Citizen journalism

When newspapers die, this is what we’ll have to get used to.

Column: Ken Blackwell, as steady as the breeze

My Jan. 8 print edition column, posted early as a reaction to Monday’s RNC debate.

I’ll say one thing about J. Kenneth Blackwell: The man can work a room.

Blackwell and five other contenders for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee faced off Monday in a debate at the National Press Club in Washington. Blackwell had his zingers ready.

One of his favorites is the following: He has little use, he said, for Republicans “who campaign like Ronald Reagan and then govern like Jimmy Carter.”

This line leaves conservative Republicans weak in the knees, and, improbably, Blackwell is gaining some real momentum in his quest to become national party chairman. The former Ohio secretary of state and failed gubernatorial candidate has locked up endorsements from some important, right-wing leaders, such as anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly, Focus on the Family leader James Dobson, American Conservative Union Chairman David Keene and others.

The funny thing about Blackwell’s frequent Carter riff is the part he leaves out: Blackwell, in 1980, backed Carter for re-election over Reagan. He became a Republican after Reagan won.

As Bob Dylan once sang, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” Quite right; you just need Blackwell.

Blackwell has such a tendency for changing his stripes that he was known in his hometown, Cincinnati, as “Switchwell,” said Charlie Luken, a Columbus lobbyist and Democrat who defeated Blackwell in a tight congressional race in 1990.

More recently, Blackwell pushed for a constitutional amendment limiting state spending growth. In early 2005, he vowed that “in one form or another, it will be on the ballot this November.” It wasn’t. Nor was it on the ballot in 2006, because Blackwell, conveniently after winning the GOP gubernatorial nomination, went along with a legislative compromise worked out by the moderate Republicans he loves to decry.

In his defense, Blackwell’s acolytes cite the flimsy statistic that Blackwell has won 13 of 17 elections in his political career.

“I know how to win elections,” Blackwell said during the debate.

Those victories include some City Council races as a member of Cincinnati’s hardly conservative Charter Committee, a third party, and down-ticket statewide races for treasurer and secretary of state. But Blackwell, like the Ohio State football team, gets worse as the stakes get higher. He narrowly lost to Luken in that 1990 congressional race. And he was blown to pieces by Democrat Ted Strickland in the governor’s race in 2006, losing 60.5 percent to 36.7 percent. To put this in perspective, it was the worst performance by an Ohio Republican running for governor since 1912, when Robert B. Brown took 26.3 percent of the vote in a crowded six-way field.

My enduring memory of Blackwell’s gubernatorial campaign was an appearance he made at the Tusco Rifle Club in Dennison, near New Philadelphia, in early October 2006. Amongst the country folk, Blackwell, a giant of a man, threw his shotgun over his broad shoulders, walked out to the range and proceeded to shoot 13 of 15 clay pigeons in between telling me about how he wanted to crack down on abortion.

Blackwell, on that day, was the caricature of a conservative Republican. In the months and years since his colossal defeat, he’s honed the caricature by joining seemingly every conservative organization under the sun — seriously, read his bio at kenblackwell.com — and writing column after column of conservative boilerplate. But a party chairman doesn’t make policy; rather, he plots how to elect candidates, who then make policy. There’s a difference.

In 2006, Blackwell destroyed the Ohio Republican Party by tacking too far to the right in his inept gubernatorial campaign; in 2009, he offers the same to the national party.

Luken said he’d be pleased if Blackwell became RNC chairman. Among Democrats, Luken surely isn’t alone in that sentiment.

UPDATE: An irate reader told me that Blackwell had to be carrying not a rifle, as I previously wrote, but a shotgun, which is true. I changed that.

Blackwell

Republican J. Kenneth Blackwell, former Ohio secretary of state and failed 2006 gubernatorial candidate, appears to be making some real strides in his quest to become chairman of the Republican National Committee: A number of  party heavyweights have rallied to his candidacy.

He’ll be debating his opponents today at 1 p.m. at the National Press Club in Washington. Watch it live here.

Marc Dann used to hang out where?

My Dec. 25 print edition column:

It’s Christmas morning, which means that many readers probably are opening gifts or recovering from hangovers. So my guess is that most people aren’t going to even read this column, which, I have to say, is a relief. Because I have a confession to make, and it’s not one I’m proud of.

