But the ifs are big this year, and some of the workers driving in the long line of Fords waiting to leave the plant are unhappy. John--undecided--has worked in paint for 11 years and identified himself as a Christian with a wife and two kids. "I was kind of prepared for the economic disaster," he says as he wipes the grease on his sweatshirt. "I have faith that God will take care of my family." David, 21 years in the commercial division, is less sure about God and more sure about the election. "I want big guns," he says half-jokingly and smiles to reveal the dentures he has worn since the errant bumper from the Ford van knocked most of his teeth onto the plant's concrete floor. "Carter doesn't have nothing going for him. I voted for him the last time, but he's made a mess of the economic situation."
John and David are the kind of people that make Joseph Zieba, attorney at law and Republican county chairman, stop chewing his gum for just a minute and smile his Hoover smile. Zieba's been getting a lot of calls this year from Democrats, giving the gray inflatable elephant perched atop his law files a lot to smile about. "Even Eisenhower didn't carry Lorain," Zieba says, but things are looking up this year. The Puerto Ricans (almost 18 per cent of Lorain) and the Blacks are "lackadaisical voters who've put all their eggs in Carter's basket."
He chews the gum furiously, spitting into the office carpet that will never show the stain, the words coming out in a lightly salivated rinse. "Couple of weeks ago (chomp) Carter goes into the plant up in Avon Lake (chomp) and says he'll give them a billion dollars (chomp, chomp, chomp). That's a lot of (chomp) bullshit...Reagan (chomp) can only cite the record (chomp). You talk about hostages (chomp), they're still hostages (chomp)..." The smile gets larger as the daughter of the waitress at the Czech grill downtown mechanically answers that mom will vote for Reagan. "Those people are normally 95 per cent Democrats," he says when the girl leaves to buy saddle shoes with his daughter. His second chin waddles as he sifts through the desk for evidence. "Can't find it, but the poll they took out at the Community College--only five more votes for Carter than Reagan, 286 to 281."
Joseph A. Ujhely Esq., Lorain County Democratic chieftain, head of Ohio's 1976 delegation to the Electoral College, son of a steelworker and a running guard for Ohio State, dismisses the poll as a lot of crap. The purple-and-yellow tie with the silver sheen ripples as Ujhelyi conducts an experiment to see just how far he can lean back in his chair and still see the visitor over the paunch. Each word is an effort, a patented statement issued forth from the right side of his mouth. The left seems almost hermetically sealed.
Ujhelyi figures that, in Lorain, he's just about seen it all. And he knows who's going to win. "Seventy-five per cent of the auto workers will vote for Carter." Long pause to let the tongue and teeth regroup. "We've got the edge on the Republicans because there's more of us than there are of them. It's not who's for you. It's how many." There are no windows in Ujhelyi's legal den, just a lot of pseudo-wood panelling and a deep red carpet. But Ujhelyi says he doesn't need to go out in the streets to know what's happening. The Democrats will win.
William "You cannot trust a Communist. Period." Parker, 18 years a city councilman and newly elected mayor of Lorain, does not agree. Parker tells his third visitor on Citizens Day that he "did not win" the election in Lorain but that the "other guy lost it." In Lorain, where "Pride Grows With Progress" at 572 feet above sea level, the Democratic mayor ran into a little trouble toward the end of his term. Some of his appointees, it seems, took a Department of Housing and Urban Development Federal Block Grant program and turned it into a "geared to the greedy, not to the needy" campaign to remodel their friends' homes. They put oak panelling in bedrooms and took bribes from contractors. The indictments--naming 17 men in all--came down two weeks ago. But in this election, Parker says, Reagan doesn't need a scandal to win.