Cincinnati Weekly Endorses Socialist Dan La Botz in U.S. Senate Race

The Cincinnati CityBeat, a news and entertainment weekly magazine, has endorsed longtime social justice activist Dan La Botz, the Socialist Party’s nominee, in Ohio’s U.S. Senate race. 

In supporting the 65-year-old former history and Latin American studies professor, the CityBeat made it clear that it was profoundly disappointed in both major-party candidates, deriding Democrat Lee Fisher, Ohio’s lieutenant governor, as “offering little in the way of new ideas” and ridiculing Republican front-runner Rob Portman for recycling discredited ideas from the Bush Administration. 

Portman, a former six-term congressman who served as Director of the Office of Management and Budget during George W. Bush’s second term, led his Democratic rival by fifteen percentage points in a SurveyUSA poll released yesterday.

Ignoring the polls, the feisty Cincinnati weekly insisted that Ohioans deserved better and unapologetically offered the crusading La Botz as their choice for the U.S. Senate. 

“The heads of those on the Far Right who consider Obama a socialist would explode, and that could be fun to watch,” wrote the paper’s editor in unexpectedly endorsing La Botz’s long-shot candidacy on Wednesday. 

The CityBeat, founded in 1994, also threw its support to Democrat Jack Conway against libertarian Rand Paul in neighboring Kentucky’s widely-watched U.S. Senate contest.