Debates: Mike DeWine,the people's lawyer who isn't there

Re-posted from Plunderbund 

Ever since Atty. Gen. Mike DeWine put on his reelection campaign game face, he's been drifting across the masses like a UFO with the best wishes of a forgiving  press  and a looming Republican year at  the polls.

Now you see him, now you don't.  He prefers to cast his attention to his other interests that gives him a Deep South spiritual coating as a social conservative - nay, as a blessed Medievalist opposed to abortion, same-sex marriage, raising the minimum wage, defending  Hobby Lobby, opposing gun control  and above all, the Affordable Care Act.  On that point, he has long made his rounds outside the state to wherever he could pitch in to help defeat ObamaCare.

Of late, he has taken up the cause of restricting Ohio's new voter system, the one that a right-wing Supreme Court just delayed after two lower federal courts had ruled it unconstitutional. The Supremes would have overruled tfhe lower courts 5-4 anyway  if DeWine had gone fishing.  Or spent a little more time facing his opponent, David Pepper, a Cincinnati Democrat, in at least a debate or two.

Pepper put the debate issue in the right context when he spoke  at the Akron Press Club this week.    As a lawyer himself, Pepper gamely questioned DeWine's  rejection of any debate, including the invitation  from the Cleveland City Club. Some newspapers gently  questioned the UFO's decision, too, but for too many voters,  debates are best left to molecular physicists.

Pepper,  however,  squarely defined DeWine's posture as unbecoming of a guy who must serve  as the people's lawyer and be  never fearful of airing differences with opponents in courts or anywhere else.      "If you're afraid to debate as the attorney general,"  Pepper declared, "something must be  wrong."

Indeed,  it is.  And that should include the many reports of how DeWine has converted his office into a pay-to-play cash cow, hauling in campaign cash from those who stand to sweeten their own pots in return.   In one recent exposed case, DeWine replaced a company that had ably served several  different governors in debt collections, giving the lucrative contract to a pal of Summit County Republican Chairman Alex Arshinkoff, despite the recipient's admission that he had little experience in that line of work. (Over the years, Alex has smelled money like a shark  attracted to blood. He was once on DeWine's payroll as the AG's liaison in northern Ohio. )

Still there is strong feeling that Mike DeWine towers so high in ballot strength that he is unbeatable.  That hasn't always been true.  Sen. Sherrod Brown, a liberal Democrat,  no less,  thumped DeWine out of the. U.S. Senate in 2006 with room to spare. (56 pct. landslide.)   On that occasion DeWine had no more than an approval rating in the 30s, putting him just above Rick Santorum as the most unpopular  senator on Capitol Hill.

But DeWine has the ability to hover in politics.  In 2012 he was a Santorum supporter in the presidential.  He then startled the experts with a  mid-campaign switch to Mitt Romney when  it became increasingly clear that Ol' Rick wouldn't win the Ohio Republican  primary. Call his retreat from Santorum as a "course correction".

Four more years for this mercurial UFO?    You decide.

P.S. Pepper did speak to the Cleveland City Club luncheon this week, sans DeWine.

By George, Sherrod Brown an authentic lefty?

 When we spotted a headline on the Beacon Journal's op-ed page that said "Sherrod Brown,  authentic progressive," it appeared to be an accurate  reference to the authentic  Ohio Democratic senator.  So imagine my shock when the columnist was George Will.  Was he really paying homage to the guy that he described as  a "leftist"?

No dear reader, he wasn't. Instead he cleverly  used Brown, as  "rumpled"  and "hoarse" as he may be,  as a wedge to get at his real target: um, gender-crazy Democratic activists who are clamoring to nominate Hillary Clinton or Elizabeth Warren in 2016.

( I will dispense with professional courtesy at  this point and refer to the sniffy conservative columnist only as George because any sentence beginning with his surname  sounds ungrammatical, as in "Will wrote..." or "Will asserted...")

From a point early in his gender diatribe, George  slams both women as phony or theatrical leftists and offers up Brown as the "authentic progressive" to fill in the blank at the top of a hypothetical Democratic ticket.

Oh, the subject has come up more than once.  Brown  deflected an  insistent question from MSNBC's Chris Matthews, saying he is "quite happy where I am but, thank you".   And to the Huffington Post he said: "I have no interest.  I mean zero interest.  I love what I do.  I think if you want to be a really good senator you shouldn't   be looking over your shoulder and running for president. Zero interest.  I appreciate the question but no thanks."

Nothing, of course, is ever final in politics, particularly in George's  tantrums against female lefties.   And Brown's intense fund-raising efforts for Democratic candidates across the land does cast him as an authentic team  that more than a few  of his colleagues will remember down the road.

