Debate-less Press Club series for state candidates

Through the combined efforts of the Akron Press Club and the Bliss Institute the  Akron area will get a closer view of some statewide candidates on the November ballot. Democrat State Rep. Connie Pillich, who is challenging Republican Treasurer Josh Mandel,  will open the fall series on Sept. 30.

Unfortunately,  there will be no political debates.  University of Akron political science professor David  Cohen, who does much of the  heavy lifting for the fall series, said the  process of setting up debates has simply become too complicated.

We experienced some of those complications when I served as the Press Club's program chairman.  Republicans simply  aren't keen on meeting  their Democratic opponents  on a debate  panel, particularly in Akron, where more than a few nitwits accused the Club of being a subversive Democratic hideaway.  (As Press Club president, I had at  least four Republicans on my board.) One critic even reported me to the national Veterans of Foreign Wars for catering to socialists!

In one instance,  we had succeeded in lining up a debate between Democrat Capri Cafaro, of Niles, Oh., and then-U.S.Rep, Steve LaTourette, a Lake County Republican.  We  later learned  that LaTourette had canceled his appearance for the age-old standby, a scheduling conflict. So Cafaro had the benefit of the entire program for herself.

The late U.S. Rep. John Seiberling, a towering Democrat who had  nothing to be gained from debates, agreed to more than a half-dozen encounters  with restaurateur, Mark Figitakis,  a Republicsn  running squarely and hyperactively  on the anti-abortion issue.  I covered the first one at the Tangier Restaurant  in which Seiberling calmly, cooly,  and collectively  left the Republican for dead.  (I told Seiberling  afterward that he  could debate as often as he wanted, but this was my first and last  one as a political writer.  He smiled gently and said he enjoyed  fulfilling his obligation to voters to debate, no matter what.)

Akron Mayor, Don Plusquellic, a Democrat , also accepted debate invitations from  the Press Club.   But over on the other side, Summit County Republican Chairman Alex Arshinkoff refused all attempts to haul him up to the debate panel against Republican Kevin Coughlin, who was challenging Arshinkoff for his job. The normally voluble  chairman flatly turned it down.    "I should have known," Coughlin told me.

I should have, too.

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A frustrated LaTourette passes baton to Joyce

When former Ohio Rep. Steve LaTourette  arrived in Akron recently for a luncheon talk sponsored by the Akron Press Club and Bliss Instititute he recounted his frustration with trying to get anything done against the right-wing Tea Party fringe contrrolling the fate of most legislation.

They represent 40  or more House members  who come to the office each day, vote no, and go home praising themselves for a job well done.  It was left to  the memory of Groucho Marx to describe such heinous resistance:   "Whatever it is, I'm against it."

LaTourette faulted the Republican Party for failing to invite minorities, women, gays and others to come aboard. And as a reputed moderate Republican from Lake County, he decided to  give up his seat in 2012 after 18 years in the House.  He is now pacing a group, Main Street Partnership, which is supporting GOP moderates against the sweep of Tea Party insanity.  While a noble cause, it does seem to be an attempt to build a sand castle in a windstorm.

LaTourette has also had nice things to say about his Republican successor, Rep. David Joyce, who is being challenged in the GOP primary.  Here, we have shadings of where moderation ends and the ancient GOP texts arise again.  For example, Joyce has put out campaign ads saying he wants to cut taxes and repeal Obamacare.   And ,of course, he  wants the voters to know that he opposes abortion while favoring family, guns and prayers. the Plain Dealer noted in endorsing him.

The  paper had little choice  against Joyce's Tea Party primary opponent, State Rep. Matt Lynch.  It described  Joyce, the former Geauga County Prosecutor,  as "less combative."

But there's nothing in Joyce's campaign spiel to suggest that he is a...um... moderate..

Eliminate Lynch from the equation, and you still have a garden variety version of a modern Republican conservative that's not likely change much of the resistance movement in Congress.

