Twelve days and counting

Oct 24, 2012 | 06:42 PM |

Tags  Presidential campaign, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Ohio, swing state, presidential candidates, platforms, infrastructure David Brooks

They may be high-profile but Barack Obama and Mitt Romney aren’t the only guys-in-ties making whistle-stop tours of the great state of Ohio. Yours truly spent the past several days meeting with a number of companies in the Buckeye State and most of the people at the helm of the businesses I visited had a similar story to tell.

Although the folks I met ranged from equipment manufacturers, to service centers to mills, most agreed that the first half of 2012 was relatively solid while the second half has been disappointingly soft. Their economic EKG squares with many of the third-quarter corporate results we’ve reported and the Dow seems to be mirroring the late-inning softening.The key question, of course, is whether we’ll see a return to strength in the first half of 2013 as we did this year after the late-inning swoon in 2011. On that particular subject, the Ohioans....