Letters to the Editor
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Steely-eyed Clinton
Indiana should be Obama's to lose. The true-blue strip in "Da Region" (counting South Bend, Michigan City [where I lived for five years], and metro Gary), who knows how they'll go. One would think the proximity to Illinois and the various college towns will favor Obama, but who knows for sure? Obviously if Indiana goes for Obama, the Clinton crew will declare Indiana meaningless and unrepresentative, as has been their campaign motif the whole time, to spin losses away.
Looking at Gary and Burns Harbor and M. City, it's hard to toe a Clintonian "Woman of Steel" line with any kind of credibility, the route of protectionism and saving Big Steel. The urban wasteland of Gary in particular shows what over a century of life under Big Steel has offered the region. Sure, jobs (at least until the 1960s, when everything began to go wrong in American steel), but at what cost? The place is devastated, and when the wind is bad you can smell the sulfur, feel it at the back of your throat. Steel has not been kind to the places that produce it, which is surely why it's thriving in China and India, and why any sense that the US can really compete against Third World laxity in environmental standards, workplace safety, and pay levels is a pipe dream.
Gary and the steel belt along the lakeshore have already prostituted themselves to Big Steel, and were not well-served by it (I'm sure much of Gary's shoreline qualifies as a Superfund site). The region shows its wear and tear, the brute force of company-town capitalism has laid the region bare -- the hopelessness is as thick as the plumes of smoke from the mill smokestacks.
I don't think the American steel industry as we know it can be saved in the global economy -- and what's more, after what it's done to every American city where it once thrived, I don't know if it should be saved. At some point, regions have to look to the future, and not the past. As ever, Clinton's campaign rhetoric hearkens to the American past at a time when we need a leader who's looking to the future.
We'll see what Indiana goes for, I guess, where its heart is at.