But George has a widening reputation for his erring punditry.  Item:  Romney would win in a landslide!    So George's readers might conclude that Brown is in fact  an authentic  crypto-right winger.  In this instance, however, we'll stick with the headline. Thanks anyway,George.

Christie: High praise for Obama's efforts in critical times

While New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was praising President Obama's intense engagement  in  the post-Sandy devastation of Christie's state,  Mitt was doing photo-ops in Ohio on a day when he said he wouldn't be campaigning at all.  Christie emphatically described Obama's  quick action  to expedite FEMA's assistance as ''outstanding" and said he didn't care  if such  praise violated party loyalties in the presidential race.

Meantime, Romney was more circumspect about  FEMA, the agency that he has long dismissed as a drag on the federal budget,  having once said that critical disaster work could best be handled by the private sector!   He didn't say  how that would be fail-safe but it is a clue to his secret plan to end the deficit.   Does that make you feel more secure these days if your town is hit by another disaster with him in the Oval Office?

On Tuesday,  trapped by his past feeble notions, he ignored  all questions from reporters on  whether he  now felt that FEMA was necessary for the nation's domestic emergencies.  It was just Mitt being Mitt when he faces an unpleasant situation that can't be solved by metrics and IPOs.

Having watched this guy since the start of the primaries, I've concluded that his campaign is much like the Seinfeld series:  It's a campaign about nothing.

That being the case, the narrative must find a way to gain traction with lies.  Not that he nor his supporting cast worry much  that it all reflects on Romney's incurable waffling and dishonesty.   Indeed, any challenge to his plot devices is merely cause to repeat them.  When top Chrysler executives criticized his fictional  Jeeps-to-China  TV ads,  the trash talk continued to turn up on TV and radio, especially in the Toledo area where the auto industry has heavy impact  on the economy.

* * * * *

Poor John McCain.  He grows more erratic by the hour.  There he was in Ohio with Josh Mandel at his side - ya know, the old soldier and his young aide-de-camp -  asserting on TV that Obama was  "unqualified" to be America's commander-in-chief.  The only thing I  can figure is that McCain  is bored and needs to hug up to Romney for a possible appointment to Team Romney if Mitt lands  in the White House. I think he might be holding a pair of sixes against a full house.

* * * * *

The Columbus Dispatch today endorsed Sherrod Brown over Josh - the second conservative Republican paper forced to concede  the wide gulf that separates the two candidates.The other paper: The Cincinnati Enquirer.

* * * * *

My column on the Romney campaign's lies about Obama and the auto industry is posted on Plunderbund.

Youngstown Vindicator offers words to Mandel

Today's recommended viewing of another Josh Mandel gem:

It's the film clip of Mandel's interview by the Youngstown Vindicator that is posted on-line by Daily Kos.    During a testy discussion of the auto bailout, which Mandel opposes, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate snapped at the paper's editorialists, "Please, sir, don't put words in my mouth." To which the editor replied:  "Somebody's gotta put words in your mouth because all you do is talk in circles."

It's also newsworthy that when a conservative newspaper like the Cincinnati Enquirer endorses  a liberal Democrat like U.S.Sen. Sherrod Brown over Mandel, the enthusaism for Mandel's candidacy continues to take a beating -  if ever there were any enthusiasm in the first place other than the right-wing high rollers who have put nearly $20 million into the Whiz Kid's campaign.

Brown-Mandel debate: Josh just being Josh

Having just watched the final debate  between Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown and Republican challenger Josh Mandel,   there are a  few points that I want to get off my chest:

Mandel's repeated pledges (including the one he signed for mega-lobbyist Grover-Norquist)  that he would never raise taxes cherry-picked the old Republican theme that there are other ways to pay for the things that  Americans want, eliminate the deficit and sustain a healthy society. (On this score, we learned more about his grandparents and parents than we did on how he would replace the tax loss).
 
His cadence and mechanical gestures were stylistically perfect, indicating that he was still young enough at 35 to remember his lines for a class play without a flaw. My notes asked, Is this fellow the young Mitt Romney?

He stressed his opposition to the auto bailout without once acknowledging the huge number of jobs that it saved.

He also added a new spin, that polls show him to be one percentage point ahead (The latest average of several polls show Brown more than 4 points ahead.)

Finally, he enthusiastically talked of his future as a "bipartisan" problem solver in the Senate.

