Is Wall Street headed to Ohio for a 'New Day' ?

WEEK-END WIDGETS:

Having watched and read about the ceremonial rollout of GM's Chevrolet Cruze from the Lordstown assembly line, it didn't surprise me that John Kasich was absent from the lines of applauding workers. You would have thought that when the word got out that his opponent, Gov. Ted Strickland, would be sitting happily on the passenger side with GM President Mark Reuss beaming at the wheel, that Kasich would want a piece of the action. But, alas, the Republican contender was not a cheerleader for the bailout of GM that saved thousands and thousands of jobs and kept the company out of bankruptcy. Is that the "New Day" that he promises on his home page?

Let's face it. That kind of opposition to such expenditures is widely popular for so many GOP candidates today, including the ticket in Ohio that it might easily have been arranged in a board room at the Bank of America.

It would be heretical for Kasich to change his stripes now, particuarly after he spent such a long time at the Wall Street investment firm of Lehman Brothers that wound up in bankruptcy. As

Candidate Kasich makes his rounds, he swears Lehman Brothers is old history for him and besides, he had little to do with its operation. Ouch! I would demur by saying that you can take Kasich out of Wall Street, but you can't take Wall Street out of Kasich.

There's been such a loud noise in the campaigns that blame President Obama for the economic mess - great political fodder, if mindless, considering what he inherited - it might be worthwhile to turn to an appropriate comment by the late Daniel Schorr, offered in a collection of his commentaries, "Come to Think of It." Observed Schorr in 2001, as he took an early inventory of the works of Bush II:

"But perhaps one should not be surprised at this tendency [ by Bush ] to act now and think later. This, after all, was the president who decided how much money he wanted to commit for tax relief before he knew how much he would need for defense, education, and prescription drugs.

It was true then - nearly a decade ago. And it's just as true now as Republicans continue to rehash the beauty of restoring the economic nightmare of the Bush tax cuts.

Finally, when we hear the Three Amigos - Sarah Palin, John Boehner, and Newt Gingrich - link the preacher's threat to burn the Koran to the building of the Islamic Mosque in Manhattan - isn't that a wildly over-the-top quid pro quo that ought to be left to playground toughs? These people are regurgitating a Gothic novel to scare the hell out of Americans and it is working in some quarters, with help from Fox News. So may we now turn to the late Allen Ginsberg, the Beat generation poet, who may have been simply looking at faces in the crowd when he wrote :

"Whoever, controls the media - the images - controls the culture."

Kasich-Taylor. McCain-Palin?

IS OHIO facing a redux of the McCain-Palin ticket? That could be one explanation of the arrival of State Auditor Mary Taylor, a Summit Countian, as John Kasich's running mate on the Republican side of the scrum with Gov. Ted Strickland. Surely there must have been some thought given along GOP Row to the prospects for a shopworn former Wall Streeter and Ohio congressman to make it all the way to the governor's office by himself this year. So Taylor, a photogenic politician who would represent relative youth and vitality to the ticket, would take up the slack. Besides both are the strongest advocates of the party's core values, not the least of which is the cut-taxes thing.

Among those on the GOP side who must be delighted by the tandem is Summit County Republican chairman Alex Arshinkoff, who has been among those nurturing Taylor's political career and is now positioned for a hometown role in a state election. (He has also been working for Kasich.) But a reasonable question persists in all of this: If the party down in Columbus is so high on Taylor, why didn't they persuade her to run at the top of the ticket, instead of seeking reelection as auditor before now?

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I've been told that a certain ranter on WNIR has been damning the Akron-Summit County Public Library for seeking a 1.4 mill levy, arguing that his taxes shouldn't pay for another's use of computers at the place and that, after all, the library is little more than a hangout for the homeless. As one who just enjoyed the benefits of the bright new facility's special collections department, I would suggest that the schlock show host go down there some time, look around, ask some questions from an always helpful staff and even read a book - or have somebody read it to him.

Steele and Kasich: A lucrative sideline

REPUBLICAN NATIONAL Committee chairman Michael Steele and Ohio GOP gubernatorial candidate John Kasich have found that their political roles can pay off in more ways than one. In less polite society it's known as gaming the system. The word has now gotten out, like those 22 million missing e-mails, that they are frequently invited to share their beliefs in lofty Republican values with audiences across the land. In return, they are personally being paid thousands of dollars by their hosts. And their money-making sideline appears to be more than crass with former RNC chairmen.

Hissed the conservative Washington Times: "Michael S. Steele, Republican National Committee chairman , is using his title to market himself for paid appearances nationwide, personally profiting from speeches with fees of up to $20,000 at colleges, trade associations and other groups - an unusual practice criticized by a string of previous chairmen."

I should say so. However, if you're one to keep score, it does seem that the University of Akron snared a bargain when it paid Steele only $12,000 for his public speech in E.J. Thomas Hall on Oct. 15. Having sat through his schtick at the time, I would have have moved his fee four or five decimal points to the left.

If Kasich was paying attention to the Steele System of rhetorical punishment and rewards, he must have been a quick study. Indeed, he prefers the Cadillac version of fees, doubling what Steele feels is an honorable charge for a service call to corporate business groups and friendly associations, regardless of the oddity of speaking in states like Nevada, Illinois and Minnesota where there aren't likely to be any Buckeye voters. But a Wall Streeter to the core, he's finding it's not that difficult to charge whatever the traffic will bear.

Meantime, Columbus Dispatch columnist Joe Hallett pointed out, Kasich "hid in the weeds" during the attempts to resolve the state's budget crises, except to "deplore the tax increase." Way back in June, Kasich bobbed at the Cleveland City Club when asked for his views on fixing the budget, insisting: "I'm not messing with that...It isn't my job now to be micromanaging the process." He's lucky. Gov. Strickland, with help from legislative Republicans, fixed it without him.

