I have a piece on the homepage today about a campaign ad Barack Obama ran in Ohio a few weeks back. It’s only worth mentioning now because over the course of writing this longer piece about Ohio’s economy for NRODT, I discovered what total hogwash it was:

In the days leading up to the March 4 Ohio primary, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign aired a TV ad that featured a man named Steven Schuyler standing in front of a Delphi Packard Electric plant in Warren, Ohio. In the ad, Schuyler says he worked for Delphi, an automotive supplier, for 13 years until NAFTA enabled the company to ship his job to Mexico. “Barack Obama was against NAFTA,” Schuyler says, adding, “We need a president that will bring work into this country.” The Delphi ad might qualify as the most deceptive of the 2008 race. First, Delphi did not exist as an independent company when Congress passed NAFTA in 1993. It was part of General Motors until it was spun off as an independent supplier in 1999. Second, foreign competition did not drive the company to eliminate American jobs. It declared bankruptcy in 2005 because the legacy labor costs it inherited from GM made it impossible to compete against other U.S.-based suppliers. Third, workers at the Warren, Ohio plant were offered generous buyouts and early-retirement packages. Its employees were not just kicked to the street. […] If all ex–Delphi Packard workers were offered buyouts or early-retirement packages, it stands to reason that Steven Schuyler, the man in the Obama TV ad, took a similar deal. The Obama campaign ignored National Review Online’s repeated requests for more information about Schuyler, but a Delphi retiree told the [Youngstown] Vindicator, “Schuyler took the buyout and got a good cash sum to quit his job.” When I spoke to Vindicator editor Todd Franko, he said he still hadn’t been able to contact Schuyler to confirm this.

That Vindicator story is titled, “Busy primary ends with one question: Who’s Steven Schuyler?”

Our challenge of the campaign had to do not with Hillary or Barack, but a with guy named Steven Schuyler. He’s the ex-Delphi worker in the effective anti-NAFTA ad for Obama. If anyone can find him, we’d appreciate hearing from him.

Ditto.