Ohio: Barack Obama

But what Montgomery won't be armed with is any guarantees that facilities such as the northeastern Ohio Chrysler plant in Twinsburg can be saved.

Montgomery, who will visit Dayton and Toledo as well as Twinsburg, joined Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, on a conference call yesterday with Ohio reporters.

The White House's director of recovery for auto communities and workers said he will bring with him Small Business Administration and Department of Commerce officials who can help with access to credit and companies trying to retool to make non-auto related products.

There will be officials to help with housing and economic-development issues, and people from the Energy and Transportation departments will be on hand to advise communities about shifting to "green" manufacturing.

Presidents wake up every day wondering whether terrorists will attack Americans and whether they will be judged to have failed to protect the homeland if that happens.

Presidents make decisions.

Members of Congress make speeches.

Is that unfair? Perhaps a little. Presidents can hem and haw and speechify with the best of them, and lawmakers sometimes take courageous, politically unpopular stands and cast votes that could cost them their jobs come the next election.

But being president has to be, no contest, the loneliest job in the world -- just look at the way they age (see the before and after photos of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush as recent examples) during their time in the White House.

At issue are comments made by an Armenian-American congressional candidate during the 2008 campaign. A Republican congresswoman from Cincinnati, Jean Schmidt, claims her opponent violated election law when he accused her of being a puppet of Turkish efforts to deny that the mass killings of Armenians during World War I constituted genocide.

The commission found probable cause yesterday that David Krikorian's statements violated election law, voting unanimously to bring the case to a full hearing.

The 94-year-old killings in Turkey are an unlikely topic for a congressional campaign in America's heartland, where Schmidt's staunchly conservative values find favor among a large portion of her constituents.

The Ohio Democrat helped launch a campaign yesterday for a so-called public plan to be included in the health-care reform bill that congressional Democratic leaders hope to send to President Barack Obama later this year.

Brown released a letter co-signed by 15 other Democratic senators telling the chairmen of the Senate finance and health committees, Max Baucus, D-Mont., and Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., that "there is no reason to believe that private insurers alone will meet the public purpose of ensuring coverage for all Americans at an affordable price for taxpayers."

Brown also joined Sens. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in unveiling a national poll that found that two-thirds of respondents favor a "public health plan that people can count on to cover what they need at more affordable rates.