Like most Americans, Joe Schriner is anticipating Inauguration Day.

But “Joe the Painter” Schriner is thinking ahead to Inauguration Day 2012, when he plans to be the one taking the oath of office.

Unlike the spectacle that is going to unfold in Washington, D.C., Tuesday, Joe the Painter’s inauguration will be a simple affair, just a few close friends and family with the rest of the nation watching from home. No parades, no huge crowds and no gas-guzzling motorcades. Indeed, Joe and his family would ride their bicycles to the inauguration.

During his speech to the nation, Joe would interject a slide show of aborted fetuses. He would tell Americans that abortion is our “modern-day holocaust” and use his position as president to mobilize an entire nation against the practice.

Afterward, Joe and his family would have a simple meal of beans and rice. There would be no gala balls to attend. Joe would direct the folks who sponsor those soirees to use that money to feed people in a Third World country.

Schriner and his family wouldn’t even move into the White House. He and wife, Liz, and children, Sarah (13), Joseph (11) and Jonathan (5), would take up residency in an inner-city D.C. neighborhood and live among real people. Air Force One would be mothballed during his term.

We’re talking real change here.

“The change they’ve been talking about is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic,” Schriner says of the past campaign. “We need to steer the boat away from the iceberg.”

Schriner, 53, is a resident of Ohio City and a part-time house painter. He was an independent candidate in the 2000, 2004 and 2008 presidential elections. Schriner was an official write-in candidate in Ohio, where he garnered 71 votes.

He received 114 votes in 2004.

“Can you imagine how frustrated we are?” Schriner asks, commenting on the results of the two elections.

He’s not giving up. At 1:01 a.m. Nov. 5, 2008, just after the polls closed in Alaska, Joe Schriner announced his candidacy for the 2012 race.

Joe feels 2012 will be his year. Thanks to Joe the Plumber during the 2008 campaign, the public is already attuned to the common-guy theme. From the start, his campaign slogan has been “Common man, common sense, uncommon solutions.” Joe the Painter — Schriner is a former print journalist and addictions counselor who switched to house painting when he felt guided to run for president — hopes to build upon the plumber-turned-war correspondent’s name recognition.

Most significantly, Schriner feels that after another four years of Washington politics and a certain economic crash, the nation will be ready for a candidate who fuses common sense with Christian values, a man who does not separate his faith from his walk.

He compares the state of the nation to that of an alcoholic who isn’t going to change until he hits rock bottom. Joe feels rock bottom is just around the corner, despite the trillions of dollars being tossed at the problem.

Joe says Americans have been living an unsustainable lifestyle. We need to consume far less. We need to stop talking green and begin living it. We need to get to know and care about our neighbors, our family members. An economic depression would do that and so much more.

“During the Great Depression, people started moving in with their relatives on the farms; they got closer to their food sources,” Schriner says. “They had to live in community; they were forced to share. They got closer to family and closer to neighbors. The communities were interdependent; they lived a lot closer to how the early Christians lived in community, sharing what they had with each other.”

Joe makes frequent references to his Christian faith, the bedrock of all he does. He’s a Roman Catholic and tries to live the essence of the Gospel. He believes in the family and feels its breakdown is at the heart of America’s societal woes. He says you can’t heal the country without healing the family first.

Schriner cares about the environment, as well, and has adopted a Kyoto Protocol Home Zone for his household.

“We live extremely simply, with just a few material items,” Joe says. “In order to get any material items, you have to burn fossil fuels.”

The entire family bicycles to any destination that is within five miles of their Cleveland home. They do that summer or winter.

They turn back the thermostat and put on sweaters to reduce their carbon footprints in the winter.

They go without air conditioning in the summer.

They recycle everything.

They are moving toward a vegetarian diet, because producing meat consumes precious grains that could be used to feed starving people in other world.

“We are left of the Green Party,” Schriner says. “God gave us this planet, and we need to be good stewards of the environment.”



