Candidate Forum

I stayed until the lunch break of Blue88's candidate forum today so I missed Sherrod Brown and Paul Hackett who were to speak later. It was very crowded, standing room only in fact. I'd say close to three hundred attended. Let's get to the candidates I did see.

First up was William O'Neill, who's running for the Ohio Supreme Court. O'Neill is a pretty good speaker, but he's running on a insane premise. He's not accepting campaign contributions, or as he says, "No Money From nobody." He plans to print one million pieces of campaign lit in his garage. When are we going to stop doing stupid shit like this. The bottom line is that in a judicial race, the only thing that matters is name ID and TV ain't free.

Marc Dann and Jennifer Brunner couldn't make it so surrogates spoke for them.

Following the surrogates, AG candidate Subodh Chandra rocked the house. He's really good, and he really fired up the crowd. Out of all the candidates I saw, he probably did the best job. He promised that as AG, he would enforce the Supreme Court's ruling on education funding that the Ohio Legislature has currently been ignoring.

Ted Strickland was the last to speak before the break. He started slow, but picked up momentum throughout his allotted time. Of course, invoking some of bogeyman Ken Blackwell shortcomings drew load cheers, but Strickland also laid out some pretty good policy points on issues such as energy, agriculture, and education.

He promised an energy audit of all state facilities with a goal of lowering energy usage by ten percent in his first year if elected, and a total of twenty percent by the end of his first term.

Wish I could have stayed to see the rest, but I'm sure I'll catch them in the next few weeks.