Can Ohio's better days help Obama?

• State, key county could hold key to election
• Auto rescue, shale oil and gas spur recovery
• The president doesn't always get the credit

CANTON, Ohio -- The economy is bouncing back in what may be ground zero of the presidential campaign, but not everyone credits the president.

Unemployment in Stark County, a bellwether county in the hardest-fought state in the nation, just dropped to 6.5%. Manufacturing is booming. And the area's flirtation with shale oil and natural gas is turning into a steady relationship.

All that should be welcome news for President Obama, whose path to a second term goes through Ohio — literally. He was in Cleveland on Thursday night and Dayton on Tuesday, where Vice President Biden joined him after visits to Canton, Lorain and Toledo.

No state in the nation is getting as much attention as Ohio in the campaign's waning days. Republican challenger Mitt Romney spent his 27th day this year there Thursday. Obama has visited 18 times for political events, more than any other swing state — including Virginia, just across the river from the White House. Ads for the two candidates pack the airwaves, including nearly 41,000 TV ads in the first three weeks of October.

Yet despite Obama's bailout of the auto industry, to which one in eight Ohio jobs is connected — as well as his tax cuts, stimulus projects and aid to state and local governments — the president hasn't closed the deal here.

"I sure don't want to see another four years like we've had," says Rick Weise, 58, a unit manager at Timken Company, the area's major employer, makers of bearings and alloyed steel. "I don't think we've gone forward."

The evidence says otherwise, as Canton Mayor William Healy is all too eager to note. Armed with graphs on jobs and tax revenue, the diehard Democrat credits Obama's economic stimulus, auto bailout and other policies with reversing a deep recession and a 15% jobless rate.

"Are we headed in the right direction? You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure that one out," says Healy, whose walls are covered with photos of Obama, Biden, Bill and Hillary Clinton and other Democrats. "In Canton, we are feeling it."

A base in manufacturing

Ohioans are feeling it across the state, according to a recent Quinnipiac University/CBS News Poll. Since early August, the percentage of people who say the economy is getting stronger has risen from 33% to 46%.

The question is why.

Obama claims most of the credit, particularly as a result of the government aid extended to General Motors and Chrysler at the beginning of his administration. He also cites efforts to boost manufacturing, both through domestic incentives and the removal of trade barriers overseas — including Chinese duties on specialty steel made in the Midwest.

"Just recently, steel workers in Ohio and throughout the Midwest, Pennsylvania, are in a position now to sell steel to China because we won that case," Obama said in this week's third presidential debate.

Stark County, which has voted for the eventual winner in seven of the last eight presidential elections, doesn't have as many auto-related jobs as other parts of Ohio. Obama is more likely to benefit in Lordstown, where a GM plant now runs around the clock building the Chevrolet Cruze, and Toledo, where Chrysler pushes out Jeep Wranglers.

Still, "the president, without a doubt, gets credit for the auto bailout here," says David Cohen, a political science professor at the University of Akron. "There are some concrete examples where the bailout has been a huge help."

The county is a haven of manufacturing, led by Timken, which has invested more than $400 million in Stark County the past two years. Other companies produce everything from galvanized guardrails to window-wiper hoses.

"We make a lot of little things in a lot of little shops," says David Kaminski, director of energy and public affairs at the Canton Regional Chamber of Commerce. "We've been doing that forever, and we still do it."

The implication: Canton and Stark County will rise or fall largely on their own, regardless of federal intervention. Indeed, a Fox News Poll gives Republican Gov. John Kasich, on the job less than two years, more credit for the economic revival than Obama.

'We haven't seen it yet'

Obama's $833 billion economic stimulus law had an impact in Stark County, but how much depends on who you ask. Much of the money went to retain police, firefighters and teachers or for highway projects. Two companies received about $8 million each for expansions.

"During the worst part of that recession, when we were at the bottom, we would not have been able to make it without those stimulus dollars," Healy says.

But not many residents understand that.

"Most people around wouldn't know how it was spent," says Stephen Paquette, president of the Stark Development Board.

What really has people enthusiastic is the hunt for shale oil and natural gas more than 5,000 feet below the ground of eastern Ohio, where steel mills and coal mines once drove the local economy. The drilling boom centered in nearby Carroll County is "probably the most significant change in our economy in, maybe, forever," Paquette says.

Yet even some of those who have leased land to energy companies for drilling rights — and stand to reap thousands or millions of dollars in royalties — remain skeptical.

"There's supposed to be all these jobs, businesses are going to be booming. We haven't seen it yet," says Jane Evans, 54, a school nurse who's working two jobs to support four children because her husband, a farmer and steelworker, has been unemployed since 2009. She worries that if Obama is re-elected, "he'll start regulating it and taxing it."

Perhaps the most pervasive opinion here is that while the economy is improving, it's being driven by technology and innovation far more than federal policies or politics.

"The shale gas revolution is here," says Joseph Halter, president of Solmet Technologies, which makes steel forgings. "It's purely transformational. Neither candidate can take credit for it."