When politicians talk about middle America or “Main Street” values, they are talking about places like Janesville, Wisconsin.
This Midwestern town of 64,000 is the kind of place where volunteers help weed the botanical gardens and build the sets for a community theater production of “Death of a Salesman.”
It’s the kind of place where the biggest claim to fame is a stately home where President Abraham Lincoln once spent the night.
“It’s a nice place to live,” said Elizabeth Jozwiak, who moved to Janesville 14 years ago to work as a history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Rock County.
There are plenty of parks, good schools, bike trails along a pretty river and a strong sense of community involvement.
And like many blue-collar towns in what is called the “Rust Belt,” Janesville has been hard-hit by the closure of a manufacturing plant that once offered the promise of middle class wages and benefits for a working class job.
What makes Janesville unique is that it is the hometown of Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan — a fiscally conservative congressman and the author of his party’s plan to radically reduce the size of the federal government.
Ryan drew the ire of fact checkers when he used Janesville’s shuttered General Motors plant as an example of President Barack Obama’s failed campaign promises in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention.
The plant — which first opened in 1923 and employed 7,000 people at its 1978 peak — was actually closed weeks before Obama took office.
While it had been shedding jobs for three decades, losing the GM plant and the 1,200 jobs that remained was a huge blow. Another 4,000 jobs were lost at companies that supplied parts to the plant.
For sale signs popped up on lawns as families struggled to pay their bills or left town to find work.
Lines at the food banks swelled. Local charities lost their main sponsors, as did beloved community events like the annual Easter egg hunt.
“It was a huge blow emotionally, psychologically and ultimately economically,” said Scott Angus, editor of the local newspaper, the Janesville Gazette.
What made it worse, of course, was that this was all happening at the height of the 2008 financial crisis as the United States was suffering the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
Unlike many hard-hit industrial towns, Janesville was blessed with a savvy economic development team and a great location near the junction of two major interstate highways which offer an easy drive to the state capital of Madison and the business and industrial centers of Milwaukee and Chicago.
Over the past two years, Janesville and its neighbors in Rock County have attracted $600 million in capital investments which have created 1,600 jobs in manufacturing, food processing, health care and logistics.
The unemployment rate has fallen from a peak of 13.9 percent in March 2009 to 8.9 percent in July.
“Janesville is still struggling, there’s no doubt about it, partly because the national economy hasn’t bounced back as much as we’d hoped,” Angus said.
“There’s confidence that we’ll emerge from this in many ways a stronger community because we’ll be more economically diverse.”
Drive around this southern Wisconsin town and it’s hard not to think that things are looking up.
Most houses look well-kept and popular restaurants are bustling again at lunchtime. The Secret Service agents manning barricades outside Ryan’s home have added an air of excitement. And a water-ski contest on the Rock River attracted teams from Australia, Belgium, China and Canada last month.
It’s not yet clear how much voters here will blame Obama for the town’s troubles or give him credit for its slow but visible recovery.
Obama trounced rival John McCain here to win Rock County 50,529 to 27,364 in 2008 and won 56 percent of the vote in Wisconsin.
The Badger state hasn’t picked a Republican for president since Ronald Reagan won a second term in 1984.
But Obama’s lead has narrowed and Republicans are hoping Ryan’s popularity in his home state could push the Republican ticket over the top.
Ryan, whose congressional district begins in Janesville and stretches another 75 miles (120 kilometers) east to the shore of Lake Michigan, won his seventh term with 64 percent of the vote in 2008.
Janesville, a slice of middle America
