Dick Celeste: The true happy warrior

Dick Celeste, the former Ohio governor, breezed into his home state for a few days last week with an itinerary that included endorsing  Democratic Senate  candidate P.G. Sittenfeld.   That bit of political business aside, he called me for a friendly  chat while riding to Cleveland from Columbus.

At 78, he's still engaged in several missions after his nine-year presidency at  Colorado College that ended in 2011. Earlier,  he had been a two-term governor, Peace Corps director, ambassador to India.  (I may have missed six or seven along the way. )

Forever accessible in office as a casual upbeat guy with a broad smile,  wit, and overwhelming formal intelligence, Celeste is now busy in a project to lure the Winter Olympics to Colorado.  "We've raised $50 million of our $80 million goal,"  he says with his always present optimism. With his tireless presence on the team,  I figure they'll reach the goal.

He's also working on  his memoirs that could fill several books  for  his path of successes.  Joe  Hallett, the widely respected Columbus Dispatch political columnist, now retired,  once wrote of Celeste that the Cleveland-born, Yale-educated Rhodes scholar  was "one of the most-accomplished and consequential Ohioans of the past half century".  As one whose job was sustained coverage of Celeste, often like catching a whirlwind, I can easily agree.

Our brief conversation a few days ago, no more than several minutes long, reminded me of how the  state let a person of enormous ability get away. As the University of Akron's troubles continue to grow, I can only speculate how it might have had a happier narrative if the school's managers had somehow convinced him to take the job  back when presidencies  lasted a lot longer than they do now.   He had been a finalist for the president's office at Case Western Reserve in 2002, but the story at the time was that a person with designs on the  job in the Oval Office might just stay a few years before returning  to the political arena.

So he's back in Colorado Springs.   Meantime,  any other highly qualified academic whiz who might have a taste for the top job of a public university as  a Democrat would have a tough time getting past the boards burdened across the state with Republicans.

The University of Akron is no exception.  It's been rebranded with a new name, so to speak, with a president safely sheltered in the mix.  But with so many sparks flying on the  downtown campus today, wouldn't it have been more appropriate  to label UA as "Ohio's Pyrotechnic University" instead of the current techie one?

Sorry, the Celeste Effect is that after a few moments on the phone with him, we are left with regressing into what might been.


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Portman checking with Tea Party on matters of state

Joe Hallett, the Columbus Dispatch's  senior editor and political columnist, has picked up the scent of Sen.Rob Portman's tippy-toed retreat into the grasp of the Tea Party.  In his Sunday column, Hallett, a perceptive guy who isn't always in lockstep with the paper's right-wing brass, wrote that Portman has been checking out his moves  with Chris Littleton, who runs Ohio Rising, a Tea Party outfit.

"I don't  agree with  everything he does," Littleton told Hallett, "but  I'm pleased with his approach to every problem"  Read: When Tea Partyers say nice things about  somebody, he's their guy.

Portman, a Republican  once known as a harmless  right-leaning centrist,  has been drawing  renewed attention since his  bid to be Mitt Romney's  running mate came up empty. (Maybe the Mitties thought he was a tad too dull despite his credentials as a senator from a battleground state. Or maybe they were skittish about his work as George W. Bush's budget director and let's not go into that.)

Since then,  Portman has emerged as anything but the middle-of-the roader that he promised to be when he ran for the Senate.  He has joined the GOP goon squad  filibustering President Obama's nomination of a highly qualified woman - Xenia native Caitlin Halligan - to the appellate court of the District of Columbia because, um...she's a "judicial activist".(When Republicans can't find anything scarier to say about a judicial nominee, they put their pennies  into the machine and out pops "judicial activist".)

Oh, Portman has also walked away from  fellow Ohioan Richard Cordray, opposing Cordray's recess appointment as director of the Consumer Financial Protection  Bureau because he doesn't like the Bureau's consumer mission.

I've written about Portman's developing taste for right-wing issues several times merely to call attention to his dual brand as a moderate and now a Teabagger.  Hallett mentions that  Portman could be shoring up his credits with the Republican wild side to run for president in 2016.   We can hope.

GOP senatorial committee needs a dictionary

WE WERE HAPPY to see the Columbus Dispatch's Joe Hallett set the record straight on the Republican Senatorial Committee's attempt to smear U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown by making one word serve for another. According to Hallett, the RSC found useful a column by a "GOP-friendly conservative" blogger quoting Brown that Congress was a little more "niggardly" on spending money when the veterans came home from the war.

Well, now. Pure racist gold for Brown's Republican opponents, who have been sinking more deeply each day into the muck to portray Brown as something that he isn't. To the blogger's credit, Hallett wrote, the blogger placed the correct non-racial definition at the top of his post. To its discredit, the RSC removed the definition and mass-mailled the blog post to news outlets.

There are two ways to look at this untidy event: The RSC is either trying to advance another myth, or it is too dumb to know what the word means. We like the second choice. But we're not sure.

Kasich/DeWine clash: Back to the Middle Ages

NOW THAT THERE is no post-season bowl hysteria to whip up the Buckeye football fans in Columbus, Republicans have generously - and uncommonly - offered their own blood sport to fill in the void. It's the clash of GOP Titans, namely Gov. Kasich & Co., and Ohio Republican Party Chairman Kevin DeWine. There is a strong medieval flavor to it, as when popes and kings duked it out over who was in charge of the masses.

