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HHS secretary Sebelius comes back to her Ohio roots

Kathleen Sebelius, the Cincinnati native who Secretary of Health and Human Services, came to the Ohio delegation breakfast in Charlotte Tuesday morning telling her fellow Ohioans that they "are the key to this election."

Sebelius, a former Kansas governor who is the daughter of former Ohio governor John J. Gilligan, took up the question that Mitt Romney's campaign has been asking in campaign stops since the GOP convention last week - are you better off now than you were four years  ago?

"Are you better off?,'' Sebelius said. "You bet you are."

She said the nation was losing jobs at the rate of 700,000 a month when President Obama took office, and has now had 29 months of growth in private sector jobs.

"And you have a governor in Ohio who was firing public workers faster than we would add private sector workers,'' Sebelius said.

"You have to be ready to leave Charlotte and go back home and be ready to tell the truth,'' Sebelius said. "They don't have a message that resonates with people so they have to start making it up as they go along."

She said that the Romney campaign "may be running away from Romney care, but we are embracing Obamacare,' Sebelius said.

Howard Wilkinson is in his 50th year of covering politics on the local, state and national levels.