Voice of the Customer

TMCnet - The World's Largest Communications and Technology Community
New Coverage :  Asterisk  |  Call Center Outsourcing  |  Call Recording  |  SIP Trunking  |  Hosted Exchange  |  PBX
Webinars
Channels by Topic
Share
 
| More
RSS-XML alerts
Print this page
E-mail this page to a friend
Voice of the Customer Featured Article Archive

TMCNet: Fight for the 5th: Latta says influx of illegal workers is key problem; Weirauch says more jobs lost to outsourcing

[December 09, 2007]

Fight for the 5th: Latta says influx of illegal workers is key problem; Weirauch says more jobs lost to outsourcing

(Lima News, The (Ohio) (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Dec. 9--When talking with voters in the Ohio 5th Congressional District, state Rep. Bob Latta said he hears about immigration second only to jobs in Northwest Ohio.

Robin Weirauch has campaigned on jobs lost to Mexico and overseas because of federal trade agreements.

The two are running in a special election Tuesday to fill the seat of the late U.S. Rep. Paul Gillmor, who died Sept. 5 at the age of 68 after a fall in his Washington apartment. In the last days of the campaign, candidates and national parties are pouring in money to the race and have gone negative with their TV advertising.

Latta, 51, is a Republican from Bowling Green, the most populous area in the sprawling 5th District. He previously served as a Wood County commissioner and state senator and has represented the area in the Ohio House since 2001.

Latta said he opposes amnesty for people in the country illegally, and favors fences on the Mexican border and hiring more border patrol officers. Illegal immigrants are a "slap in the face" to people who are in the United States legally and drain services such as health care and schooling.

As a county commissioner and legislator, Latta said, he has helped create jobs by favoring policies that help businesses.

"If a law doesn't make sense, if it's hindering something, we need to change it," Latta said.

Latta also said his views on social issues -- he is anti-abortion and a Second Amendment supporter -- represent the views of the 5th District.

Weirauch, 50, a Democrat from Napoleon, ran for the congressional seat in 2004 and 2006. She served as assistant director of Bowling Green State University's Center for Regional Development from 1998 to 2006.

With major contributions from labor groups, Weirauch has focused on trade issues, jobs leaving the country and health care. She has campaigned at factories closed or closing. She used the Friday after Thanksgiving to highlight consumer product and toy safety issues and the "made in China" label.

Several attempts were made to contact Weirauch this week, but she could not be reached for comment.

Democratic momentum?

Weirauch lost twice against Gillmor, but garnered 43 percent of the vote in her previous bid, with a tiny budget, almost no outside help and no TV advertising.

Democrats, emboldened by gains made in state and national elections in 2006, are putting time and money into the dash of an election. At the same time, Latta, with a strong base and family roots in a district that voted 61 percent for President Bush, could be facing mutiny within his own party.

Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John Edwards sent letters last week encouraging support for Weirauch, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had spent more than $243,000 as of Friday on mailings and television advertising, according to campaign finance filings.

The attention has forced the National Republican Congressional Committee to spend more than $380,000 in mailings, phone banking and TV advertising, according to the filings, on a district that shouldn't be competitive.

Gillmor held the seat in the heavily Republican district 19 years, and Latta's father, Delbert, held the seat for 40 years before that.

National support for Weirauch hasn't surprised Latta.

"Special elections are exactly that," Latta said. "It's an election where a traditional base will or won't show up and may not have much to do with the makeup of the district. I anticipated there would be great interest in this race."

Negative air attacks

The resulting TV ads, some produced by the campaigns and others by the national parties' congressional committees, have taken a not-surprising negative turn in the last days of the campaign.

"We're really getting the negative advertising here," said Melissa Miller, a political science professor at Bowling Green State University. "We had a lull after the primary, which was probably a relief to voters, because I think they got their fix."

The money from the national parties is financing the amount of negative ads -- as Democrats focus on tying Latta to tax increases, Ohio Election Commission reprimands and former Gov. Bob Taft, while Republicans criticize Weirauch's positions on immigration, health care, abortion and taxes.

The money indicates the parties believe the race is closer than some might have thought, Miller said.

The negative tone could keep people away Tuesday and be one reason why a 20 percent turnout isn't out of the question.

"There are no other races on the ballot. There's no other reason to go to the polls that day," Miller said. "No one else is out there trying to mobilize voters, so it's going to come down to which side can mobilize their supporters and there's a real incentive for Democrats."