On that point, history is not on his side.    Most of his talking points are  clearly on the hard Right, as are the super-rich wealthy right-wing contributors who have dumped upward of $20 million into his campaign.  An important condition that he has yet to learn if he ever reaches the Senate floor is in the book of Ancient Political Realities :

                            You must dance with the  people who brung you there

The Koch way of doing anti-environmental business brothers

The billionaire Koch Brothers have decided to flood  the   narrative of the  hysterical  campaign  against Sen. Sherrod Brown with a burst of anti-environmental crap onto the streets and into voters homes.  This  photo from a reader  shows three separate arrivals into a single home.  While walking in the neighborhood this afternoon I found another piece tossing about in the grass.  All of the pieces were paid for by Americans for Prosperity,  the royally financed propaganda machine founded by the Kochs.

The Kochs sit at the top of Koch Industries, a mammoth multi-purpose enterprise, which explains their  fierce animosity toward the Environmental Protection Agency, climate change and anything else that threatens to cost them a buck or two from liberal politicians like Sherrod Brown. On the other hand, they are friendly to Brown's Republican opponent Josh Mandel, who also believes, among other nonsensical things, that climate change is a hoax.  And that greater coal production is the wave of the energy future for a healthy economy.

There are times when I hear Mandel's utterances that I have to believe they came directly from the Koch's office suite.

So the voters will have to decide  whether they consider Kochs' mailers are  from people concerned solely with their welfare, or whether  we should avoid returning to the days of  Elizabethan England when the air could be inhaled with a spoon.

With pants on fire, Mandel cries "Liar"

How do you  define insolence, chutzpah, impudence, effrontery, audacity et al?  The defining moment for Josh Mandel, the Republican senate candidate,  arrived in Columbus Thursday night when he called Sen. Sherrod Brown, his Democratic debate opponent, a "liar".

He said WHAT?  

Given Josh's well-deserved fact-checked reputation of being the GOP's Liar-in-Chief in this Ohio race, wouldn't you think that the Whiz Kid would sort of avoid the liar thing in his assault on Brown?  (He's  burned more pants than any candidate I can recall in a half-century.)  No sense reminding people, me included, of the shamefully superficial way he has evolved in this campaign.

The facts are simply this:  he is a commodity on the open market for big-time contributors who have spent $19 million  to oust the incumbent, whether they are laying up the cash for Mandel or, if it so served their  main objective,  Honey Boo Boo.

His ad hoc financiers include the usual suspects on the Dollared Right:  The American Petroleum Institute, U.S.Chamber  of Commerce, Ohio Right to Life, Karl Rove, Koch Brothers,  Sheldon Adelson, Republican Jewish Coalition.  The consequences are scary. But without these groups adding a pre-paid vote to the Senate, Josh Mandel and his lean-and-hungry look would be a mere blip on the radar screen.

Or as Ben Bradlee, the Washington Post's former executive editor, liked to say about inconsequential people,  "When the history of this day is written, you won't be in it."  And that's no lie.

Mandel tells it like it ain't at City Club debate

As I watched and listened (via electronic media)  to the Cleveland City Club debate between Sen. Sherrod Brown and his Republican challenger, Josh Mandel, I could only sigh that Josh was doing it again.  His  self-burnishing  moment arrived when he, as occurs  so often when he speaks,  wanted the audience  to know that he so loved the country that he volunteered to join the Marines to protect his homeland.  Or, as he put it, to say "thank you" for what America has done for his family.

He hasn't yet given us specific details of what he did while working in the protected Green Zone, and there is no reason to bring it up except he has cast himself as Sgt. York.  Or maybe Col. John Glenn.

His grandiose view of his patriotism didn't occur overnight. I would suggest that back in his teens (he's now 35) he realized that he had to radiate toughness in his anticipated political career,  given his boyish looks and schoolyard high-pitched sound. The Marines served his personal needs.

On Monday, he offered nothing new, but the speech was so constructed that I believe  he has been prepping for it since high school. After all, he is still a  whiz kid of a young man who has held four different political jobs in his quest to be well prepared for his next brattish leap into greatness.

Although I find nothing corrosive about being a liberal, particularly  after a "compassionate conservative"    like George Bush left behind such a mess when he went back to his vast acreage in Texas,   Josh accused Brown of being a do-nothing ultra liberal senator  who wants to blame everyone else.   No sense, I believe, in going over much of his  debate terrain from promising  to lower taxes "across the board"to opposing the auto bailout.  He even signed Grover Norquist's pledge not to raise taxes - Norquist, for God's sake, the  Gulliver lobbyist who rules over the Republican Party.  At times, his remarks were downright foolish.   I mean, here was Josh calling Brown a liar for reneging on his past promise to limit his political career.

