CLEVELAND URBAN NEWS.COM-Cleveland, Ohio- The celebrated endorsement on Wednesday by President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden of former Democratic Ohio governor Ted Strickland's bid to unseat Republican U.S. Sen. Rob Portman gives the state of Ohio even more clout as a pivotal state, and as Gov. John Kasich commands the stage as one of four GOP presidential contenders still standing.

"As the nation goes, so goes Ohio," then Cuyahoga County commissioner Peter Lawson Jones said during a 2008 interview with Kathy Wray Coleman for a story published in the Call and Post Newspaper. (Editor's note: A Black Shaker Heights Democrat, Jones is a longtime President Obama supporter).

Ohio's primary is March 15.

No Republican in thinkable years and no Democrat since president John F. Kennedy in 1960 has lost Ohio in the general election and subsequently walked away with a presidency, a notability that lends credence to the primary election.

Strickland endorsed Obama for president in 2012, but in 2008, he supported Hillary Clinton for Ohio's Democratic primary, which she won, though she lost the nomination to the now two -term Obama, America's first Black president, and the nation's highest ranking Democrat.

The front-runner, Clinton is running in the Democratic primary against Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is holding his own but lags in delegates, Clinton splurging ahead with a 45-to-1 super-delegate advantage.

A junior senator and Cincinnati Republican, Portman will face Don Elijah Eckhart in the primary election in March, and Strickland, the Democratic front-runner, will face both P.G. Sittenfeld, a Cincinnati councilman, and Kelli Prather, an occupational therapist and virtual unknown.

Strickland spoke at length with Cleveland Urban New. Com in a largely Black forum in Cleveland earlier this year, a gig staged by longtime Democratic Party operative Charles E. Bibb Sr., who is Black.

That gathering,  at Angie's Soul Food Restaurant on Cleveland's largely Black east side, drew a large crowd of Democrats, including union -types, activists, Black clergy, and a few elected officials,

A former East Cleveland councilman, Bibb is the  president of the greater Cleveland Carnegie Roundtable, which sponsored the luncheon with Strickland.

During that forum Strickland, who lost a second term as governor to Kasich in 2010, promised that Black issues of public concern will be part of his congressional platform if he wins the Democratic primary and goes on to win a U.S. Senate seat in November.

The former governor also said that education, jobs, social security, medicaid and healthcare are his priority, among a litany of other public policy topics that he tossed to the audience before taking questions.

Strickland did admit, via questioning at the forum by Cleveland Urban News.Com., that the Ohio state legislature did not comply with the DeRolph decision, a ruling handed down by the Ohio Supreme Court in 2002 and reissued several times.

That ruling, which the high court of Ohio allowed the Republican controlled state legislature to outright ignore,  mandated a revision of the school funding formula by the state legislature,  and deemed  it unconstitutional, due partly to the over-reliance on property taxes that create "property rich and property poor school districts." And Black children and poor children are disproportionately impacted, data show.

(By (www.clevelandurbannews.com) / (www.kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com), Ohio's Black digital news leaders)