One race during a month that is perhaps the busiest for Americans, Miller said, could very well mean people skip it.

"A regular midterm election averages 35 percent turnout," Miller said. "I won't be surprised by 20 percent. I'll be disappointed, but I won't be surprised."

Republican meltdown?

The money and support coming in to Weirauch's campaign has been a double-edged sword. The money from the likes of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's Political Action Committee and pro-choice PAC Emily's List has allowed Latta and Republicans to paint Weirauch as an extreme-left wing candidate whose views don't mesh with those of Northwest Ohioans.

On Friday, Latta spent the day appealing to core conservatives and talking about social issues, doing news conferences in Bowling Green and Ottawa on "family values" with Right to Life officials and attending a fishing and gun club banquet, highlighting his National Rifle Association endorsement.

However, chatter swirled this past week on conservative blogs in Ohio about the possibility of conservatives staying home Tuesday. Following a negative, divisive and close primary in which the Ohio Elections Commission reprimanded Latta and fellow candidate Ohio Sen. Steve Buehrer for lying about each other, Buehrer supporters haven't gotten behind Latta.

"You had four in 10 Republican voters supporting Buehrer. If they are disgusted by the negativity of that campaign or the outcome, and they stay home, it could really change the outcome of the election," Miller said.

One poster at Redstate.com summed up other conservative views:

"It is Republican(s) like you, Mr. Latta, that soured the GOP's reputation on fiscal matters that helped lead to the 2006 bloodbath. Like Rush said after the 2006 election, I'm tired of carrying water for big government Republicans like you."

You can comment on this story at www.limaohio.com.

To see more of The Lima News or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.limanews.com.
Copyright (c) 2007, The Lima News, Ohio
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.

[ Back To Voice of the Customer Community's Homepage ]
› Return to Voice of the Customer Home

FOLLOW US

FREE Voice of the Customer eNewsletter

Subscribe Now

Featured White Papers

  • Seven Best Practices for Speech Analytics: Speech analytics is valuable for identifying issues in the contact center. However, limiting its use to the contact center only considers a portion of all customer interactions and subsequently only reveals a small part of the voice of the customer. This paper discusses how organizations can optimize their Speech Analytics implementation strategy to realize the promise of this exciting technology.
  • Understanding the Voice of the Customer: Today's contact centers involve a sea of information that must be captured, processed, and distributed on a daily basis. Effective use of this information enables companies to remain competitive in an increasingly aggressive and customer centric marketplace. An overwhelming percentage of the information that circulates in a contact center's audio recordings, documents, web pages, and emails is unstructured in that it resides outside of a normal structured database and cannot be managed efficiently. These unstructured items contain valuable information, yet this information historically has been difficult to organize, categorize, and access.
View All ›

Case Studies

  • Aflac: Aflac, the leading provider of guaranteed-renewable insurance turned to Autonomy to help them automate the process of monitoring their contact center agent for quality and compliance. The company now has a system that can offer continued improvement in agent quality and productivity while enhancing the customer experience. ...
  • Avaya: Avaya, a global leader in business communications, inherited 880 websites as well as numerous intranets and extranets when it was spun off from Lucent Technologies. The sheer volume and diversity of the sites and the over 500 content creators resulted in inefficient content distribution rife with divergent branding, messaging, and product information. ...
View All ›

Video Showcase

    Interview with Autonomy: Rich Tehrani interviews Simon Hayhurst, SVP of Autonomy

Featured Events

  • Multichannel Analytics with Autonomy Explore: In today's world of constant connectivity there are a variety of direct and indirect channels of communication between an enterprise (or a brand) and its customers. 80% of these valuable interactions are generated in a human-friendly, unstructured format across multiple touchpoints and channels. With this ever growing mountain of information how do you extract the emerging trends and topics of interest to the enterprise? ...
  • SES Chicago 2011: Marketers and SEO professionals attend SES Chicago each year to network and learn about topics such as PPC management, keyword research, SEO, social media, local, mobile, link building, duplicate content, multiple site issues, video optimization, site optimization, usability and more. The conference offers 70+ sessions, intensive training workshops, and an expo floor packed with companies that can help you grow your business. While you're at it, network with peers and leading industry vendors. Programmed by the SES advisory board, you can be assured - SES content really is king! ...
View All ›
 
Share
 
| More
RSS-XML alerts
Print this page
E-mail this page to a friend