More from the debate

Lori Kurtzman reports:

Life’s rough when you’re running for the governor of Ohio without the words “Republican” or “Democrat” attached to your name. At today’s afternoon debate between Green Party candidate Bob Fitrakis and Independent Party candidate Bill Peirce, you’d find little of the hoopla you’ll likely see at tonight’s Blackwell-Strickland debate.

The audience inside the tiny studio of the Media Bridges building at 1100 Race St. numbered about 20. The podiums were draped with wrinkled black tableclothes. The red lights on the cameras – the ones that indicate where a speaker should look – were broken.

Fitrakis and Peirce, though, debated as though this were the Big Event.

Here were some of the things they talked about:

Bringing jobs to the state:
Peirce: Cut back on government regulation, eliminate corporate welfare.
Fitrakis: Legalize hemp, retool the prison system.

Higher education:
Fitrakis: Make community college more affordable, move college programs into public high schools.
Peirce: Give students tuition vouchers and crack down on the “decorative graduate programs” that produce well-educated students who can’t find jobs.

Gay marriage:
Fitrakis: Believes in the First Amendment. Said individual churches, not the state, should decide who can get married.
Peirce: Same. Any two people ought to be able to sign one contract with the state, he said.

Abortion:
Peirce: Life begins at conception, and the government has an obligation to protect that life. Said this set him apart from half of those in the Libertarian Party.
Fitrakis: Said Roe v. Wade is a good law, a good compromise. Also thinks no woman should be economically forced to have an abortion.

Whether they’d pull out of the election if their presence was hurting their preferred major candidate/helping the other guy.
Peirce: Nope. “I see very little difference between the two major party candidates.”
Fitrakis: Nobody throws an election to anybody. Fitrakis list of preferred candidates begins with himself as first, Peirce as second, write-in candidate James Lundeen as third, Strickland as fourth and Blackwell as ninth.


Then there were the final pitches. Why should you vote for them?
Peirce: "I know what the existing situation is and what can be done.” He wants to make Ohio “the freest state in the nation.”
Fitrakis: “In part because social change has never come from the two-party status quo … Historically, when people want change, when you want to send the people in office a message, you don’t do it by endorsing the least corrupt of the status quo.”

Debate over!