Josh, indeed.  He hardly locates his new office's bathroom before he prepares for another job - including the current one in which he had promised  to serve for a full term.

But as he was asked by a Muslim in the audience why he chose to negatively characterize a former opponent as a Muslim,  (which, by the way he wasn't except  that he was dark-skinned) Josh could cnly ramble about why he wanted to stop radical Muslims from brutally harming their women.

Folks, the  Republicans allowed with open arms this foolish candidate to happen, so it's their problem now.  There was a time when they could boast of senators  Bill Saxbe, George Voinovich, and two Tafts who were family to the latest Bob Taft.   Not that I could always agree with them.   But Josh Mandel vanishes in their senatorial presence.

Frankly, Josh, I don't think you prepped nearly enough over the years for this job.  At your age, you still have plenty of time to prep for another one.  And  as an avowed advocate of the middle class, where would you be today without the $20 million from  the big right-wing oil, energy  and corporate power brokers?  If you should win,  they'll be expecting a huge return on their investment, don't you think?   Finally, Josh, for the big dollars, you da man!

Mitt spins health care; Josh visits us with robo-calls

When Mitt Romney dismissed the problems of those without health insurance by saying they can always call an ambulance to take them to an emergency room, it made  one wonder how far he has strayed from the struggles common to many Americans.

We got more evidence of that hollowness from his remarks to the Columbus Dispatch that people don't die from a lack of health insurance.  Would that this be true.  Indeed, as Talking Points Memo has noted, there have been several authoritative  studies that debunk Romney's cold-turkey opinion.

Let me refer to the 2009 study by the Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance that said as many as 44,789 Americans die each year because they have no health insurance.  Furthermore, it  reported, "that alternative measures of access to medical care for the uninsured, such as community health centers, do not provide the protection of private health insurance."

Other studies have turned up similar results.

So, folks, I must ask: Will it take an emetic to find out where Mitt is getting his information these days?

* * * * *

Josh Mandel's field hands have now robo-called my home to complain about  Sen. Sherrod Brown's'  disposition to be less than thrilled by Josh's oft-repeated boots-on-the-ground tales of his tours in Iraq.    I would have been more tolerant if  Josh would simply tell us what he was doing all of that time in the Green Zone, a story commonly making the rounds today.   How about it, Josh?  Want to tell us?

To Josh Mandel: Have you no decency, sir?

In case you are the curious type, my official one-person poll of the guy who works at my computer has elevated Josh Mandel to the title of Greatest  Liar on the Ohio Ballot.  (GLOB)  He worked hard to get  there with $19 million in out-of-state donations from people who couldn't care less about average Ohioans.  He's merely the convenient front man for the one per centers who want to rid the Senate of Sherrod Brown.

For awhile, Josh was running neck and neck with other Republicans like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan for the GLOB title,  but as PolitiFact/Ohio  reminded me  in the Plain Dealer today,  Mandel's political ads accusing Brown of missing more than 350 official votes is pulled out of la-la land, although the official record shows Brown has missed only 21 in his entire first-term Senate career. When Brown was in Congress, he missed 83 votes during a hospital  stay after an  auto accident.  He's missed 3 in the past 3 years.

Still , the fact checkers note that Mandel accuses the incumbent  of "living by different rules than us".  I can't argue with that.  Brown has an honest and open accounting of his work as a senator - while Josh  doesn't hesitate to lie about it. They do play by different rules.  Which leads me to ask, How desperate must this Whiz Kid  be to run such  TV garbage like this? Very desperate, I'd say, even with a $19 million war chest.

Mandel campaigning in light of full moon

At first glance, I once thought that Josh Mandel was simply  careless about his words and actions because so little of either made much sense.  But as the whiz kid's  campaign against Sen. Sherrod Brown  becomes more visible, I''m now convinced that his  every move as a walk-on to the political stage is calculated with steaming caldrons by the light of a full moon.

The latest example - and there have been many - is his moronic charge that Brown is "un-American" - something Joe McCarthy would have said long before Mandel was born.  And we all know what happened to Tailgunner Joe, whose name is now an eponym for the worst in political assassination.  Will Josh be remembered  from the ashes of his ruthless campaign as  Mandelism?  Give him time,  He's only 34.

His disloyalty charge against Brown was reported by the Columbus Dispatch  in a piece following  a Brown-Mandel sitdown with editors and reporters. He based his troubled remark on Brown's support of the auto industry bailout.  The story reported that Josh never answered directly when he was asked what he would have done differently than Brown on the loans that saved the auto industry and thousands of jobs. His calculated accusation against Brown was so locked into his psyche that he couldn't come up with a reasonable alternative  other than to mention "regulations,  energy production and the U.S. Tax Code," the paper said. Strictly GOP boilerplate.

