The appeaser in Ohio
I have a question.
Mike DeWine is 77 years old, and serving his second term as governor of Ohio.
He has served in the United States Congress, US Senate, Ohio State Senate, and as Ohio attorney general and county prosecutor.
He has been married to Frances for 56 years, whom he met in first grade, and together they have eight children, 28 grandchildren and one great grandchild.
He has spent his entire life in public service, during which he has won elections, lost elections, but he always served admirably. He was trusted by his fellow citizens across decades in an array of different positions that require trust.
Two years ago, Mike DeWine was reelected governor of Ohio by an astonishing 26 points in an election that carried JD Vance to victory in the US Senate, along with $50 million from Mitch McConnell. This will be his last term in public office before retirement.
Currently, a town in his state, Springfield, is under siege from insanity triggered by the vicious and racist slur that Haitians are eating local pets and geese from the town’s ponds. The false story was spread by Donald Trump and JD Vance. Governor DeWine was forced by the lie to write an essay in The New York Times decrying it and setting the record straight.
Here is the title of his essay published on September 20, 2024:
I’m the Republican Governor of Ohio. Here Is the Truth About Springfield.
It is an extremely important piece of contemporary historical documentation around a momentous inflection point for American society 45 days before an existential election. What is happening in Springfield is about hate, division and all of the furies that have always been at the center of the American storm. Springfield, Ohio, has become the improbable battleground where the lie and truth are met in a lethal struggle. My question is about truth. I’ll get to it soon.
Here is how Governor DeWine talks about Springfield. Remember, he is 77 years old. Frankly, his description instantly triggered the sounds of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band playing “My Hometown” from the recesses of my memory from a long ago concert in Giants Stadium.
I was born in Springfield, Ohio. My wife, Fran, and I have lived our entire lives less than 10 miles from this city.
When we were dating in high school, we would go there to see movies at the Regent or State Theater or to eat fried clams at Howard Johnson’s. I remember Fran taking the bus about eight miles from our hometown, Yellow Springs, to Springfield to shop at Wren’s Department Store. Over the years, we’ve eaten countless doughnuts from Schuler’s Bakery, worshiped at St. Raphael Catholic Church and we logged many work hours there when I represented Springfield in the U.S. House and Senate.
This is what Governor DeWine wanted the whole world to know about Springfield, Ohio. This is important because JD Vance has justified his vicious fabulism with the claim that the suffering of Springfield must be known by all, by any means necessary.
Springfield has a rich history of providing refuge for the oppressed and being a place of opportunity. As a stop on the Underground Railroad, the Gammon House, which still stands, was a safe haven for escaped slaves seeking freedom. And, as a stop on the Old National Road, America’s first east/west federal highway, Springfield attracted many settlers both before and after the Civil War. Immigrants from Ireland, Greece, Germany, Italy and other countries helped build the city into what it is today.
For a long time, commerce and manufacturing flourished in Springfield, which earned the title “Champion City” after the founding there of the agriculture implement giant Champion Machine Company.
But the city hit tough times in the 1980s and 1990s, falling into serious economic decline as manufacturing, rail commerce and good-paying jobs dwindled. Now, however, Springfield is having a resurgence in manufacturing and job creation. Some of that is thanks to the dramatic influx of Haitian migrants who have arrived in the city over the past three years to fill jobs. They are there legally. They are there to work.
DeWine concludes the essay with this piece of optimism for the city’s future, which refutes the Trump smears:
Springfield today has a very bright future. The people who live there love their families, value education, work hard, care about one another and tackle the challenges they face head-on, just as they have done for over 200 years.
I am proud of this community, and America should be, too.
DeWine also talks about the Haitian people that have come to Springfield, Ohio, legally, seeking a better life. I am quite sure that I read somewhere that this is a key part of the American story. You know, the one where dreams can come true?
The Springfield I know is not the one you hear about in social media rumors. It is a city made up of good, decent, welcoming people. They are hard workers — both those who were born in this country and those who settled here because, back in their birthplace, Haiti, innocent people can be killed just for cheering on the wrong team in a soccer match.
Only about a two-hour flight from U.S. shores, Haiti is one of the poorest, most dangerous places on earth. The government is in shambles, with machete-wielding, machine-gun-toting gang members taking over 80 percent of the capital, Port-au-Prince.
