Leaving Ohio on a Jet Plane?

By Stuart Warner

I confess. I celebrated America’s 250th birthday in Mexico. Not very patriotic of me, I suppose, but it was a lot cooler. Both the weather and the political temperature.

At least we tried to bribe a mariachi band into playing Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A”. They didn’t know it. We had to settle for “Sweet Caroline,” which all of the Americans in the Mexican restaurant knew by heart.

I doubt, though, that you really care that a former Ohio journalist spent his holiday out of the country. (At least I flew coach.)

You may care a little more about where someone asking Ohioans to elect him governor reportedly spent his.

According to The Rooster, a Columbus newsletter that has taken to tracking Vivek Ramaswamy’s private jet the way bird-watchers chase rare warblers, the candidate’s Bombardier Global 5500 left John Glenn Columbus International Airport at 10:20 on the night of July Fourth and landed at Paris-Le Bourget the following morning.

Or at least the airplane did.

We don’t actually know who was aboard.

Maybe FBI Director Kash Patel borrowed it for a quick champagne run, anticipating a U.S. victory after President Trump reinstated our soccer star. Who knows

Whatever happened, I can’t complain too loudly since I was out of the country myself.

Some people, however, think the optics matter. Cincinnati Enquirer guest columnist Nick Anderson argued the reported trip reflected the kind of detachment that enormous wealth like Ramswamy’s can produce.

Personally, I can’t understand why anyone would leave the Olentangy River for the Seine, though I’m not entirely sure even the natives know how to pronounce either one.

What does Paris have that Ohio doesn’t?

The French like Grey Poupon. Ohioans prefer Bertman’s Ballpark Mustard.

Advantage: Ohio.

Paris has Notre Dame. We have Big Butter Jesus. At least we had Him, until the 62-foot statue in Monroe, Ohio, was struck by lightning and destroyed in 2010. Notre Dame was almost destroyed, too, but has subsequently reopened. I guess God thought Big Butter was just too sacred to replace and rebuilt a steel structure, Hug Me Jesus, in its place.

You can cheer the dancers at the Folies Bergere in Paris, but is that really any comparison to following the follies at the Factory of Sadness in Cleveland, where the Browns turned the Can-Can into the Can’t-Can’t.

Paris has the Louvre, but Ohio has a legislature that treats ethics as an abstract art.

While the French have their haute couture, Ohio has the finest collection of Jim Jordan’s sweat-stained, short-sleeve shirts. You’ll have to wrestle those away from him, though.

And neither the French’s Chateaubriand nor that Cincinnati Skyline stuff vaguely resemble chili.

Truth be told, though, I’m glad I spent the Fourth in Cabo instead of Cleveland. I’d probably rather spend next year’s Fourth in Paris than Parma, too. Retirement comes with certain privileges.

Running for governor doesn’t.

When you’re asking 12 million Ohioans to hire you, every parade, every county fair, every VFW picnic, every church festival is more than another campaign stop. It’s your way of saying, These are my people. This is where I belong.

That’s why the issue isn’t whether Vivek Ramaswamy had the right to go to Paris – if he even did. (Photos show he attended at least one parade before his jet took off.) The issue is whether it was the right weekend to do it.

There are 364 perfectly good days each year to fall in love with Paris.

There is only one Fourth of July.

If you want to govern the Heart of It All, that’s when you ought to spend all weekend in the heart of it.

(Stuart Warner is a former editor at the Akron Beacon Journal, The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the Arizona Republic. ChatGPT-5 contributed to the editing of this column.)

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Mr. Write Coach

Stuart Warner can help you become a better writer. Warner has developed a national reputation as an editor and journalism teacher. He has written or edited three Pulitzer Prize-winning entries and edited three other Pulitzer finalists As the writing coach at The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, he edited stories than won more than 50 national awards. Currently, Warner teaches journalism at Case Western Reserve University and is a regular contributor to AOL.com. He has been honored numerous times for his own writing. He has also been invited to speak on writing at the Nieman narrative conference at Harvard, the Let’s Do It Better conference at Columbia University, the National Writers Workshop sponsored by the Poynter Institute, the IRE’s national Computer Assisted Reporting workshop and at Capitolbeat, the national seminar for state government reporters. He has also worked with the writers at a number of companies, including Politifact, Key Bank, Signal Cleveland, the Akron Beacon Journal, Cleveland Jewish News, Akron General Hospital and also taught at Cleveland State University.

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