Josh, please.  You are the Republican/Tea Party nominee for the U.S.Senate.  You are running in Ohio.  Auto industry recovery of jobs is even making Governor Kasich  look better (though he didn't
 have a damn thing to do with it).

Tone it down, Josh.  Check Brown's birth certificate.  Find out whether he's  ever been to California.
Ask him whether he's ever skinny-dipped in the Sea of Galilee.  And why he's never sent a Christmas card to Netanyahu.  Show some...um...gravitas, for God's sake.  Many of us won't vote for you but maybe when you run for president someday a few  people will forget your  un-American crap that you laid before the Dispatch people.

Mandel's $$$ buddies: Jot down the Koch Brothers

We happened to catch a TV political attack ad on Sen. Sherrod Brown, not a  rare intrusion into my program viewing these days.   It was sponsored by American Commitment, one of those shadowy players  whose name means so little to so many folks beyond the Potomac.  What made this more interesting than the others, I discovered with a few minutes research, is its president, a guy named Phil Kerpen (pictured).  He's listed on the web  as a columnist on Fox News Opinion, chairman of the Internet Freedom Coalition and a former vice president of policy for Americans for Prosperity.

In other words, he's a lobbyist for generic conservative groups whose names normally promote starry patriotic  themes like freedom, (from taxes) liberty (from taxes)  and...American Commitment (to unseat Democrats who stand in the way of lowering taxes, fatter profits,  and deregulation.)

You could go on and on about the things that keep these folks up at night, but the one group that stands out in Kerpen's resume is Americans for  Prosperity.

That's the mega-funded juggernaut founded by David Koch, a billionaire who wants to rearrange  American life to suit his own rich stake in the land .  He and his brother are doing so by laying up tons of cash in House and Senate races, including Ohio's.  You might wonder what a man of Koch's vast wealth is doing birthing  organizations with prosperity in the title since he already has more dough than he needs to buy his own country.

But the intersection of Kerpen, Americans Commitment, Americans for Prosperity and the Kochs is a sweet deal for Brown's whizzy  Republican opponent, Josh Mandel, who doesn't appear in the ad but you can bet the Statue of Liberty that Josh is well aware of it every waking moment of his day.

So factor into Mandel the name of David Koch, one of seveal of Josh's silent partners.

And so far, it hasn't worked despite the millions that the Mandel campaign is spending on attack ads.  A late Quinnipiac poll  has  Brown about 11 pts. ahead  with Josh settled in at 36.6 pct..

PD's Senate race headlines leave us guessing

IF YOU  HAPPENED to see the Sunday Plain Dealer's letters page you might have  noticed the big headline that needed translation:

 Mandel may sling some mud,  but some of it deserves to stick

Oh? Stick to whom?  Josh Mandel? Or his  opponent, a "deserving" Sen. Sherrod Brown?  Brown  would be a  good guess.  Even the sole italicized  quotation under the heading was drawn from an anti-Brown letter.    (The  eight published letters were evenly balanced pro and con, if you got that far.)

The brouhaha was prompted by an earlier PD editorial  taking issue with Mandel's revival of a generation-old issue that Brown assaulted his former wife - now friendly and raising money for his campaign - during a rancorous divorce proceeding.  The story is hardly new, and even was circulated during the liberal Democrat's  successful 2006 challenge of then-Sen. Mike DeWine, who declined to inject it into the narrative of his own campaign. But you should remember that the same Josh Mandel  raised questions about his African-American opponent in 2010 during the race for Ohio Treasurer, suggesting that the guy was a Muslim.  He wasn't, but why should that be a criterion? Mandel won.

Back to the PD:  The critical editorial lost its edge when the writer  concluded that Mandel was "capable of better".   There's no evidence that he can be - or will be - in his catch-as-catch-can rush to Capitol Hill at age 34.   But the ambiguous headline and the italicized quote  weighed against Brown.

The letters rested above another headline over two other letters  near the bottom of the page that read:

Wisdom of Sen. Brown's pollution vote debated

Once again, it certainly appeared to be a Brown negative.

All of this should be put into the context of the state's corporate media (read: Republican) being  less than thrilled by Brown's friendship with organized labor and opposition to exporting America's jobs.   He's been running uphill against the state's editorial writers for years , the last time in his successful challenge to DeWine, which Brown won in a landslide.

