President Obama visits Cleveland suburb of Parma Ohio, Cleveland's largest suburb and one with racial tensions involving Blacks, Ohio still pivotal

United States President Barack Obama

From the Metro Desk of Cleveland Urban News.Com and the Kathy Wray Coleman Online Newsblog.Com(www.clevelandurbannews.com)

CLEVELAND,Ohio-President Barack Obama weathered scathing hot temperatures that hit 94 degrees to speak to a capacity crowd at the James Day Park in the Cleveland suburb of Parma Oh. on Thursday afternoon, and went to Sandusky, Oh., and then on to a campaign stop in Pittsburgh, PA.

Both Pennsylvania and Ohio are key battleground states for presidential elections.

The president's visit to the Cleveland area was the second in under a month and followed a campaign gathering at the Cuyahoga Community College campus in Cleveland in June.

Obama talked jobs, the economy, education, and green energy, among other issues, and ended this round of campaigning in Pittsburgh on Friday.

And the president pushed his controversial health care plan to Ohioans and Pennsylvanians that the U.S. Supreme Court last month narrowly upheld as constitutional with a 5-4 decision authored by Chief Justice John Roberts.

"The law I passed is here to stay,"Obama said to an audience at a campaign stop outside of Sandusky on Thursday. "It is going to make the vast majority of Americans more secure."

Obama will face Republican nominee Mitt Romney this November, a neck and neck election that will likely be a testament to the president's universal health care mandate and whether Americans see the economy as moving foward.

Yet ObamaCare won the support of a divided Congress, after 60 years of failed tries by presidents beginning with Harry Truman and including Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton, now the U.S. Secretary of State with the Obama administration.

The native home of Standard Oil Company Giant John Rockefeller, the city of Parma sits 20 miles south of downtown Cleveland, but it also borders the majority Black city's predominantly White west side.

It was wise for Obama to stop through Ohio, again, some political pundits have said. And they say that the president will likely come again before the nation's voters cast their ballots in 2012 for an unprecedented election that will decide if America's first Black president will get a second four year term.

Parma is roughly one percent Black and has a population of about 80,000 people.

It is the seventh largest in the state and a Democratic stronghold.

And Parma is the largest of Cleveland's suburbs with the typical family earning a median annual income that harbors around $44 thousand.

But it has had its bout with racial profiling too, data suggest.

Parma officials and the Cleveland NAACP signed a decree in 2002 as a federal district court-supervised pact that ended a 12-year legal battle alleging bias against Black firefighter applicants and required the use of innovative measures to recruit and hire Black applicants, though the trial court ruled at least once that the pact, which has since been dissolved, was violated by city officials.

Blacks by their own assessment traditionally do not like to ride through town to face what data have shown to be police misconduct and other alleged discrimination. Some Blacks say it is a moderate Ku Klux Klan without the sheets and bonfires in obvious view.

Others say that Parma is a thriving working class community that breeds brilliant politicians like Democratic Mayor Timothy DeGetter and Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Bill Mason, whose political machine still shines as he steps down and does not seek a fourth four-year term but continues to make or break Cuyahoga County judicial candidates and other ambitious politicians.

Allegations of impropriety also plague the city's political scenery as DeGetter's predecessor, Dean DiPetro, a popular Cuyahoga County Democrat and Mason ally, stepped down as mayor last year amid a broad public corruption probe of elected county officials on bribery and other claims of malfeasance , some convicted such as former Cuyahoga County Auditor Frank Russo and former Cuyahoga County Commissioner Jimmy Dimora, a prior chairman of the county Democratic party.

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