Alas, Florida ended nothing of value

WHEN MY father retired, he sold his small garage in Pennsylvania and moved, tribal-style, to Miami with Mom and several other family elders. There, they arranged to have modest new homes side by side in the shade of ficus and palm trees. The resettlement meant that I was obligated to head south with Nancy and our two young sons at vacation intervals. A long tiring drive from Columbus, it was. And it forever raised the critical question: Are we in Florida yet? When we crossed the state line from Georgia, a cheer went up. The signs welcomed us to the Sunshine State. We had finally reached our destination! Only several hundred miles separated us from Biscayne Blvd. But after four or five hours of boring travel with Miami not in sight, the mood turned morose again.

I recalled those annual family visits in the earlier Republican presidential tussles for delegates with the naive hope that the Florida primary would be the final destination in this strung-out theatrical absurdity. Resigned to the fact that one of the four candidates would be the likely nominee among the ficus and palm trees, I thought it would spare the rest of the nation of the new glossary of political babble clogging our ears. (McMitt continues to top the list with "self-deportation" as public policy. ) I could finally erase those long sweaty we'll-never-get-there journeys to Florida with the word that the GOP quest for sunny greatness after longish travel was finally settled.

The media, of course, covered the climactic days as though the Martians had landed in the Parrot Jungle. Disney World, after all, had nothing to match it. Now with my dream of a Floridian solution to escape from the GOP quartet, I'm left with the challenge to set out to my former home in Columbus to await the March 6 primary while asking, "Are they in Ohio yet"?

Senate Bill 5: When Romney chose to pivot

THE HERD OF Republican elephants hasn't even taken out visas for the South Carolina and Florida campaigns when the experts are already casting Ohio as a "swing state".

It is the eternal role of experts to be ahead of the curve and if they are fascinated by the swing in Ohio, who can argue? We will be reminded more than once that the Buckeyes have produced more presidents than anyone can remember mostly because a majority of them are not memorable.

So get ready for it. Your state is crucial, pivotal, a battleground state, a point of no return for the loser.

Now that we have designated Mitt Romney as the Republican nominee, we hope that he is listening to all of the talk about how suddenly important Ohio is to America's future. But pivotally speaking, he may face some troublesome moments when he starts making the rounds here. It's called Senate Bill 5, Gov. Kasich's ill-advised attempt to sweep public union workers off their feet because he was the governor and they were nothing more than public union workers.

The last time that Romney addressed the issue, he treated it as a multiple choice question. Back on Oct. 25, he visited a phone bank near Cincinnati where a Republican phone crew was

urging voters to vote against repealing the restrictive union law. Bad choice. So when he was asked about it, he said he really wasn't speaking against any ballot issue, with which he said he wasn't "terribly familiar." When he drew fire from both parties for waffling, he corrected himself the next day and declared in full body armor, "I am 110 percent behind Gov. Kasich and in support of that question." (The repeal was upheld by the voters by monstrous numbers.)

Wanna bet a lot of this will show up in the months ahead? On this and so many other issues, shouldn't Romney's managers insist that he stop being so pivotal?