The PD seems a tad frustrated that a young right-wing Republican prospect  like Mandel may be forfeiting any claim to credibility by his nastiness, deceptions and callow game plan toward his current opponent when he is "capable of  better."  Hint, Josh. Hint. There are still more than four months to shape up  for editorial endorsements.  Sunday's fuzzy headlines on the PD's  letters page are  another start.










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Romney's gift at making pie shells

There was a picture in today's USA TODAY  of  one of those made-to-order photo-ops of Mitt Romney  on his campaign tour in Michigan. The sleeves of his white  shirt were rolled up to the elbows  to show that By God he was a regular guy among regular guys and gals  invoved in the common labors of the middle class and below.

The caption said the candidate was kneading dough to make a pie shell.  It was a fitting image of the empty shell his campaign has offered so far.  He has dodged the difficult questions, shifting from one position to another , as the moment dictates, spinning them as he would a pizza crust.  Aside from repeating that he would cut  taxes and create jobs,  he has yet to tell us how he would do this while eliminating the deficit.

 As one who occasionally watches TV 's Cake Boss solve impossible problems with imaginative solutions  (and a lot of icing) I would think Romney might  want to add him to the campaign  to offer  ways to fill the shell.  Or is it no more than a shell game?

(P.S. The headline on the story told us:  Romney mum on unions as he woos Mich. What did I just tell you?)

* * * * *

Speaking of newspapers:  The Plain Dealer  today editorially crtiticized Josh Mandel for being
"stuck on the low road."  That's a reference to Mandel & Friends dragging out the ancient published story of how Sen. Sherrod Brown was the source of domestic violence during his rancorous 1986 divorce.  (No matter now that he and his ex-wife have  remained friends and, indeed, she just  hosted a fund raiser for him. )

But Mandel is an incorrigible brat who raised false Muslim issues against his opponent when he ran for Treasurer. As someone once wrote of the Roman historian Livy's questionable accounts of wars, "He had a taste for truth,  but no passion for  it."

So allow me to quibble  with the PD's optimistic assessment of the Whiz Kid, which asserted :

"Mandel is capable of better".

There's no evidence of  "better" in his mad-dash  political career.  Or was the PD, as the corporate media are quite capable of doing these days,  merely trying to soften the blow?

Marines Josh Mandel vs. John Glenn: No contest

Anyone who has been following the quasi-meteoric rise of Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel couldn't escape the fact that  he is an ex-Marine.  And if you didn't know  by now that he is running somewhat as an ex-Marine for the U.S.Senate against Incumbent Democrat Sherrod Brown, Josh will be more than happy to fill you in.   The 34-year-old Whiz Kid has cast a heroic glow on his political life.  As Summit County Republican chairman Alex Arshinkoff once admiringly declared of Mandel,  it took  "balls"' for a Jew to be off fighting in Iraq.

Right. Like Horatius at the bridge!


Mandel's sanctified message is simply that just as he answered his personal call  to duty in Iraq , he will likewise save America from the liberals, beginning with Sen. Brown  and Barack Obama. Casting himelf as a disciiplined soldier and first-tier friend of Israel,  he has succeeded in raising millions of dollars as well as kind words from the Republican Jewish Coalition of Cleveland, which obviously had something to do with his decision to enter the  Senate race.  He has also so pleased the Tea Party that it has solidly claimed him as one of its own with all that this portends regarding health care. The feeling is mutual.

One quickly senses with Mandel that every moment of his life is well planned, from his political birth as a Lyndhurst councilman, to state representative  to Ohio  treasurer in less time that it takes to steal second base.

I've met ambitious young politicians over the years, but none comes to mind with so much campaign cash to destroy his opponent. Or for that matter, enough lies to keep Politifact/Ohio  busy eight days a week.

Now, allow me to go back to another Ohio Marine, Col. John Glenn, a Democrat who landed in the Senate.

In the many years that I reported on his political career, I heard not a word from him about his military life, which included tours as a combat pilot shooting down MIGs. His record as a flying ace  and astronaut could speak for itself without his embellishment.   His advisors often were disappointed that he didn't play on that noteworthy aspect of his life when he ill-advisedly decided to run for  president, a short-lived  venture. Actually he was  too reticent  about his accomplishments to run a national campaign.   He turned down offers to make cameo appearances on sit-coms.  Never made a product endorsement.  Went shopping in Manhattan for shirts while Jimmy Carter was on the verge of naming a veep in 1976 as  Ohio Democrats futilely promoted him for the job. He even turned down a floor rally at the convention by the D's in his  behalf.

This Boy Scout from New Concord, Oh., had a reason: "I've already had more recognition  than I need," he told me.

