Factcheck.org: 9th district ad misrepresents the facts

  If you have lived in Northwest Ohio for any number of years, you most probably remember our local food chain, Seaway Foodtown was a hometown favorite for many people. The history of the Foodtown chain can be found here at Funding Universe:

In spite of intense competition from powerful regional and national chains, Seaway Food Town, Inc. was maintaining its leading share of the metropolitan Toledo food market in the mid-1990s. The local supermarketer has held its own against regional giants by anticipating major trends, acquiring less fortunate competitors, and maintaining a consistent reputation as a low-price leader. Initially established as a cooperative and a public company since the early 1960s, Seaway has been guided from its inception into the mid-1990s by the Iott family. It appeared likely that octogenarian co-founder Wallace D. "Wally" Iott would eventually be succeeded as chairman and CEO by his son, Seaway Food Town President Richard B. Iott.

  If you read the article, you can see that this local chain struggled against the larger chains that moved into the area, some of whom used non-union labor like Meijer. Only a few local supermarkets survive in the Toledo area, including the beloved Kazmeier's and Churchill's. 
  With superstores like Kroger, Meijer, Giant Eagle, and Walmart just in the Perrysburg area alone, family run businesses have struggled to maintain their business model against the chain stores that can easily put them out of business through cut rate prices and huge selections, in addition to a diversity of product in addition to food.
  This problem is replicated all across the United States; it's one of the reasons unions do not like Walmart.
  Rich Iott is the former president of Foodtown who sold the chain to Spartan, which ended up selling off all the stores and put Foodtown out of business, is running against Marcy Kaptur for the 9th District seat that belongs to Northwest Ohio.
  There is a lot of voter interest in Iott, as apparently Kaptur's campaign noticed.
  She has been running negative campaign ads claiming that Iott drove the company into the ground; she's managed to dig up some grizzled former employees who are still angry that their jobs went out the door with Spartan, claiming Iott himself is responsible for Spartan's mismanagement and sales decisions, in addition to the problems faced by the aggressive marketing of Meijer, et al. 
  Even the Toledo Blade agrees that Kaptur's claims do not justify the attacks being made against him. Read the background at The Blade here.
  Here's the ad Kaptur's running. Decide for yourself if you think it's fair:

  Factcheck.org agrees that the problem was not Iott's. Read the whole background here:

But the ad is wrong to blame Iott for "closing our neighborhood stores," and it goes too far in blaming him for "costing 5,000 people their jobs." Although he was a major player in the decision to merge Food Town with Spartan, there is no evidence that he was involved in the decisions to close Food Town stores.

In the end, the ad’s summary charge — that Iott "doesn’t create jobs, he sells them off" — misrepresents what happened to Food Town and its employees, and who was responsible for it.

  There's a lot more around the web, but one point seems clear: the best Iott's opposition can do is accuse Iott of not knowing in advance that Spartan was going to mismanage the stores and eventually sell them off. (Perhaps a bit of witchcraft would have helped Iott learn that in advance.)
  A voter and Iott supporter has written a response to Kaptur's accusation. It is included after the jump.
  Why is Kaptur so nervous about Iott's campaign that she is willing to saturate the airwaves, spending a small fortune stating demonstrably inaccurate statements with the throat swelling narration accusing Iott of losing these jobs?
  If you would like to contribute to the Iott campaign, go here. 
  If you would like to contribute to the Northwest Ohio Conservative Coalition which supports conservative values, go here.
  Here's the reader submitted commentary on the difference between Iott and Kaptur:

Marcy Kaptur has found what she believes to be the achilles heal of the Rich Iott candidacy for Congress. For the next month expect to be inundated with Ads about how Rich Iott cost thousands of people in the Toledo area to lose their jobs at Foodtown. 

Kaptur won't say anything positive about the thousands of people who had jobs at Foodtown over many years due to the hard work and risk taking of the Iotts. Nor will many of those people who were given thousands of dollars, many hundreds of thousands of dollars, in wages and benefits during their careers at Foodtown.

     Kaptur and her supportive former Foodtown employees don't consider the fact that Kaptur has never created a job herself with her own money, or through her own risk taking. Sure, she has created some jobs over the last twenty-eight years in Congress through earmarks and pork barrell spending. 

Many times she has "brought home the bacon", but on the backs of American taxpayers, not through her own hard labor. Her paycheck has always been guaranteed by you and me. Kaptur has never laid awake at night worrying about how she was going to cover thousands of dollars of rent due in a few days, or how to pay for goods and materials and supplies to keep the business open, or how to cover hundreds of thousands of payroll obligations due at the end of the week. 

Kaptur has never had to sign personally on the dotted line risking personal assets so she could be sure that the single mother cashier took home her pay check. No -- Marcy Kaptur employs only her staff of eighteen or so full time employees whose paychecks are guaranteed by us, not her. She has never hired one individual who wasn't paid by taxpayers.

     Rich Iott and his father employed for decades the single mothers, the widows and widowers, the college students earning money for tuition, and teenagers working their first job. He and his father did it themselves, not with taxpayer dollars. But when Foodtown closed its doors, whether by its successor, Spartan Stores, or by their own business decision, Rich Iott got blamed for "destroying jobs", as though jobs at Foodtown had become an "entitlement". 

And that is what liberal politicians would have us believe -- that a job is an "entitlement", and that it is the obligation of private businessman and women to continue for life to furnish such an "entitlement". 

Forget about the millions of dollars paid to employees over fifty years that went into house payments, car payments, vacations, and clothing, and an endless list of day to day living expenses Foodtown employees were responsible for. Forget that this is what the Iotts did for decades for people in Toledo. 

None of that is important to Kaptur. All that is important to Kaptur is that Rich Iott made a business decision which did not work out as he had hoped, and that people lost jobs as a result in private industry. Iott won't receive any thanks from Kaptur for providing a living for many of her constituents for years and years.

     Look at the Yellow Pages from twenty years ago. You'll notice that hundreds of businesses which employed thousands of Toledoans are no longer in business. Are we to accept the proposition that none of those business owners who closed their businesses are qualified for Congress, that only career politicians who only create a few jobs through corrupt earmarks on the backs of taxpayers are worthy to represent our district in Congress? 

Because if that's where we are then we are doomed as a free nation. God forbid that our national mentality is that businessmen and businesswomen who close their businesses, or who go out of business for one reason or another, are unworthy, but career politicians whose main job is to get re-elected are somehow to be held in higher esteem. That may have become the mindset here in the 9th District, but when it becomes the mindset for our entire nation, there will be no incentive for hard work and for risking everything for a dream.