Ohioblog: A Swing State Journal

The debate in one Cleveland and life in the other 

The national spotlight will be on Cleveland - or will it? - tonight when Vice President Dick Cheney and Sen. John Edwards meet at Case Western Reserve University for their one and only debate. CWRU is nothing but a $4-million temporary set for this vice presidential moment in the presidential campaign. No one will see the other Cleveland, the one with the highest poverty rate of any big city in the country. Instead, they see a wonderful university in a neighborhood at features much of the best of Cleveland. Nothing wrong with that. It is too unfortunately, however, that the national audience won't get the view of Cleveland that 23 foreign journalists from at least 16 nations got on a Monday tour of the good and bad of the city. And it's too bad that Cheney and Edwards are not likely to address many of the issues that Akron Mayor Don Plusquellic, president of The U.S. Conference of Mayors, wishes them to address. But this is politics and show biz. You want the real deal, go onto the streets and into the homes of people with Sam Fullwood, a Plain Dealer columnist who is writing a series of columns about the Faces of Poverty. They're real. Much too real. But you won't see many of them in the audience tonight.
posted by Ohioblog: A Swing State Journal at 11:52 AM