PolitiFact: Here lies the biggest 2012 lie

Despite his poor showing on Election Day, Mitt Romney has bounced sideways with a national award:  PolitiFact cited him for  spreading the 2012 "lie of the year".  In a business where exaggeration and embellishment are common tools of the trade, Mitt's sin was that he continued to repeat it  even after it was repeatedly shown to be untrue.

In short, he claimed that Chrysler would cost American workers their jobs by moving its Jeep production to China.  PolitiFact described his campaign ads as "brazenly false". So did Chrysler's front office. (An Italian company that has controlling interest in Chrysler said that although China will  start building Jeeps, it would have absolutely no effect on Jeep production in the U.S., which, in fact, is expanding.)

That wasn't good enough for Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, one of Romney's top advisors, who's waving to you in the above photo.  He went on CNN just before the election to defend the political handiwork.  "I thought it was an important ad to run,'" Portman said in an effort to convince Ohio voters that President Obama was destroying  the company in America.

But he added:  "It doesn't mean that we'll have fewer jobs here, because hopefully our market will improve here as well, particularly under Mitt Romney if we get an expanding economy"

While we're at it, Talking Points Memo listed  all of the Republicans on Capitol Hill who have pulled away from the Grover Norquist tax pledge.  There is only  one Ohio Republican , retiring Rep. Steve LaTourette, who originally signed it, then backed off.    Portman remains firmly on the signers list.

Yes, bipartisanship created the Cuyahoga Valley National Park

REP. STEVE LATOURETTE'S decision to not seek reelection was a reminder of an earlier day  when non-partisan cooperation created one of Northern  Ohio's prized public amenities - now called the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.  It's a stretch of pristine beauty reaching border to border from Akron to Cleveland that is drawing more than 3 million visitors each year.

LaTourette indicated he was fed up with the stalemate in Congress,  much of it generated by the arrival of the Tea Party hordes that descended on Capitol Hill from the  2010 elections.But there was a time when good things could come our way from a collegial attempt to serve the public good.  So it was in December 1974 when the federal parkland was set aside by Congress and signed into law by President Ford.

Even then, it was a close call - but it did end on a positive note.(Yes, it can happen!)   The three Northern Ohio congressmen who sought the protected acreage were John Seiberling of Akron, a liberal Democrat, and Ralph Regula, a centrist Republican from Navarre in Stark County.  They got a helping hand from another Democratic representative, Charles Vanik of Cleveland.

But as it began to appear that resistance was growing in Congress that would allow the law to die without Ford's signature, 11th hour calls were exchanged among the congressmen, Sens. Robert A. Taft (R)  and Howard Metzenbaum (D that led to a clinching call from Akron's Ray Bliss , the former Republican chairman,  to Ford, who was vacationing in Vail, Col., over the Christmas holiday.  "Get it done," Bliss told the president, or you'll lose the election in 1976. Pure political pragmatism. the sort of influence that made Bliss a towering figure in his party with a lot of folks except Nixon.

It was a textbook example of how government can work for the common good.  Unfortunately, LaTourette doesn't think it is working now.  And we can understand why.

(For my dissection of the resulting political scramble  from LaTourette's impending departure, you might read my overview column in Plunderbund.com.)

Why am I now grouped with Cleveland voters?

To my despair,  I have learned that my neighborhood in Fairlawn, which is a few minutes away from Akron, is in the Eleventh Congressional District.  That means my vote will be dumped into the new boundaries that include Euclid, East Cleveland, Shaker Heights and  Cleveland. My  congresswoman will be Marcia Fudge, a Democrat,  the former mayor of Warrensville Heights.  I'm sure she is a competent representative.   But I live in Fairlawn, some distance from the bulk of her constituents. Excuse me if as a voter I feel isolated from the crowd.  Excuse me again if I say the Republicans responsible for  butchering the new congressional districts couldn't have cared less about the relationship between the People's House on Capitol Hill and me. Am I not a people?

