Back in the 1950s, when I was still learning right from left, my neighborhood friends and I engaged in “cowboys and Indians” wars.
We had toy guns, bad aim and a very loose understanding of history. We took turns being the good guys, mostly because nobody wanted to be the other thing. The rules changed depending on who was winning. It was noisy, chaotic and, in its own uninformed way, innocent.
Almost 70 years later — especially after learning of my own Native American heritage — I couldn’t imagine that kind of crude, racist imagery showing up in a gubernatorial race.
I was wrong.
In the past week, Casey Putsch, a Republican candidate for governor, posted a video firing a rifle and inviting primary rival Vivek Ramaswamy, whose parents immigrated from India, to play “cowboy versus Indians,” with a racial slur for emphasis.
Surely, that’s the bottom of Ohio political rhetoric.
Wrong again.
The attacks got even more pointed toward Democratic frontrunner Amy Acton. Once, her life story — poverty, childhood sexual abuse, recovery, medical training, public service — would have been seen as a testament to resilience.
Now it’s being treated as campaign material.
Ramaswamy, in a video circulating online, dismissed Acton’s experience of childhood sexual abuse as little more than “what someone else did to her.”
Her campaign pushed back, calling his attacks “disgraceful” and accusing critics of trying to shame her for surviving childhood sexual abuse, which she has spoken about publicly for years.
As a Cherokee descendant and the father of three daughters, I can’t imagine how anyone could support any candidate who made assertions that crossed lines like these.
But what we’re seeing instead is what happens when the line isn’t just crossed. It’s been obliterated.
One candidate treats a woman’s childhood trauma as oppo research. Another uses racial insult and a rifle as a messaging strategy. And somewhere, presumably, there is a consultant being paid to say, “Yes, this is the direction.”
At moments like this, politics feels less like a campaign and more like a scene out of Pulp Fiction. You keep waiting for someone to deliver a Hollywood-style Bible verse about the path of the righteous voter being beset on all sides —not for guidance, but as a prelude to whatever comes next.
And then you remember this is the same political culture that recently managed to turn Donald Trump into something resembling a religious image.
Which tells you something about where the performance has taken us. We’re no longer watching candidates persuade voters. They’re performing for algorithms, which have no interest in decency.
Ohio voters, on the other hand, might.
I was a journalist in the state for more than 30 years. I don’t remember it looking like this.
But I left Ohio more than a decade ago, when it was still considered a bellwether state. Maybe I’ve been away too long.
I can only hope this is still a state that, at its best, values competence over chaos and substance over spectacle. I hope that it is not a place that looks at a gubernatorial candidate who mocks the sexual abuse of a child and says, “Now there’s someone ready to manage Medicaid.”
Maybe at some point this race will return to something resembling reality — the unglamorous, necessary work of fixing potholes and funding schools. Until then, you are left with a campaign that, on one side at least, seems determined to answer one question above all others:
How low can you go and still get elected?
Stuart Warner is a former columnist and senior editor at the Akron Beacon Journal. He also served as a senior editor in Cleveland and Phoenix.
This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: How low can Ohio go? The gubernatorial race might show us | Opinion
Reporting by Stuart Warner, Guest opinion / Akron Beacon Journal
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