Is Kasich serious about being a governor? Or are all of those out-of-state fees too generous for him to change his mind?

The Morrison case: I think I'll wait for the movie

SURPRISE, SURPRISE! (And don't say I didn't warn you.)

The Ohio Senate has delayed action on a vote to decide whether Jack Morrison should be dumped from the University of Akron Board of Trustees. The Akron lawyer has found an ally in Sen. Tim Grendell, the hard-right Chesterland Republican and teabagger who was once described by the Plain Dealer as a voice of the "lunatic fringe." Grendell stalled action to allow more time for "fact-checking". That, of course, makes teabagger sense. After all it has been only four months since a court convicted Morrison on a couple of ethics violations - a period in which everyone from the governor to the secretary of state to legislative Republicans and Democrats have asked him to find another line of public work.

Among them are Akron Sen. Tom Sawyer, a Democrat, and Cuyahoga Falls Sen. Kevin Coughlin, a Republican. Sawyer says Senate President Bill Harris, a Republican, would like to resolve the issue promptly, but he's also trying to avoid an "unseemly" trial in the Senate that would embarrass the legislative body. Such a trial, Sawyer said, would be unprecedented.

"Bill Harris is a man of decency and honor," Sawyer tells me, "and although we have disagreed politically on some issues, I know that he is personally trying to avoid an embarrassing trial in the Senate to retry a case that has already been tried. Morrison has been found guilty in a court of law."

At the same time, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner is pushing ahead to remove Morrison from his seat on the Summit County Board of Elections. In short, Morrison is standing pat on his argument that the state his trampling on his right to due process. Brunner doesn't at all think so.

What began as a routine case that would have been concluded for a person of less political influence and wealth has now become a running spectator sport as he holds a bipartisan army at bay.

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Morrison Saga lingers on and on and on...

THE BEACON JOURNAL'S editorial call on Monday for Jack Morrison to give up his seat on the University of Akron's Board of Trustees was the latest attempt to persuade him to leave short of trussing him up and wheeling him off the campus. Don't count on that happening any time soon, if ever. For months, Morrison, the Akron lawyer whose resume now includes two misdemeanor convictions on ethics charges, has been impervious to any suggestion by high ranking officials that he pack up and leave the UA board as well as the Summit County Board of Elections, where he is the chairman of the often rancorous four- member panel.

His critics have included Gov. Strickland, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, Ohio Board of Regents Chancellor Eric Fingerhut, some Democrats and Republicans in the Ohio legislature and a silent cadre of trustees who whisper there there's not a damn thing they can do about it.

Morrison, an influential Republican who serves as the lawyer for the Summit County GOP, knows all of this quite well and assumes that so long as his conviction is being appealed, any attacks on his status as a UA trustee are, well...purely academic.

As everyone surely knows, his legal problems evolve from his son's purchase of a derelict home near the University's new football field and Father Morrison's interest- bearing loan to his son to underwrite the transaction for a house that has since been torn down after it was resold for a profit. The Ohio Ehtics Commission insisted that the elder Morrison was less than candid about these details.

Since July, when the court ruled against him, Morrison has drawn more attention in political and academic circles than one would expect of Sarah Palin, the newly arrived literary sensation who has been known to draw a crowd or two in Ohio, as elsewhere - in a losing cause.

Morrison is not really the only issue anymore. It's the negatives that he's heaped on the University simply by stonewalling. He probably correctly concludes that if the University can live with it, so can he.

Whose educated guess this time?

THE HANDWRINGING over education funding in Ohio has contributed little to an early solution to how a boastfully informed democratic society can educate its young people.  Gov. Strickland's budget proposal has been defended, shredded and kneaded from all sides without really guaranteeing that it will move, even flimsily,  beyond a stalemate that is at least a half-century old in the Buckeye State.  During that time, shortchanging public education has become rooted in a state of mind that may take another half-century to cure. It is Ohio's disgrace that has led to the state's long lamented brain drain, among other horrific fallouts.

A little history is in order.   Here's what a freshman governor, James A. Rhodes, proudly had to say upon his arrival at the statehouse in 1963  when times were good - the first of four such arrivals:

"The budget is in balance.  It does not call for new or additional taxes on the taxpayers of Ohio.  It sets strict standards of economy and efficiency.  Nevertheless it provides adequately for essential services." 

Adequately it did not provide. It was pure Rhodes-style rhetoric that he repeated  often during his four terms, terms that he made possible with a comfortable state of mind among Ohioans that failed to connect the dots between Ohio's highest college tuition among the Big 10 state schools (topped only by privately operated Northwestern) and taxes.  Only the shallowest thinkers, and there are plenty of them, do not equate soaring tuition and other rising costs with a deceptive  form of taxation. Only the shallowest thinkers do not equate a state's economic retreats over the years to its inattention to the priorities of secondary education.   You get no more than you pay for. 

In  the decades since the Rhodes era,  Democratic governors have had to live with the Rhodes credo, and some have been kicked out.  Meantime, school buildings have deteriorated or closed, curricula shrunk, layoffs increased and various nostrums offered in the wake now bearing down on the longtime Rhodes theories (aided and abetted by a doting General Assembly)  about his Wonderful World of Ohio.

David James, Akron's new public schools superintendent, has bravely moved into the center ring surrounded by the even greater demands of  urban districts. In his recent curtain-raising speech hosted by the Akron Press Club in the Martin Center, James repeatedly called for a "collaborative" approach from all sectors of the community, including service groups, parents, teachers union, businessmen and professionals to address the problems.  He also called for reforms and new initiatives, a Herculean task in itself.   But with both the governor and the superintendent, the question remains:

Can they get there from here?  In a half-century of history, it would be unprecedented.