Once, when I visited his home in Central Ohio, I was astonished to see a smaller version  of the iconic  sculpture of Marines  raising the flag on Iwo Jima.  It was sitting on a wide mantel  in the spacious living room.  It was the sculptor's  model in creating the monumental memorial that now sits just outside Arlington National Cemetery.

"They sent this piece  to me," he said casually, nodding to the model.  "I shouldn't have it, so I'll send it  to the Smithsonian."

Glenn, always the modest hero with a liberal voting record that showed his deep concern for average folks.     So I'll  tell you this much:  I knew John Glenn.   Josh Mandel is no John Glenn.






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Josh Mandel: A dash out the service door

The latest word from the front is a report in the Toledo Blade telllng us that U.S. Senate Candidate Josh Mandel is not keen  on talking shop with reporters.  Not even hello and goodbye.

 How else can we interpret his quick exit through a service door - !!! -when he anticipated  questions about a widely reported snafu in one of his practiced fund-raising efforts. When  we last bore in on  the Republican Whiz Kid's efficacy in raising the staff of political life, he had returned $105, 000 that had arrived via the charitable folks employed by a  Canton donor.

That appears to have occurred only after the FBI became interested in the contributions from  the Suarez Corp. of Canton, whose owner Benjamin Suarez is  always ready pass  on great sums of money to Republicans.   In this instance, one can fairly ask how the checks arrived at Mandel's treasury in equal amounts of $5,000 per employe.

According to the Blade:

"The Mandel campaign declined multiple requests for interviews and failed to respond to written questions for this story.  After a speech in Toledo last Thursday,  Mandel avoided  a Blade reporter and rushed out of the building though a service entrance ."

For Mandel, who happens to be the Ohio Treasurer, something isn't quite right about the evasiveness of a young man who has never hesitated to boast of his service as a Marine in Iraq.  There are things about his repeated leaps to higher political office that aren't quite right for a guy who assures  us that he has the gravitas to replace U.S.Sen. Sherrod Brown,  So far the only  talent he's shown is  his hop-scotching to various fat-cat donors, with some of his financial aid coming from Karl Rove's right-wing multi-million-dollar Crossroads America  fund-raising behemoth.  As we have learned,  Rove and money never sleep.

From heart-felt Americans on the right

The weekly leftovers:

When Mitt Romney   was asked about Rush Limbaugh's reference to Sandra Fluke as a slut, he cagily  responded that it wasn't "the language I would have used"  without telling us what language he would have used. Little did it prepare us for later mystical utterances that mark the candidate . When reporters asked him about the cabal being cooked up in Chicago  by the billionaire owner of the Chicago Cubs that would revive the Rev. Jeremiah Wright issue in the 2008 campaign,  he topped the earlier Limbaugh dust-up. Asked about a comment he made on the Hannity show that the president wanted America to be a "less Christian nation", Romney was prepared for it:

"I'm not familiar, precisely , with exactly what I said, but I stand by what I said, whatever it was."

Pinned on the shelf of my office is one of the classic political responses that I've encountered over the years. It was spoken by George W. Bush, and could be of more use to Romney.  Said Dubya to a nosy reporter:

"I would have to ask the questions...I haven't had a chance to ask the questioners the question they've been questioning." 

But with nearly six months to go, there's still time for Mitt  to build on that.

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I'm beginning to see attack ads on the Internet against Sen.  Sherrod Brown by Dick Armey's FreedomWorks.  No mention of Brown's Republican opponent Josh Mandel in the ads.  But adding the right-wing FreedomWorks to the American Petroleum Institute and U.S.Chamber of Commerce tells me  why Mandel was repeatedly absent from his Ohio duties tending to his fund-raising needs.  His campaign has already spent millions on TV advertising.  For Mandel, right-wing money never sleeps.

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Want a quote that pretty well sums up the dark side of  what is happening in the presidential campaign?  Try this one from Colorado U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman, a Republican:

'I don't know whether Barack Obama was born in the United States of America.  I don't know that.  But I do know this, that in his heart, he's not an American.  He's just not an American."

An odd presumption for a guy who isn't even a cardiologist!

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When e.e. cummings poetically mused about the "sound of one hand clapping," he could very well have envisioned the GOP class when it was announced George W. Bush, the economic wizard who financed the budget-busting Iraq invasion on the cuff,  has written a book on how to build a stronger economy. It won't have the slightest potential to be made into a movie.

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Joe Hallett of the Columbus Dispatch reports that Portage County Republican Chairman Andrew Manning has been interviewed by the FBI regarding Manning's charges that he was asked by Gov. Kasich's headhunters to withdraw from the the GOP  State Central Committee.

