All Eyes On Ohio

Editor's Note: Two days after this story aired, Sen. Hillary Clinton went on to win the primaries in Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island; Sen. Barack Obama won in Vermont. Also on Tuesday night, CBS News projected that Republican Sen. John McCain had clinched his party's nomination for president, after winning the primaries in all four states.

If Democrats had carried Ohio in the last two elections, they would have won the White House, and Ohio voters will play a large part in determining who the Democratic nominee will be in 2008 and, perhaps, whether Hillary Clinton can keep her candidacy alive.

Correspondent Steve Kroft talked with Sen. Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama as 60 Minutes followed their campaigns in Ohio this past week.

"I know your husband has said and other people have said you've got to win these two states to stay in the race. Do you agree with that?" Kroft asked Sen. Clinton.

"Well, I intend to. I intend to do everything I can to win them. And we're doing well," Sen. Clinton replied.

"Do you like your chances of winning one of the two big primaries that are next Tuesday?" Kroft asked Sen. Obama.

"I think we've got a good shot," the senator from Illinois replied.

There's no better place to find out than Ohio: it's the heartland of America, one of the big states in the middle of the country that has always grown the food and made the things that America needs - from auto parts to soap and shampoo to hamburgers.

It stretches from the Great Lakes to the Ohio River, from Appalachia to the plains of the Middle West. If Ohio were a country it would have the 25th largest economy in the world, just behind the Netherlands. But today it reflects the problems and the challenges facing the United States and its middle class in a world that is rapidly changing.

From Youngstown and Cleveland to Akron and Dayton, Obama and Clinton have crisscrossed a state that could put one of them in the White House. In the eight years that George Bush has been president, Ohio has lost more than 200,000 manufacturing jobs and the state's median income has fallen by nearly ten percent.

It's being felt in the small cities that dot the Ohio landscape and could very well decide the primary. It's places like Chillicothe, a town of 22,000 people an hour south of Columbus.

Chillicothe is a political microcosm of the state of Ohio: in the past two presidential elections, the voting patterns here have been virtually identical to the statewide results. George Bush and John Kerry campaigned for president here; so did Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon, Harry Truman, and Teddy Roosevelt.

One reason may be that the politics here are unpredictable. Chillicothe has more independents than Republicans and Democrats combined. And all of them are eligible to vote on Tuesday.

Steve Madru, the Democratic chairman of Ross County, thinks the town is not only a mirror of Ohio, but the whole country.

Every evening he turns his real estate office in Chillicothe into the campaign headquarters for Senator Clinton.

"My sense of it is that a lot of the party establishment, a lot of the party machinery, is behind Hillary?" Kroft asked.

"Yes, pretty much," Madru agreed. "I think it's, you know, Ted Strickland, our governor, is behind Hillary. And he's done such a great job in Ohio. And he's friends with the Clintons. And a lot of us kind of follow along with the governor."

A month ago that organizational support had given Sen. Clinton a 20-point lead in Ohio polls, but much of it has evaporated with 11 straight defeats and the rise of a dedicated corps of Obama supporters who have been canvassing neighborhoods and taking their own informal street corner surveys by gauging how many people honk at their campaign signs.

"You assume that people honking are people that like you?" Kroft asked campaigner Chris Cooper.

"Well, when they give you a thumbs up, they like you. When they give you the finger it's a thumbs down. So, I'm pretty sure those are international symbols," Cooper replied.

Over the past eight years there has been good cause for obscene gestures. Thomson Consumer Electronics packed up its plant and moved more than 500 jobs to China. And, there have been layoffs at the Kenworth truck factory and the Glatfelter paper company, two of the town's biggest employers. Another paper plant, New Page, is closing its facility by the end of the year. One of the people losing his job is Kenny Schoenholtz, who 60 Minutes invited to join a small cross-section of Chillicothe residents to talk about politics and the town's problems.

Schoenholtz told Kroft he has no clue what he's going to do. "Not at this time. Paper makin's all I know for 27 years. That's what my dad did for 41 years. And it's been my whole life. But, I'll find something. I'll do something."

What about health insurance?

"That's another huge part in my life. I have a sick wife. MS. And I'm facing some huge expenses," he told Kroft.

"If you had to go out and buy private health insurance, could you afford it?" Kroft asked.

"Oh, boy. No. I couldn't afford it," Schoenholtz said.

John Ison worked most of his adult life at the Thomson plant until it moved to China. He spent two years retraining himself in information technology and wound up with a lower paying job at a local health care center.

"The job I'm working now, I make still a third less than what I was making for the last three years at my previous job," Ison explained.

"Anybody here better off now than they were four years ago? Ten years ago?" Kroft asked the group.

"Four years ago, absolutely not," local union official Jeff Allen said.

"I'm makin', in my base pay now, what I was makin' in '91," Ison replied.

Mike Throne has been the editor of the local newspaper for the past ten years and has seen a lot of things change.

"Used to be that almost everybody in Ohio and the Midwest took a vacation to Florida, the west coast of Florida in the wintertime. And bought a new Chevy or a Ford or Chrysler every other year," Kroft remarked.

"The one I have has 175,000 miles on it," Throne said.

As far as vacations go, Ison said he hadn't taken one in five years.

60 Minutes found them almost evenly divided on how they planned to vote on Tuesday, and college student Katie Tuttle and Jeff Allen like Obama.

"I'm leaning towards Barack. You know, they talk about the experience and that's one of his shortcomings is he doesn't have a lot of experience, but I think there's a lot of upside there," Allen explained.

