Charita Goshay: Tsunami warning in Ohio

If you live in Ohio, the mother of presidents, the state that is a virtual must-win, you already know what's ahead.

The Batphone doesn't get as many calls as Ohioans are about to receive over the next nine months from pollsters and the competing presidential campaigns.

Presidential politics has never been a dance recital, but 2020 is poised to make all the others look like your Aunt Tillie's quilting club.

Remember the buffalo hunt "In Dances with Wolves?' The riot in "Animal House?" The tsunami of 2004?

Yeah. It's going to be like that.

We know fear and anger always have been the evil stepsisters of presidential politics. Unlike past eras, however, when name-calling, rumors and accusations took their sweet time in getting around, we're in an age when the knife-fighting occurs in real time.

Everyone knows Ohio is the Big Get. The last man to win the presidency without us was John F. Kennedy in 1960.

It has been rumored that because Ohio is less "swingy," and more red than it used to be, the Democratic National Committee might not bother to contend for the state.

Well, sure. Because no one shoots off their own toes quite like Democrats.

The Death Star

So, although we Buckeyes know we're about to be pitched, wooed and inundated, most Ohioans probably are not fully aware of the magnitude of what's coming.

In his new report, investigative journalist McKay Coppins of The Atlantic details the Trump campaign's "Death Star," a $1 billion disinformation apparatus.

According to Coppins' report, the Republican National Committee and Trump's campaign have morphed into a single entity, even sharing office space, and are collecting as much as 3,000 "data points," or bits of information on every single every registered voter in the United States -- from your Facebook likes, to the church you attend, to the brand of sneakers you buy.

We have to suppose this could be done without disinformation, but here we are.

Vote for Jesus!

Every four years, we hand-wring over the tone and tenor of presidential campaigning, whining how we'd like to see more civility, even as we cheer on attacks lobbed against candidates we don't like.

It's tempting to laugh away those hokey, foreign-made attack ads currently saturating social media -- except that they work.

In other words, yes, some people are convinced that a vote for (or against) Candidate X is a vote for (or against) Jesus.

Or Satan. Or Obama.

People are losing friends and family members over conflicting politics. "Agreeing to disagree" is going the way of the buggy whip.

There are campaign paraphernalia, the slogans of which can't be printed in a newspaper. Grandparents proudly wear T-shirts in public that contain obscenities and insults designed to start a bar fight, or your money back.

The worst of these might have been two men spotted in identical T-shirts that read: "Better Russian than a Democrat."

Guess where?

Reach Charita at 330-580-8313 or [email protected].

On Twitter: @cgoshayREP

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