On several occasions, I’ve hung out in Columbus at a bar called Zeno’s. If’ you’ve ever been to Zeno’s, well, you know. But if you haven’t, take my word that it’s not a place any upstanding member of the community should visit. It sure is fun, though.

Having walked into Zeno’s, I apparently have something in common with former Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann, a Democrat. You see, according to a report released earlier this week chronicling Dann’s pathetic management of the attorney general’s office, Dann was hanging out at Zeno’s when he came across Jessica Utovich. He later hired Utovich as his scheduler and had an affair with her. Dann and I have company in our selection of raunchy night spots; according to a Columbus Dispatch article from 2005, former U.S. Rep. Bob Ney, who represented much of southeast Ohio in Congress earlier this decade before being sent to federal prison for corruption, used to go to Zeno’s as well.

The tidbit about Zeno’s is but a small detail in state Inspector General Thomas P. Charles’ damning report about Dann and his disastrous tenure as Ohio’s top lawyer. The report documents how, under Dann, the attorney general’s office fell into an appalling state of debauchery, cronyism and incompetence.

Much of it is, I think, comical. I mean, that is, if one can laugh at the debasing of a bedrock foundation of this state’s government. (I can!)

Dann and his Youngstown goon squad — communications director Leo Jennings and general services director Anthony Gutierrez, among others —hired staffers the way the Dallas Cowboys hire cheerleaders. Brains and qualifications were trumped by, umm, certain other considerations:

“Dann hired into his office a coterie of young women who were dubbed ‘the Dannettes.’ So unprofessional was the dress and conduct of some of these women that a project assistant in the office was assigned to conduct etiquette classes for them,” according to the report.

Gutierrez, who began Dann’s downfall when he was accused of sexual harassment, is the report’s most pathetic case. A Dann crony, he reportedly intimidated staffers by “referring to his alleged Youngstown mob connections and claiming that he associated with people who could have (others) buried in concrete.” Gutierrez, who apparently modeled himself after Al Pacino in that awful “Dick Tracy” movie, made about $87,500 per year.

The entire office seemed to be run like Satriale’s pork store from “The Sopranos”:

“Displeasure with subordinates, we were told, was expressed by screaming, yelling, breaking phones and other office property and by backing up individuals against walls and threatening them.”

And I’m just noting the instances of intimidation and lewd conduct. The more serious parts of the report deal with Dann’s misuse of campaign funds — Dann used them as a “personal honey pot,” the report claims — and his disgusting disdain for taxpayers’ money. For instance, Dann allowed Gutierrez to spend $1.9 million to buy 99 vehicles for the office, which was a “waste of state funds,” according to the report. Dann also reportedly passed out Blackberry devices like candy, which cost the state almost $30,000 per month.

Attorney General-elect Richard Cordray, also a Democrat, will take over the office next month. Dann’s is not a tough act to follow.

All Cordray needs to do is keep his nose clean. Oh, and stay away from Zeno’s.

A new treasurer

Gov. Ted Strickland, a Democrat, will appoint Columbus Councilman Kevin Boyce as state treasurer, The Associated Press reports.

This isn’t particularly a shock. Strickland was under pressure to appoint a person of color to this seat; Boyce will be the state’s first non-judicial Democratic statewide black officeholder.

Boyce won’t be the first black treasurer; Republican J. Kenneth Blackwell holds that distinction.

Boyce has two years until he must stand for election.

Dann, continued

Former Attorney General Marc Dann met the scheduler he later had an affair with, Jessica Utovich, at a bar named Zeno’s in Columbus, according to the Charles report. Without going into any details, I can say that I’ve been to Zeno’s, and therefore can say with confidence that any public official who gets within 100 yards of that bar isn’t particularly bright.

Legislators hacking, wheezing

In 2006, a commanding majority of Ohioans voted to ban smoking in nearly all indoor, public places. The law had hardly any exceptions; for instance, businesses employing only family members still could allow smoking, but in my view such businesses don’t really constitute public places anyway because smoking would be banned if the public was allowed into the business. The law was very clear about this, although I remember that private clubs, such as VFW halls and Elk’s Clubs, seemed to think they were exempted from the original law and that voters had been hoodwinked.