Fran and I first traveled to Haiti almost 30 years ago as part of a congressional delegation when I was serving on the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. We have since been there over 20 times and have supported a Catholic priest who runs a tuition-free school in a slum in Port-au-Prince. We have always been amazed when, even in the poorest areas of Haiti, we see children coming out of homes made of rusting corrugated metal and cardboard with shoes shined and clothes neat and pressed. We know that the Haitian people want the same things we all want — a good job, the chance to get a quality education and the ability to raise a family in a safe and secure environment. Haitian migrants have gone to Springfield because of the jobs and chance for a better life there. On Monday, I met with Springfield manufacturing business owners who employ Haitians. As one of them told me, his business would not have been able to stay open after the pandemic but for the Haitians who filled the jobs.
Governor DeWine’s essay also offers a description around what has happened in Springfield, and what he has done about it. Before reading the quote, it is important to focus on the fact that the schools are under siege and require the protection of the state police to stay open. Importantly, this part of the essay offers the first glimpse towards how the governor feels about the matter.
He is disappointed, which for a career politician, is always a prelude to the inevitable expression of sadness.
It is disappointing to me that Springfield has become the epicenter of vitriol over America’s immigration policy, because it has long been a community of great diversity. Fran and I were reminded of this when we attended Mass at St. Raphael this past Sunday and stopped at the nearby Groceryland on our way home. We talked with community members from many backgrounds who are understandably concerned about the negative things being said about their city in news reports and on social media.
Bomb threats — all hoaxes — continue and temporarily closed at least two schools, put the hospital on lockdown and shuttered City Hall. The two local colleges have gone remote. I have posted Ohio Highway Patrol troopers in each school building in Springfield so the schools can remain open, teachers and children can feel safe and students can continue to learn.
Understanding what has happened is materially and significantly different from how it happened, no matter what the event may be. They are two completely different things.
Here is my question or rather a cluster of them:
Why is Mike DeWine willing to tell the truth about what is happening in Springfield and the people who are being smeared, but afraid to tell the truth about how it happened and why it happened? In other words, why the half truth? Perhaps another way to think about it is why the half lie? Why the half lie steeped in gaslighting and the otherworldly lunacy that the purpose of it is to shield the cause of the mayhem?
As a supporter of former President Donald Trump and Senator JD Vance, I am saddened by how they and others continue to repeat claims that lack evidence and disparage the legal migrants living in Springfield. This rhetoric hurts the city and its people, and it hurts those who have spent their lives there.
Come again? They’re repeating the claims? That’s what happened? Really?
Donald Trump and JD Vance are the cause of this chaos, which raises the most important question:
Why won’t Mike DeWine tell the truth about Donald Trump and JD Vance? Why?
Why won’t a career public servant, a governor, father of eight, grandfather of 28, great grandfather of one, husband of 56 years, who is in his last years of public life and pushing 80 years old not defend his hometown from the men assaulting it?
What is he afraid of? What hold does Donald Trump have on him? Why?
This choice of DeWine’s is not a lonely one, but rather common and typical. Mike DeWine is a crystalline example, a perfect specimen of a fascist apologist. When Ohio needed to be defended, Mike DeWine may have called out the state police, but his first instinct was to protect the arsonist who is the leader of a cause that DeWine, while dispositionally lukewarm towards, is an absolutely committed supporter of.
Mike DeWine understands the “why” of it all. He understands it perfectly. Trump and Vance are trying to build a fire and fuel it with hate. They believe this hate-filled fire will create the currents that lift them to victory.
When Mike DeWine had a chance to be big he shrank. He’s a little man in a job too big for him when courage is in retreat and viciousness is the only virtue that matters within a party led by a rapist and criminal promising retribution, revenge and violent mass arrests and deportations against his many enemies. Mike DeWine may not have much to worry about but Springfield, Ohio, and the rest of us certainly do.
Mike DeWine’s NYT essay should be frozen in amber for future generations to study. It is a portrait of a hollow man kneeling to a vicious man, while crying for calm in the paper of record, which has played such a major role in curating this miserable era with a political journalism that is as remarkably rotten as its MAGA subjects and content partners.
If you ever want to know what really happened in Springfield, and everything that mattered in 10 years of MAGA, all you have to do is read DeWine’s essay.
Rich Lowry, editor in chief of National Review, explained it perfectly:
Banking on evil is the strategy, and Mike DeWine has played his part. He is an appeaser and a weakling.
In some ways DeWine is the worst of all.. he covers for and enables the arsonists who are burning down the truth in Springfield.
I hope he’s spending a lot of his time in church on his knees asking forgiveness.
He had the chance to do right by his State, his city and his constituents. He chose to do the opposite. Shameful in any elected leader.
As an Ohioan, in our local Columbus newspaper DeWine said he will vote for the GOP candidate in this election cycle. He could've gone out of public service with a good legacy, yet he's squandered it for Donald Trump. I'm truly scared, as a member of the Jewish community