John Ison and City Councilwoman Queen Lester plan to vote for Clinton, partly out of nostalgia.

"Her husband had the economy in much better shape when he was president than what we have today. So if he's an advisor in that area, I think we will do great," Lester said.

Both Clinton and Obama want to renegotiate NAFTA, give tax breaks to the middle class, and take them away from companies that send jobs overseas. But John Blind, a vice president at the Glatfelter paper company, one of the last big employers in Chillicothe that pays $20 an hour with full benefits, says that's not going to be enough to reverse the tide.

"What are your problems specifically with foreign competition in the paper business?" Kroft asked.

"They're paying their employees about 1/40 of what we pay our employees. They do not have environmental regulations to deal with," Blind said.

Asked how the next president could change that, Blind told Kroft, "It's gonna take some courage to deal with this. I really believe so."

What unpopular decisions does he think need to be made?

"I think there needs to be some form of tariff to level that playing field," Blind said.

When Kroft caught a few minutes with each of the Democratic candidates earlier this week, he asked them about what John Blind had to say about tariffs, which are taxes placed on import to make American products more competitive.

"His complaint about you, and his complaint about Senator Obama, both of you, is that you're sort of nibbling around the edges trying to make improvements, when to do all the things you're talking about there needs to be stronger action, bolder action, a more protectionist policy, tariffs," Kroft told Sen. Clinton.

"We have to have a time out on trade, which is what I've said I would do as president," she said. "We need to step back and say, 'Look. During the 19th century we had tariffs when we were growing our economy. During the 20th century, open markets were to our advantage, because we were by far more productive.' Well, now we got a new set of problems. I'm all for trade. But I don't want to be a patsy."

"I don't think we can draw a moat around our economy," Obama told Kroft. "But what we do have to say is, 'We're gonna drive a tough bargain. If you want access to our markets, you're gonna have to open up yours.' Now, is that gonna solve all our problems? No. But it's a good place to start."

"Senator Clinton said people forget that there have certain times in our histories where we've had a much protectionist policy. And it may be time for us to sit down and reevaluate that situation again," Kroft remarked.

"The problem with the time-out is, the rest (of) the world's not takin' a time out," Obama said. "I don't think we should be afraid of competition with the world. I think what we have to do is to be smart about competition in the world."

But trade and jobs are not going to be the only issues for some voters in Tuesday's primaries and in November.

In Chillicothe, people told 60 Minutes that both race and gender would both be hidden factors in southern Ohio - that many blue collar workers here won't vote for a woman and others would never vote for a black. And Sen. Obama has another problem: a malicious campaign against him that surfaced in a number of our interviews.

Schoenholtz told Kroft he is leaning towards Obama, but that there were a couple of issues he was "not too clear" on.

Asked what they were, Schoenholtz said, "Well, I'm hearin' he doesn't even know the National Anthem, you know. He wouldn't use the Holy Bible. He's got his own beliefs, got the Muslim beliefs. Couple issues that bothers me at heart."

"You know that's not true," Kroft remarked.

"No. I'm just…this is what I've been told," he replied.

"One of the things that we found in southern Ohio - not widespread, but something that popped up on our radar screen all the time - people talking about it, this idea that you're a Muslim," Kroft told Sen. Obama.

"Right. Did you correct them, Steve?" Obama asked.

"I did correct them," Kroft replied.

"There you go," Obama said.

Asked where this is coming from, Obama told Kroft, "You know, this has been a systematic e-mail smear campaign that's been goin' on since actually very early in this campaign. It clearly is a deliberate effort by some group or somebody to generate this rumor. I have never been a Muslim, am not a Muslim. These e-mails are obviously not just offensive to me, somebody who's a devout Christian who's been goin' to the same church for the last 20 years, but it's also offensive to Muslims. Because it plays into, obviously, a certain fear-mongering there"

It happened again last week, when a photo of Obama in ceremonial African tribal dress during a visit to Kenya was featured prominently on the Internet and attributed to people in the Clinton campaign.

Senator Clinton disavowed any knowledge of it.

"You don't believe that Senator Obama's a Muslim?" Kroft asked Sen. Clinton.

"Of course not. I mean, that, you know, there is no basis for that. I take him on the basis of what he says. And, you know, there isn't any reason to doubt that," she replied.

"You said you'd take Senator Obama at his word that he's not…a Muslim. You don't believe that he's…," Kroft said.

"No. No, there is nothing to base that on. As far as I know," she said.

"It's just scurrilous…?" Kroft inquired.

"Look, I have been the target of so many ridiculous rumors, that I have a great deal of sympathy for anybody who gets, you know, smeared with the kind of rumors that go on all the time," Clinton said.

Her big leads in Ohio and Texas are both gone now, but she still has a chance of ending her losing streak and winning both states.

"There are a lotta people that think even if she manages to win both states, by a small margin, and there's no difference in the delegates, it's most likely impossible for her to catch you," Kroft told Sen. Obama.

"That's true," he replied.

"Is there a point where you say it's not in the interest of the party to continue this?" Kroft asked Sen. Clinton.

"No," she replied, laughing. "No. You know, I am going to win. And I am going to go on."

"You seem to be saying that as long as you think you have a chance to win, that you're going to stay in it, even if it goes to the convention?" Kroft asked.

"Well, I don't think that will happen. But, you know, my husband didn't wrap up the nomination until June," she replied.
Produced by L. Franklin Devine, Michael Radutzky and Tanya Simon