Chumps

From the Ted Strickland campaign:

On August 20th, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that a Republican named Nathan Estruth showed up at a Clermont County Democratic rally to give Ted a chance to persuade him.

Link

In a county that proudly paints itself political red, where about 70 percent of voters backed President Bush in 2004, Nathan Estruth showed up at a park Saturday morning to hear the blue people.

In particular, he wanted to listen to Ted Strickland, the Democratic candidate for governor who, with U.S. Senate candidate Sherrod Brown, was headlining a three-day bus tour promoting the party's statewide ticket in some of Ohio's most Republican counties.

Estruth, a father of four who typically votes Republican, milled in the back of a partisan crowd of about 100, one of just a handful of people not wearing a shirt promoting a Democratic candidate. At the urging of a friend, he came to give the Democrats, who have been out of power in Ohio for more than a decade, a chance to win his vote.

"It's just common sense that we need change," Estruth said at Veterans Memorial Park in Union Township. "Frankly, it's about change for change's sake."

Unfortunately, Mr. Estruth said he wasn’t convinced.

After the 40-minute rally, Estruth said he was not ready to vote Democratic. He was put off, he said, by their harsh rhetoric.

"I wanted to see if he was an executive with clear plans for fixing the state," he said about Strickland. "What I got was partisan talk. He confirmed my worst fears."

However, there might be another reason that Mr. Estruth wasn’t ready to vote Democratic. Via Buckeye State Blog, we learn that he happens to be the president of Common Sense Ohio, a Blackwell-supporting group that’s been running hundreds of thousands of dollars of advertising across that state attacking Ted.

The BSB post: http://buckeyestateblog.com/node/2592

Common Sense Ohio: http://www.commonsenseohio.org

Common Sense Ohio’s ads began running on August 16th. The president of the group is on the record alleging to be a Republican just “checking out” Ted Strickland at a rally held on August 19th.

Wouldn’t it just be common sense that the president of a group spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to destroy Ted Strickland had already made up his mind?