Manning accused Summit County Chairman Alex Arshinkoff and his sidekick Bryan Williams  of urging  him to resign in return for having a a stronger calling card in the Kasich Administration.  Manning at the time supported State Chairmaan Kevin DeWine to retain the chair in the bitter ongoing clash with Kasich, who wanted to oust DeWine - which he did.

Hallett says Arshinkoff and Williams have denied offering Manning a deal in a meeting  at Portage Country Club.  Where else?  

For Mandel, silence is golden among students

ONE OF THE STRANGEST lines from this season's Senate race in Ohio was from Republican Josh Mandel during an interview with the Youngstown Vindicator.      Follow this,  if you can:

"We must stop student loan interest rates from rising, but I'm not going to say how.  Also, I don't think kids should talk in the hallway."

We have now witnessed a rare unexplored  issue introduced  in the Mandel's Senate race against Sen. Sherrod Brown.  School corridors befitting the silence of a mountaintop monastery?  Good luck on that, Josh. Talk about non-sequitors!  What does student chatter have to do with student loans?  ( The Vindicator also noted that the whiz kid had earlier come out strongly in favor of requiring students to wear uniforms,  without saying who would pay for them.)

Anyway,  it's good to know that Mandel, the Ohio Treasurer, is out and about these days for reasons other  than to raise money.   People who watch more TV than I do say they have yet to see him on a ad attacking Brown. So far Brown has been carpet bombed by more than $5 million in ads paid for by such progressives as the U.S.Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institiute while Mandel focusses on reminding the public that he is an Iraqi veteran.

At least the bit about chattering students is a welcome, if odd,  change in the subject.    

Arshinkoff's salute to Josh Mandel

Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel, the Republican whiz kid running for the U.S. Senate, has an ebullient supporter in Summit County Republican chairman Alex Arshinkoff these days.   In a phone conversation, Arshinkoff left no doubt that he subscribes to one of Mandel's recurring  campaign themes that he served two tours as an Iraqi war veteran.

Describing the 34-year-old Mandel as a "decent kid",  Arshinkoff took  it to the next level by citing Mandel's courage thusly:

"It takes a set of balls to be Jewish and fight in the Iraq war."

Huh? Right.

No one should dishonor military service.  But how far can he take his stars and stripes in major league politics? Ask Jimmy Carter,  a submarine officer, who was defeated by Ronald Reagan, who never left California during the war.  Or Al Gore and John Kerry, both veterans who lost to a guy who dodged the draft.  And was there a more celebrated military hero than John McCain?  You know the rest.

If you want to talk  about courage, how can a fellow like Mandel face the voters after pledging to serve out a full four-year term as Ohio treasurer only to change his mind shortly after his election to seek the senate seat held by Sen. Sherrod Brown.  It really shouldn't surprise anyone since Mandel has been a habitual candidate for one job or another.

Arshinkoff says Mandel has a "great future".  National ticket in 2016?  Don't be surprised.  Fair warning.

Mandel becoming a PolitiFact regular

IF YOU'VE BEEN following the PolitiFact/Ohio column in the Plain Dealer, you'd have to think that Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel has been consigned to the non-partisan fact-checker as a repeat offender. The whiz kid's latest encounter with the truth was featured Thursday in his confused slam at U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown's stance - his rival in this year's senate race - for impeding an emissions rule to clear the air. PolitiFact's long and complicated research into Mandel's claims also did some air-clearing, thusly:

" It is true that Brown voted against an amendment to strip the EPA of its power to regulate greenhouse gases. But the rest of the claim is inaccurate and invokes issues that don't exist in reality. In fact, were it not for this shred of truth, we might consider the claim for a ruling of Pants on Fire. "

Reality? So far in this campaign, Josh has yet to distinguish between fact and fiction. But he is beginning to be a regular in PolitiFact/Ohio, which will cost him credibility if not a dime of campaign cash to tell people that he's the Republican candidate.

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Did you see that the Center for Health Transformations, the think tank that also operated as the Gingrich Group - yes, that Newt Gingrich - has filed for bankruptcy? The group was best known as a health care consultant, from which Gingrich, who passed himself off as a health care guru, has now divested himself. The New York Times reported that CHT had issued a promissory note of between $5 million and $25 million to McNewt, the figure appearing on his financial statement last year.

Candidate Gingrich, it's time.

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McMitt Romney has found a new love, in addition to Michigan's trees and streets ("They're just right."). Oh, and Detroit's cars. He now says he loves immigrants. "We are not anti-immigrant," he declares. "We are the Party that loves people coming to this country as immigrants."

Allowing them to vote is another matter, we presume.