Clearly, the unlikely power play that violates Republican tradition of never publicly slamming a member of your own party (while blistering each other sotto voce) is an open sore nowadays. A well- connected state Republican conceded on the phone with me the other day: "It's serious. It won't go away soon." Is it ego? I asked. "Exactly," he said, suggesting there were a number of moving parts. It's understandable only if you bring yourself to concede that with Kasich, the top tier of the pecking order is occupied by lobbyists, cronies and old friends.

That's the short version of the party's in-house hostilities that are worrying some of the faithful's bystanders. It will bleed into a busy political year with a presidential election at stake. Indeed, as the Columbus Dispatch's Joe Hallett keenly reported a few days ago, the State GOP's second-in-command has scorched the Kasich forces for splitting the party by openly trying to unseat DeWine. "It's almost become: we have met the enemy, and it is us," said Kay Ayres, state GOP vice chairwoman. Her message to the governor: Lay off this nonsense.

Nice try, but it won't be enough to satisfy the Kasich machine that is driven by lobbyists who are doing quite well with Kasich's aid, thank you. The governor has been joined by his buddy and torpedo, House Speaker Bill Batchelder to wield the axe. Batchelder has accused DeWine of working against the governor's best interests.

Meantime, no less than Kasich claque Alex Arshinkoff, the Summit County GOP chairman, took a strong stand for Batchelder's credentials in the Plain Dealer, offering a brief character sketch of Batchelder. Declaring Batchelder to be a great party leader ( by the way, Arshinkoff never fails to describe his political pals as great) said: "I've never known him to lie." But I digress.

The Columbus political blog Plunderbund offered some insight into the quarrel: "Kasich came into power with a plan: privatize everything in the state and enrich as many of his friends as possible in the process."

That point is hardly debatable. There have been numerous reports the past year of Kasich handing off lucrative contracts through well connected lobbyists to the sort of recipients who would be expected to reciprocate. That's how the governor has done business and continues to do so. On the other hand, DeWine is said to believe that too often state policy is being carried out by the governor's friends.

Lobbyists? Friends? Cronies? Here's one example cited by Plunderbund. Don Thibaut, who was Kasich's chief-0f-staff for two decades when Kasich was in Congress, now operates a lobbying firm, Credo Company with a boast on his "About Us" page "highlighting his very personal and long-term relationship with John Kasich. " So should we be surprised that when the state sold off a prison to a private buyer, the contract went to a Thibaut client?

God knows how much of this is going on. Yet wasn't it John Kasich, upon entering the governor's office, who warned lobbyists that he would not put up with them in the bright new era of progressive governing? Sure he did. And like Batchelder, he never lies.

Rhodes vs. Kasich: A case of Identity theft

THE HEADLINE above a column on the Beacon Journal's op-ed page Tuesday asserted:

John Kasich is no Jim Rhodes.

I should say not! The column was by Joe Hallett, the perceptive senior editor of the Columbus Dispatch, and it spoke of the many ways that these two politicians differed in approaching Ohio's problems, in their views of the Feds, how they were to pay for the fixes, and the wide gap in temperament. Why the comparison at this time? Well, as Hallett notes, Kasich is now reporting that the voters see him as the reincarnation of Rhodes. "We welcome that," Kasich boasts.

What a wretched stretch. So let me add something about their political credentials as one who went at Rhodes chin-to-chin in all four of his terms. Unlike Kasich, Rhodes was no ideologue. On more than one occasion he declared that he would gladly become a Democrat if it meant that he could pass some of his pet projects. At other times during Jimmy Carter's presidential campaign, Rhodes said he didn't want to criticize the peanut farmer about anything because "Carter might become president and I might need him to help me on some of my programs."

As Hallett points out, Rhodes was a cheerleader for federal programs that would send money to Ohio. Kasich is quite the opposite in his rants to dismantle government, including the Ohio Department of Development that Rhodes created.

And how can Kasich possibly match Rhodes' "Ohio-ness."? He is fresh from Wall Street and was not a household name among most Ohioans before his announced candidacy. He began his political career as an aide of some sort to the late hard-right Ohio congressman, Donald ("Buz") Lukens, one of Rhodes' arch-enemies. After leaving Congress, he spent all of those years apparently closeted (by his description) in a satellite office in Colmubus for the bankrupt Lehman Brothers.

But Rhodes' historic success - I say as one of his detractors at the time - is that he was a dues paying Ohioan who intuitively related to his constituents with down-home humor and self-deprecating comments. Slyly, he never seemed that interested in the political class and pooh-poohed national conventions as a waste of money. To him, the delegates simply could mail in their votes. It was always a disarming style for a man in the governor's office and if pressed by a reporter on a particular issue, he would beg off, saying: " I never yes or no", for whatever the hell that meant. He lived by the credo that "Profit is not a dirty word in Ohio" which always sounded as sincere as the Boy Scout oath.

But he did pay his dues on the political ladder, always conscious about how to reach the next rung. It might have been done in an unorthodox style, but he cleverly got away with it.

Whatever else you might have thought of Jim Rhodes, he was the real thing, often a spectacle but a memorable presence wherever he went, good humored and endearing to his business apostles (and in certain cases, labor union crowd , some of whom wore his pins.) I see none of that in Kasich. If only half of his reckless plans to rip apart state government come to pass, it will take years for the state to recover.