Did I say People's House?  Defining people has taken some strange turns this political season.  Mitt Romney insisted that corporations are people.  And the   gang in Columbus that isolated my neighborhood in an alien  Cleveland  people zone was greedily at work in  building a still greater GOP force in Congress that already boasts of 12 of the state's 16 congressional seats.
Their math is telling.   May we conclude that three out of four Ohioans are Republicans even though the state went to Barack Obama in 2008?

A little history of this ridiculous scheme:  When I arrived in Summit County more than four decades ago , there was but one congressman,   Bill Ayers, a Republican.  He was ousted by Democrat John Seiberling in 1970.  To no avail, the local Republican front office spent many restless nights trying to figure out how to win back the county.

It didn't get any easier in 1987 when Seiberling retired and turned the seat over to Tom Sawyer, the city's Democratic mayor. After more restless nights,  the local and State GOP decided  the best way to rid the county of Sawyer after 15 years was to carve  up his district, pitting him against Tim Ryan, of Niles, in the Democratic primary.  It was a no-win  challenge to Sawyer with the eastern part of the county dumped into  Ryan-leaning territory.  The county has now evolved into three congressional districts with Fudge, Ryan and Republican Steve LaTourette (a bit of the northern patch  of the county).

It's a mess  from the Master Carvers of Columbus. (There was a moment or two when I thought my neighborhood would end up in Toronto).

Ah. but others have taken note of this villainous handiwork.  Voters First, set up by the League of Women Voters, has filed petitions with the Secretary of State - more than 430,000 signatures - to place a constitutional amendment on the November ballot to create a non-partisan  citizens commission to draw up district boundaries.  I hope it works , but at least I am now assured that there are 430,000 others in this a state who care about fairer representatation as much as I do.


UPDATE: Thanks to a reader, I now can tell you that the goulash called Summit County congressional districts is even more tasteless.  The county actually has four congressmen - four!   I have overlooked Democratic Rep. Betty Sutton, which  ended up with a horribly malformed district  zigzagging south across part of the county  from Lorain to Green.       How did my new district escape Toronto?   I stand corrected.  


UPDATE NO. 2:  A Republican called to inform me that there were four congressmen with bits of Summit County in 1972 when Democrats drew the lines.  The one that escaped me was a single township  assigned to the late  Rep. John Ashbrook.  So I must ask:  Is there anyone out there who can report five?  

On Arshinkoff, Lincoln, socialism and whatever

REPUBLICANS DON'T have to look to Rep. John Boehner, RNC Chairman Michael Steele or Fox News to get their adrenalin flowing this election year. There's some basic fill-in-the-blank name-calling in the invitation sent out by the Summit County Republican Party for its $40-a-plate (and more) Lincoln Day dinner Saturday Night at Quaker Square. Prepared over County Chairman Alex Arshinkoff's signature, the currently fashionable plea to the party faithful is dredged up for the currently fashionable Pavlovian response - anger and more importantly, ready cash. Sigh. Times are tough all over.

In return it is promised to the dinner guests that U.S. Rep. Steve LaTourette, once slotted in the "moderate" column on Capitol Hill, will give a "lively first-hand report on what it's like to serve on the front lines in the fight against Nancy Pelosi and Obama's far-left socialist agenda."

Oh?

Actually, what it has been like on the front lines for all of the GOP congressmen has required very little effort. Just say No, or, if you prefer to be more macho, Hell, no. There has been little evidence that anybody on the Right has given the "far-left socialist agenda" much of its own blood, sweat and tears. Nice work, if you can get it. You even get some weekdays and most week-ends off, as well as great self-mandated health-care coverage.

None of this would have deserved any attention, except that it's just starting. And with the current state ticket bearing hyper-candidates who want to repeal the health care reform law, or eliminate the state income tax, the field of battle into November is looking more like Texas. I mean, will anybody take a breath long enough to find out what socialism is? Or was?

By the way, it wasn't mentioned in the letter, but Nancy Pelosi is the Speaker of the House and Barack Obama is the President. Both, I believe, are Democrats. As George Gobel once said of World War II, it's been in all of the papers.