It’s being called the biggest job win for Ohio in 10 years. General Electric, working with JobsOhio, is bringing 1400 new jobs to Southwest Ohio. Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley, a Democrat, couldn’t be happier. From the Enquirer:
General Electric Co. will bring 1,400 jobs to Greater Cincinnati for a new U.S. Global Operations Center, in offices it expects to have built by 2017.
The “shared services” hub will be one of five worldwide, where the engine, appliance and technology company will host departments such as finance and information technology, JobsOhio CEO John Minor said Thursday in a statement.
Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley hailed the announcement as “awesome news for our region,” but declined to confirm that The Banks and Oakley are frontrunners. Cranley, a Democrat, credited Republican Gov. John Kasich with luring the new GE hub to Ohio.
The Ohio Democratic Party, however, rooting for failure as usual, took the opportunity to attack Governor Kasich over the news. How did they manage that?
Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley – a Democrat – couldn’t stop praising the Republican governor on Thursday.
“I want to thank the governor,” Cranley told reporters. “I’d love to say we did it, but we didn’t. It was the governor and the Ohio group (JobsOhio) that really brought this to our attention about a month ago, and we’re thrilled. We’ll do everything in our power to land them here in the city of Cincinnati.”
The Ohio Democratic Party would beg to differ with Mayor Cranley. The 1,400 jobs are coming to Ohio in spite of Kasich, not because of him, the party said.
“The reality is, if John Kasich had his way, those jobs may never have existed. In 2010, John Kasich opposed the TARP bill which provided GE with millions of dollars in relief during the economic crisis,” the Democrats said, in a statement released after JobsOhio, Kasich’s privatized economic-development group, announced GE’s plans.
The problem is, they’ve embarrassed themselves again, because they’re wrong.
Unfortunately for the Democrats, their facts were wrong. The party linked to a CBS Moneywatch story whose headline erroneously says GE Capital, the company’s financial services arm, drew on the Troubled Asset Relief Program used to bail out the auto and financial industries.
Actually, neither GE nor GE Capital drew on TARP money.
It looks bad enough when you try to launch a political attack over such great news for Ohio. It looks even worse when you faceplant on the facts while doing it and get called out by the press.