someday we shall return…goodbye Columbus, goodbye Columbus……

Philip Roth, Goodbye Columbus

Whatever else it may be, Columbus, Ohio is a city that punches above its weight. It’s the headquarters of Nationwide Insurance, Limited Brands Inc, and Big Lots Inc, among others, and the place where the first Wendy’s opened, and the site, now a vacant lot in a street corner park, has a cast-iron commemorative sign of a size which gives it a historical weighting more or less equal to the Battle of Kursk.

At the edge of its downtown stands Ohio State University, an educational behemoth, whose enormous medical school hospital complex has eaten up whole neighbourhoods, and whose vast stadia could easily accumulate a small to moderate size Olympics. Its city blocks are enormous, and its plethora of 60s and 70s international style skyscrapers have a Mad Men nostalgia feel to them, row after row after Mies van Der Rohe, the sort of places where you could get a steak dinner at the Red Room, and pay with a cardboard Diners Club card.

Beyond that, and its well preserved and restored civic and religious buildings, it has been substantially planed flat. Vast car parks stretch between the squared off streets, where all the small stuff once was, all the little buildings, all the scumble. Glass curtain walls sparkle over vast vacancies, and the effect is now without its appeal, a Forbidden City that has escaped the greater damage done to Ohio as a whole, a state that was, until recently, little more than a vast auto-parts workshop. It is awful, in the archaic sense of the term, leaning on the awe, and the scattered folks on the street — those who don’t use the skyways — seem diminished by it.

So it was probably wise for the Fire Pelosi! Bus to make its southern Ohio pit-stop a little out of town, at the Better Business Bureau Business Park, a beige single story office strip mall near the bend in the river, host to the Ohio Grocers Association, a discount medical imaging centre and the Columbus Republican Victory Office.

There were forty or so faithful on hand in the car park for the arrival of the bright orange tourliner, and not much Tea Partyesque bonhomie in evidence. This tour was being helmed by Michael Steele, the reasonable, intelligent, disastrous African-American head of the Republican National Committee, and the turn out was Republican mainstreamers, young men in mid-priced jackets and chinos, young Republican co-eds given a t-shirt, told to look pretty and possibly fingerbanged afterwards, and a couple of old geezers taking the elders’ license to dress whacky, the gals in stars and stripes earrings, men with flag pants and ear-hair.

Everyone knew each other, greeted each other as they drove into the car park. Tea Party events have an entirely different feel, somewhere between a country fair, and a medieval peasants crusade in which everyone has made their own armour out of barrels, a carnivale of loners, netizens and militias drawn momentarily together from the vast American matrix. This crowd had all been at last night’s Shriners Tombola at the Hampton Inn ballroom. The smallest Tea Party event can get in reporters from all over the world. The Fire Pelosi Bus was attended by the Columbus Dispatch, the local CBS affiliate, and Crikey.

“Can we have a little noise?” said the cameraman to the co-ed cheer squad, as the flame orange bus appeared at the turn into the car park, and sailed straight past. Then it appeared again, coming backwards, slowly, and backing into the park. It took eight minutes. The co-eds kept cheering, then realised they would have to stop and re-start. Everyone else just waited, signs held at their hips. No-one knew where to look.

As far as Steele goes, that phenomenon is not exclusive to Columbus. The Fire Pelosi bus is all his own idea, a barely-staffed ghost campaign wandering the country, that party critics charge to be of little effect — and overwhelmingly oriented to Michael Steele’s quest for a second term as RNC chair. Two years after their disastrous loss across the board, the Republican party still hasn’t really got its act together, and the Fire Pelosi bus is a symptom of that — old skool party rules barrelling down the highway.

Had they been going into this election solo, their chances of regaining the House would be slim indeed, but Fox News, the Tea Party, and, let’s face it, the Democrats have saved their asses. Even the Pelosi bus, with its appearance of partyless agitprop, is a steal from the Teaheads. The fact they’ve had to back it in slowly to the Grocers Association parking space is, in that respect and as we say, far from coincidental.