Now Ohio’s Legislature appears poised to gut the smoking ban, bending over backwards to carve out exceptions for businesses that yell the loudest.

If private clubs, bowling alleys or anyone else thinks that the public would support them at the ballot, then they should take a weaker ban to them in November. The Legislature, meanwhile, was given a clear mandate — 58.5 percent — by the voters. Legislators needn’t go against their wishes to reward narrow constituencies.

Let Detroit fall

Megan McArdle of The Atlantic, much shrewder than I, makes a compelling case as to why the Big Three shouldn’t be bailed out. It directly addresses the parochial argument I made below.

Saving Detroit

I wrote the following editorial for the print edition on the auto industry bailout for Thursday’s paper. I’ll include it here in full:

Imagine Avon Lake without Ford. Or Parma without General Motors.

And we thought the economy was bad now? What if the Big Three domestic automakers — Ford, GM and Chrysler — went belly up?

The Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich., has pondered the once-unthinkable and has come to some eye-popping conclusions. In the first year of a 100 percent shutdown by the Big Three, nearly 3 million U.S. jobs would be lost. Those losses would be disproportionately felt in Ohio and the Midwest.

The reckoning — the collapse of the Big Three — might be on the horizon. Ford, regarded as the healthiest of the Big Three, is spending its cash reserves at an astonishing rate. It has burned through an average of $2.6 billion in each of the past three months, which means Ford could run out of money by April if it keeps spending its reserves at that rate, according to the Detroit Free Press.

The economic future of the nation, and the Midwest in particular, is at stake. Just like it did with Wall Street, Uncle Sam must step in to try to avert disaster.

How exactly it should bail out the Big Three is an open question. Congressional Democrats, such as U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Avon, want to authorize Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to use money earmarked for the $700 billion rescue of Wall Street to help the auto industry. That’s a start. But Congress probably will have to do more. We’re sickened by the immense debt the nation has racked up; but debt isn’t as troubling as the failure of the Big Three, the loss of millions of jobs and the withering of our nation’s manufacturing base.

In exchange for our money, Washington is going to need to get something from Detroit in return. Former Wall Street Journal Detroit bureau chief Paul Ingrassia, writing in that newspaper Monday, said, “If public dollars are the only way to keep General Motors afloat, as the company contends, a complete restructuring under a government overseer or oversight board has to be the price. … As for Ford and Chrysler, if they want similar public assistance they should pay the same price.”

The Big Three have been poorly run for decades. For decades, they bowed too easily to union pressures, surrendering too-generous benefits packages that now are killing the automakers’ bottom lines. They ignored the higher prices for gasoline, which, though now abated, inevitably will rise.

It would be easy to let Ford, GM and Chrysler die, because that’s the fate they’ve earned through their blunders. But it’s about more than just them — it’s about the future of the nation and the Midwest.

The Big Three might be beyond saving, but the government must try.

My natural inclination is to oppose such a bailout. And several of my friends have made very convincing arguments as to why Ford, GM and Chrysler should be allowed to die. Essentially, we’d be making an investment in these companies with no guarantee that we wouldn’t have to pump even more money into them a year from now. It is perhaps unrealistic, in 2008, for manufacturers of all stripes to pay undereducated Americans fantastic wages. I used the word “reckoning” in the editorial above — perhaps it’s inevitable, and a bailout just would delay the pain.

I still think a bailout is worth a try, though I admit it’s mostly for parochial, regional reasons: The collapse of the auto industry might put the nail in the coffin of my beloved Northeast Ohio. I also think that, as a nation, we should admit defeat if whatever bailout Congress ultimately approves doesn’t end up working. I see an auto industry bailout as akin to applying shock therapy to the heart. Let’s see if an infusion of cash can get the Big Three going again. If not, then we’ll watch Detroit’s funeral at least knowing that we tried.

Photo: The Ford plant in Avon Lake (Chuck Humel/Chronicle-Telegram)

In covering Caprimania…

… I neglected to mention that another candidate for Ohio Senate minority leader is state Sen. Tom Roberts, D-Dayton.