Common sense,

common people

A native of Cleveland, Schriner was living in the idyllic community of Bluffton when he launched his campaign. Schriner says it’s part of his message: “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

He moved his family into the west-Cleveland neighborhood in keeping with his platform to “ask some people in suburbia and small-town American to roll up their sleeves and move into the inner-city, to live side by side with the poor.” On the Schriners’ street, there have been two homicides, one attempted rape and a ruckus that Joe tried to break up.

“If we want peace, we really have to have the guts to work for it,” Schriner says.

He and his wife coach a recreation-center soccer league. They are involved in change at the asphalt-roots level.

“Seventy-five percent of those kids don’t have a dad at home,” he says. “They don’t need just money; they need some kind of a male adult figure, someone to be there to say ‘Nice kick, Johnny.’ That can mean the difference between a kid joining a church or joining a gang.”

That kind of involvement requires time, a byproduct of the Schriners’ simplified lifestyle. Schriner’s part-time job as a house painter and handyman pays the bills. He doesn’t have health insurance, choosing to focus on prevention, one of the planks in his health-care platform. Because his family lives so minimally, they have time to give back, to build a better America, to go on the road, conduct their research and spread a message of common sense and hope born of hard times.

“I happen to be a politician who thinks another Depression would be good for the country,” he says. “But why do we need to get to that point to figure out that maybe if I cut back on incidentals, I’d have more time for others?”



Real solutions

Schriner jumped into the race 19 years ago when he and Liz made the decision to travel across the country, talk to real people and look for community-based solutions to national problems. They have logged 200,000 miles on the trail during the past 19 years. Some of that mileage was on bicycles during the 2004 campaign.

Wherever he goes, Schriner looks for community-based solutions that work.

“That’s part of the essence of our campaign: to learn about something and then take it all over the country,” Schriner says.

In Ashtabula, he found in Silver Sands a model for assisting low-income seniors with housing and care needs. Its modus operandi is part of his position paper on Social Security.

In Monroe, La., he found a community pharmacy that dispenses free medicine and over-the-counter medications to low-income residents. The medications come from a variety of sources that normally would dispose of the drugs.

“The idea of neighbors helping neighbors seems a lot more spiritually redeeming than any health care system that will come out of Washington, D.C.”

Schriner’s challenge is move his ideas, from a March for the Unborn protest line in Lake County and a gymnasium in Oklahoma City, to the nation’s capital. He is making his plans to return to the nation’s roads in the near future to do more research and talk to people in both groups and one on one. He has, during previous campaigns, given more than 2,000 print interviews, as well as dozens of television and radio interviews.

Without the powerful engine of a political party behind him, it is a daunting — many would say impossible — task to win the White House. Joe the Painter says his campaign is not so much about the big picture as it is about day-to-day miracles.

“There have been so many little miracles along the way, things that have happened that have been God’s way,” Schriner says. “We believe strongly that we are helping change the nation one town at a time.”



Joe the Painter on the war



Schriner opposes the wars and feels the United States ought to have considered the weapons of mass destruction on its own soil before it headed off to Iraq to rid that county of its fabled cache. He feels Osama bin Laden ought to be captured and brought to trial, not hunted down and killed.

As president, Schriner would push for a sincere apology from the U.S. to the people of Iraq and push for a “tremendous outpouring of humanitarian aid” to the nation. He feels such a move would go a long way toward easing tensions there and across the region.

As for the war between the Palestinians and Israel, Schriner suggests the following course of action to the president-elect:

“If Obama really wanted that conflict to end, as president-elect he should fly over to Palestine and stand in solidarity with the people being bombed,” Schriner says. “I would be willing to bet that if he moved in with a Palestinian family tomorrow, that war would stop tomorrow.”



Health Care:

Schriner prefers an emphasis on prevention and regional solutions over a huge government program. Taxes and a series of benevolent initiatives would fund the program.

Read more about Joe Schriner’s position on everything from abortion to war at voteforjoe.com and in his books, “Back Road to the White House,” “America’s Best Town” and “America’s Best Town 2,” available from amazon.com.