.
Both candidates are offering a working class, populist message, aiming to win back voters who have strayed closer to the Republican party in recent elections. They’re also painting their opponents as out of touch and more aligned with wealthy Americans and special interests. Entering the final days of the race, both candidates hold a narrow advantage in public polling and have significantly out-raised their Republican counterparts. As in many other states around the country, a flood of Republican Super PAC money has doused that advantage.
Former President Barack Obama made a pitch for basic decency in the face of leadership he dismissed as “unserious.” Between building a White House ballroom, paving the rose garden and installing a helipad, Obama quipped that Trump ought to be on HGTV. “What’s up with the gold?” Obama asked. “Everything more gold. He’s got the White, looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.”
The former president acknowledged the economy isn’t working for a lot of people, and that, speaking for experience, there are limits to what a leader can accomplish from the White House. But between the Iran war and Trump’s tariffs against allies like Canada, “That is not the case here.” “In this case, he said, “this administration’s actions are directly responsible for rising costs.” Still, Obama reached for something deeper than just affordability. He pointed to examples of the president’s family or inner circle leveraging their positions for profit and insisted you can’t “unrig” an economy when its leaders “think it’s OK to lie and cheat and bully.”
“Yes, we need to lower costs. We need to put money in people’s pockets,” he said. “Yes, we need to end this war and the corruption in Washington. But we don’t do any of those things if we don’t fix our moral compass as a nation.”
Obama also spoke about the controversial ad Republican candidate for governor Vivek Ramaswamy has begun running against Acton. The ad features Acton’s mother Donna Arthur claiming Acton “has a serious problem: she is a liar. She lies about her past.” That past includes Arthur’s husband, Cledith Arthur, raping Acton when she was a child. Mahoning County officials brought charges in 1978, but Donna sided with her husband and fled the state once he was out on bail. Arthur doesn’t bring that history up in the ad, but does claim that she worked on sexual abuse programs to attempt to establish her credibility, and says Acton’s claim of living in a tent at one point isn’t true. The 1978 arrest warrant for Cledith Arthur lists his residence as a campground called Terrace Lake Park with no specific address.
“There’s a decency that we should expect out of our public officials,” Obama said of the ad. “And I don’t know what’s happened where the standards of behavior have gotten so low that somebody can run and ad like that.” “There’s got to be something inside you where you just say, you know, no office is worth stooping that low,” he said.
Dr. Amy Acton On stage, Acton told the crowd she wished they could see what she was seeing. Growing up as a “a scrappy kid from Youngstown,” she said, neighbors knew more about a person’s union or church than their politics.
