Senate Bill 5: When Romney chose to pivot

THE HERD OF Republican elephants hasn't even taken out visas for the South Carolina and Florida campaigns when the experts are already casting Ohio as a "swing state".

It is the eternal role of experts to be ahead of the curve and if they are fascinated by the swing in Ohio, who can argue? We will be reminded more than once that the Buckeyes have produced more presidents than anyone can remember mostly because a majority of them are not memorable.

So get ready for it. Your state is crucial, pivotal, a battleground state, a point of no return for the loser.

Now that we have designated Mitt Romney as the Republican nominee, we hope that he is listening to all of the talk about how suddenly important Ohio is to America's future. But pivotally speaking, he may face some troublesome moments when he starts making the rounds here. It's called Senate Bill 5, Gov. Kasich's ill-advised attempt to sweep public union workers off their feet because he was the governor and they were nothing more than public union workers.

The last time that Romney addressed the issue, he treated it as a multiple choice question. Back on Oct. 25, he visited a phone bank near Cincinnati where a Republican phone crew was

urging voters to vote against repealing the restrictive union law. Bad choice. So when he was asked about it, he said he really wasn't speaking against any ballot issue, with which he said he wasn't "terribly familiar." When he drew fire from both parties for waffling, he corrected himself the next day and declared in full body armor, "I am 110 percent behind Gov. Kasich and in support of that question." (The repeal was upheld by the voters by monstrous numbers.)

Wanna bet a lot of this will show up in the months ahead? On this and so many other issues, shouldn't Romney's managers insist that he stop being so pivotal?

Kasich & Co.: overreach, and then some

THE MORNING AFTER...

The unconditional surrender of Kasich & Co. to the voters on Tuesday was a textbook example of crushed political arrogance. The mismanaged Republican-led assault on public worker unions was DOA at the polls, but its demise has been widely anticipated from the day the opponents of Senate Bill 5 filed more than a million signatures calling for a referendum to repeal it. Even with the support of the state's two biggest newspapers - the Plain Dealer and Columbus Dispatch, which lamely tried to provide cover for the law - the ill-conceived legislation was destined to land in a pauper's grave with the clearly shaken governor offering a brief TV benediction.

Good! Since his arrival in the governor's office in January , Kasich has shown little patience for rational conversation with his critics as well as the public at large. Stripping public workers of their bargaining rights has been one of his planned fail-safe initiatives in attempting to convince the corporate world that status quo is not a term you would ever find in his dictionary. Yet there he was, no more than your average chastened pol, in the gloom of painful defeat telling us that the voters have spoken and he will now need time to reflect on its meaning. It's not likely his funeral oration will remotely approach Pericles' in content and vision.

Taking a longer-lasting hit was his triumphant exhuberance in gruff political engineering in the coming months. That also will be true of the Republican lawmakers, consumed by their own self-importance, who have left sound logic at the backstage door. Many will be on the ballot in 2112. At the same time, some current øbservers have noted that Kasich had operated on the weird notion that his anti-union handiwork would be so widely applauded that he could end up on the national ticket. Fat chance of that.

Meantime, the demolished Kasich power play has energized a once-musty Democratic labor base that is expected to have long memories. Sometimes it helps if you can depend on your opponents to lend you a hand. The unionists should be among the first to send the governor a thank-you card.

Kasich: From bluster to, eh, humble servant

WHEN JOHN KASICH stormed into the governor's office last January, he wanted to leave no doubt that Ohio was at the dawn of a Brave New World. He had long studied the state and decided it was not good. A swashbuckler to the core, he warned anybody that dared stand in his way that " If you think you're going to stop us, you're crazy. You will not stop us. We will beat you. ...If you are not on the bus, we'll run over you with the bus. And I'm not kidding."

He also described a cop who arrested him on a traffic charge as an "idiot" Bellowing it a couple of more times for Kasich-style emphasis. Oh, and he demanded an apology from teachers unions - calling for a full-page ad - for what they said about him during the campaign.

It was pure performance art by a blustering new kid on the block who was acting as though he had won the job by acclimation rather than a slim plurality. Having spent the previous 7 or 8 years as a managing director of Lehman Brothers - which tanked - Kasich, a Republican, could not dissociate a steely Wall Street can-do no-questions-asked culture from his new role at the top of the state's political heap.

So it is laughable - a giant political miscalculation , really - that what was good for the Wall Streeters and Fox News, where he had his own show that could not be held accountable for facts, that he is now down on his knees calling for a compromise with a lot of folks who challenged his bus. Yes, a compromise with this guy?

Kasich and his cohorts in the legislature, brazenly stuck a dagger into the heart of public unions without expecting a roaring reaction. With all signs pointing to the November repeal of Senate Bill 5 , the law that severely sheared public employe unions, Kasich is now a humble servant, calling for a compromise before the voters get a crack at 1t. Her said he was only being reasonable for the sake of the state's sanity. He also noted that he was influenced by editorials in the Columbus Dispatch and Cleveland Plain Dealer calling for compromise.

Both papers endorsed his candidacy and were quick to give his appeal heavy coverage. Surprise, surprise.

The governor's second miscalculation was to bring up the subject now. The law's opponents, We Are Ohio , have stood fast with 1.2 million signatures on their petitions to repeal the law. There would be no point in giving him a face- saving escape hatch. As Joe Green, the Hall of Famer of the Pittsburgh Steelers, once explained the route to victory:

"When you got your opponent down, you gotta keep him down."

And Mean Joe wasn't kidding either. But with him, it's not boasting if you can do it.