“Heya heya, what is up Columbus!” Steele’s emerged from the doors, rallying the troops, trying to sell a little bit of style. Tall and gangly, bald and neatly mustachioed, he ‘s always seemed like a basically nice guy, gently-spoken and never vicious, maybe a little awkward. For that reason The Daily Show represents him with a purplish muppet, whom Jon Stewart occasionally interviews about the state of the GOP. That’s a little bit racist, but watching him, in a suburban parking-lot glad-handing the crowd it’s difficult not to think that among the number of people who should never try to act black, can be counted Michael Steele. He’s the Vanilla Ice of Republican politics.

“We’re here to thank you! You know the Democrats were bragging to me that they’d made four hundred thousands calls a few weeks ago. And I could tell them we’d made eight million!” Moderate cheering. “How bout dat!” Cheering withers. “Thank you thank you. Thank you for extracting us from the jumble of politics that we had lost ourselves in after November 2008.”

A little booing. “It goes without saying that Ohio is a very important state this and every year…” Goes without saying it do. Outside of the glass towers of Columbus, Ohio has been hit hard by a double wave — for years the continued decline of the auto industry has seen the state lose good union jobs that had been held for two and sometimes three generations. The 08 crisis came on top of that, destroying many of the less secure jobs that auto workers had drifted to. Other places have been hit harder, but Ohio had been the centre of a well-paid, secure working class, and the the shift — the shift backwards — has left the state reeling.

Having voted for the Democrats in 08, Ohio is now swinging back into the red zone, with the Democrats facing a loss of as many as four House seats in a state of 18 districts, the election of a Republican senator to an open seat, and a neck-and-neck race for the position of governor, currently occupied by Democrat Ted Strickland. These all matter, but the governorship matters more than most places, because the road to Republican victory in 2012 passes through the buckeye state. For all the Republicans’ bluster, regaining the White House will be a tougher proposition than regaining the House no matter how much corporate money is shovelled in.

That’s not only because Obama remains a charismatic leader who can be a great campaigner on seven of every 20 days, but also because they have to win everything back and then some. The Democrats can lose Ohio — and Florida and Indiana, or any two or three other states — and still scrape back in. Barring strange and terrible events, the GOP has to get Ohio. In 2004, they won with the state, in an election many believe was at best dirty, at worst stolen. Should the 2012 vote turn on a few thousand votes, control of the statehouse may make all the difference as to what gets counted and how. Steele knows this, and there are signs of more than usual life — well, life — in his stump speech.

“Try and imagine what headline you’d like to see on November 3 in the Columbus Dispatch — it is the Dispatch isn’t it?” he says to a very little laughter. The fat old Dispatch roundsman scribbling in a pad looked dreamy at that (“Dispatch to survive another three years” perhaps). “What would you like to see?”

“You’re fired!” someone yells. Everyone laughs big at that one, Steele a little less easily, suspecting it’s not Pelosi that one’s directed at. “Well Columbus, make it happen!”

There’s time for photos after that, and the assembled Republican candidates – all very white, saving for one Asian woman running for a state assembly seat — start to disperse pretty quickly.

The state chairman, a man looking like Ned Beatty but less fit, was inserting himself into his car, angling the steering-wheel into the divet of his paunch. He started the car up and all but fishtailed it away. There were stars and stripes on the back numberplate, which read AVLANCH. Most likely there will be, but if there isn’t, this may be the explanation — that there is nothing in the Republican armoury to match the grim and relentless phone banking of the Democrats Organising For America outfit, and no right-wing gathering in this cycle has attracted even a fraction of the crowds turning out for Barack Obama.

The Tea Partiers live at the bend of the river, near the strip malls and discount imaging offices, splurging at Wendy’s. Whatever happens, AVLANCH will remain undisturbed in the towers of glass and steel. But who’s stuck and who’s pulling ahead? Columbus goodbye, hello.