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Made for each other
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March 9, 2000 | YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- On the defense is Rep. James Traficant Jr., a Democrat who had a tense several days after a poll last week showed him in a dead heat with the one of three primary challengers. (He also anticipates being indicted for corruption.) The implicit message: The 17th District was tired of throwing a nearly two-decade tantrum that has done it no good. Standing in the crowd at a Jewish community center groundbreaking ceremony last week, local AFL-CIO head Larry Fauver was talking about how he knew that the steel mills and their high-wage jobs that once made Youngstown a postwar workers' boomtown are long gone. And he affirmed his belief in the need to attract modern manufacturing and high-technology jobs to this once-thriving industrial town.
But, he added, he does not believe Traficant (whom he used to campaign for) is still the man to do it. That Traficant himself was standing a mere 20 feet away, shooting Fauver menacing looks and shaking a clenched fist at him, only seemed to buttress the points Fauver and a number of other citizens here have made: that Traficant's behavior, by turns notoriously eccentric, erratic and arguably amoral, has lately done more harm than good to this economically depressed, crime-ridden community. With a number of officials here under investigation or indictment (last Thursday, the latest one in a string of local judges was arrested by the FBI), it's no wonder, Fauver said, that it has been hard to attract new businesses. When one's congressman has a historical knack for alienating other House members, however, and openly talks about his own probable corruption indictment, "it surely doesn't help" Youngstown clean up its act, or get access to badly needed federal dollars, he added. Fauver and others had rallied around Bobby Hagan, a veteran state legislator who argued that Traficant's time had come and gone. "He's a demagogue," Hagan said, and a sign at his campaign headquarters indicated Traficant was something else, too. Adorning the front door is a graphic showing Traficant at the center of a spider's web connected to a number of convicted felons. "When the mills left, people got angry, and Jim played to that. It might have been therapeutic, but has it given us anything tangible?" asked Hagan. "It was important to people to see someone who thumbed his nose at authority and the law, but we're at the point where it runs out." Or not, as Tuesday night's returns showed when Traficant emerged as the victor with just over half the vote. While the immediate threat to Traficant's political survival may be over, the problems for his Mahoning Valley remain. If one looks at the information-based economy as an autobahn, the exit to Youngstown leads to a dead end. While some vestiges of quaintness and dignity remain -- in the form of turn-of-the-20th-century houses, signs inviting anyone to walk into mayor's offices in the surrounding townships and the palatial monument to native son William McKinley in neighboring Nile -- everyone around here agrees that the community's leaders have failed it by constantly searching for one big, quick economic fix that simply isn't there. The critics include former Democratic Rep. Dennis Eckart (whose district abutted Youngstown) and Staughton Lynd, a veteran left-wing activist and lawyer who has lived in the area since the early '70s. "They tend to look for grand-slam home runs, like a regional airport. There's been one or two schemes like that, where with one fell swoop, we're going to generate 20,000 jobs," sighs Eckart. "But as we've learned from other places, like Cleveland and Pittsburgh, it's a variety of solutions, not a single grand stroke."
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