Aptly put. Johnson and his crew -- and by extension, the Ohio General Assembly -- had their hands on the steering wheel and did more to put it in a ditch than they did to keep it on the road.
When you're bottom feeding with neighbors like Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi, it will take more than a P&G marketing hotshot to convince even junior executives here, let alone the world, that Ohio's the new hot spot to set up shop in.
Johnson has lost one big project after another, the most recent being Honda saying no thanks and heading to Indiana.
Johnson et. al's Inconvenient Statistics:
1)Ohio is bleeding jobs -- 204,308 between 2000 and mid-2005 -- and it has lagged the nation in job growth for 125 consecutive months (yes, that's more than 10 years). And the jobs we're losing are well-paying ones. The Center for Community Solutions, in Cleveland, reports that Franklin County lost nearly a fourth of its manufacturing jobs since 2001. In Cleveland, the manufacturing loss was 20 percent. Statewide losses totaled 15.5 percent.
2) Even government figures from The Ohio Department of Jobs and Family Service show that, compared to the start of the recession in Ohio (2001), a net of 192,700 manufacturing jobs have been lost or 19.3%. Misery loves company.
3) ...a new federal report showed that, during the last year, Ohio ranked 47th among the states in economic momentum, 44th in personal income growth and 43rd in employment growth...
(Source: The Columbus Dispatch. The truth is ugly enough that even the CD can't deny the numbers.)
Anyway you cut it, Strickland and company has a huge mountain to climb, and waiting at the top to make their rock climbing that much harder is a petulant and vindictive Republican legislature who will choose hobbling the D's over partnering with them to get our car back on the road.
In the not to distant past, Johnson, an attorney, was spoken of as future gubneratorial timber or as someone who could move to attorney geneneral.
And as Taft's chief prosecutor of the new Commercial Activity Tax, Johnson will suffer from having backed the wrong horse. And even though Ohio has repeatedly been recognized by Site Selection Magazine, an economic development industry standard publication, for Ohio's supposed new developments, tuned-in observers know it was more show than blow and that announcements of developments are not the same as tangible results.
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