OHIO SUPERDELEGATES BAND TOGETHER
TO DEMAND STRONG JOBS PLANK FROM DEMS

Using their leverage as “superdelegates” to this summer’s Democratic National Convention, six Ohio U.S. representatives are demanding Sens. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), the party’s presidential hopefuls, unveil a strong pro-jobs plank in order to get the delegates’ votes.

Otherwise, the six say, they’ll stay uncommitted to either hopeful, for now. And they want to recruit other superdelegates to their cause.

The demand came in an early March letter to both campaigns initiated by Rep. Marcy Kaptur. Its other signers are Reps. Dennis Kucinich, Tim Ryan, Zack Space, Betty Sutton and Charlie Wilson.

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), also an uncommitted superdelegate, agrees with the object of the letter and confirmed its existence to Press Associates, but he did not sign it. Neither did Rep. Stephanie Tubbs-Jones, the only Ohio representative who is a superdelegate who is already committed to a hopeful, Clinton.

“I didn’t know they were speaking as a group, but the position they hold on trade is very important to both winning Ohio and to changing our tax and trade policies,” Brown added.

The letter was sent after the March 4 Ohio primary, which Clinton won. Ohio was largely fought on economic issues, including fair trade contrasted to so-called “free trade” pacts, led by NAFTA, the jobs-destroying U.S.-Mexico-Canada “free trade” treaty that Clinton’s husband, then-President Bill Clinton, jammed through a then-Democratic Congress--over worker and union opposition--in 1994.

Before he dropped out of the presidential race, and won renomination to his House seat, Kucinich had vowed that if elected one of the first things he would do in the Oval Office would be to “cancel NAFTA.”

But the Kaptur-initiated letter went beyond that trade treaty to demand Clinton and Obama focus on other jobs issues.

They include giving tax breaks to corporations that create U.S. jobs, while penalizing those that export U.S. jobs, investment policy, manufacturing job losses, and unfair trade treaties. They also want Clinton and Obama to discuss trade with China and China’s artificially low currency, the yuan.

“American workers and industry can compete with any nation, providing the playing field is even,” the Kaptur-initiated letter says.