Getting harder in the Trump era to tell the players even with a scorecard

CPT | County GOP votes on endorsements today 

Things are seldom what they seem;

Skim milk masquerades as cream.

— Gilbert & Sullivan​

Cuyahoga County Republican executive and central committee members will gather this afternoon to make their endorsements for the May primary.

The marquee endorsement will come in the governor’s slot, where Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine is expected to handily defeat current Ohio Lt. Governor Mary Taylor.

Last week the Ohio GOP endorsed DeWine by a thumping 59-2 vote. Still, Taylor has refused to concede either quietly or graciously. What’s interesting about this contest is the subtext behind it.

While party insiders all seem to back DeWine, Taylor is working to court Trump voters, and could be in a position to upset DeWine if she succeeds in connecting with the Trump base. She has the nominal backing of term-limited Gov. John Kasich but has done her best to disavow it, because Kasich is anathema not only to that base, but also to many others throughout the party for a host of reasons: Kasich has been a Trump antagonist dating back to 2015, very publicly declining to appear at the 2016 Republican Convention held here in his home state where Trump officially received the GOP Presidential nomination. Kasich’s decision to support Medicaid expansion over the express opposition of many of his own state legislators further alienated him from parts of the GOP.

All of this was backdrop to the ouster of Kasich ally Matt Borges from the chair of the Ohio GOP by Jane Timken early last year, with the support of the President. Kasich forces, we hear, now think they have a chance to retake control of the state party, which could be significant if Kasich does indeed mount a 2020 primary challenge against Trump.

But any chance for Kasich people — dare we call them GOP moderates? — to regain state party control would go out the window if Taylor becomes the state standard bearer this year. So one might conclude that even though Kasich has endorsed Taylor almost against her will, he would prefer to see her defeated by DeWine.

The battle for the GOP nomination for the right to challenge US Senator Sherrod Brown this fall also has national implications for the GOP. Both Congressman Jim Renacci, R-16 of Wadsworth and Cleveland businessman Mike Gibbons are, like Taylor, touting their Trump bona fides. Renacci is claiming that the President encouraged him to switch from the governor’s race to the senate battle following the sudden and unexpected withdrawal of frontrunner and state treasurer Josh Mandel. But he may actually be US Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s preference instead of Trump’s because he is likely to be far less of a maverick than Gibbon.

The takeaway from all this may be that the Ohio GOP is much less united at the top than the state’s Democrats in this election cycle. But we are a long way from seeing how that might translate in November. 

Meanwhile, at least one Democratic gubernatorial candidate, former Cleveland mayor and Congressman Dennis Kucinich, believes he has a real shot to capture some 2016 Trump voters. He’s probably right, but in the today’s topsy-turvy political climate, the populist Kucinich was just endorsed this past week by the Cuyahoga County Progressive Caucus. That may have been largely a hometown boy vote, but it nonetheless points out the increasing inadequacy of labels as a guide to who stands where for whom and what.

Stepping Up Inside the Ohio Democratic Party

A New Day in Ohio Democratic Politics

Young black voices make themselves heard at candidate forum

COLUMBUS — When you see something for the first time you can be hard pressed to find the words to describe it, especially if it's unclear whether what you’re watching is a one-off event or the harbinger of a new day. So we won’t say what happened this past Saturday in the heart of a Columbus ghetto was akin to the appearance of the black monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s epic film, 2001 — A Space Odyssey.

Chadd Smith, president of Central Ohio Young Black Democrats, with
OYBD media liaison Jewell Porter: "Black Votes Matter!"

But the presence of every major Democratic candidate for statewide executive office at a forum conceived, sponsored, and well-executed by a developing network of young black activists certainly seemed to augur a new reality in Ohio Democratic Party politics, where voters could see — up close and personal — candidates for statewide office being x-rayed by a cadre of smart, savvy, tough, organized young African Americans who wanted more than just direct answers to their prepared policy questions.[1]

The Ohio Young Black Democrats also wanted to send a message: Black Votes Matter.

The Setting

The tone for the day was set by Chadd Smith, president of the Central Ohio YBD chapter. He made clear that the intent of the “Black Votes Matter” program was “to show the power of the black vote both to the black community AND to the mainstream”. He said OYBD wants to engage black voters early in this year’s election cycle and had a three-fold strategy to do so that involved targeted precincts, holding events around the state, and voter registration.

One of the goals of the OYBD campaign, he said, was to counter misconceptions about the voting process, including the one that formerly incarcerated citizens are ineligible to vote.

The candidate forum and brunch at the Northern Light branch of the Columbus Metropolitan Library was sold out in advance. At $5 apiece the tickets were scooped up by an interracial and intergenerational audience comprising a mix of sophisticated politicos and the civically curious.  The majority of attendees were black, but a healthy number were loyal white Democrats, present because they understood that the electoral victories they seek in November require the support of an engaged black community no longer content to have its concerns relegated to the policy sidelines.

The setting and the moderators combined to produce an atmosphere that prompted true engagement and discouraged pandering. The audience included at least one recently naturalized American citizen concerned that single language ballots in his community did not speak to his many neighbors whose first language was Nepali.

Esosa Osa is chief of staff for the Congressional
campaign of Ken Harbaugh, running in Ohio District 7

Most candidates arrived early enough to network with the audience. A few, including apparent crowd favorites Rich Cordray, running for Governor, and state treasurer candidate Rob Richardson, arrived in just-in-time fashion.

House Minority Leader Joe Schiavoni, also running for governor, brought his entire family from Youngstown for the day, in addition to his running mate, Stephanie Dodd of Buckeye Lake in Licking County.

Northeast Ohio was well represented on both sides of the mike. Cleveland’s Dennis Kucinich was there with his running mate, Akron councilwoman Tara Samples. William O’Neill, also running for governor, was joined by his running mate, Chantelle Lewis and his scheduler, Mansell Baker, both former East Cleveland city council members.

The Team

Dontavius Jarrells, a graduate of Cleveland East Tech HS and Hiram College, currently serves as president of the Ohio Young Black Dems. An early arrival, privileged to observe Jarrells and other group members arrive to set up the event, could not help but note the egalitarian spirit and camaraderie that animated the large team. All egos were pocketed as chairs were set up, food was fetched and arranged, the sound system was installed, the registration table prepared, and last-minute errand runners dispatched. The team even had an operative in place to keep tabs on the GOP spotter who hovered around, along with a knowledgeable media handler. This was a group intent on dotting its “i”s and crossing its “t”s.

Gabrielle Jackson and Antoinette Wilson were among the representatives of the Cleveland YBDs in attendance. Toledo and Cincinnati were also in the house.

Moderating the event were Chenelle Jones and Kyle Strickland. Jones is a

Professor Chenelle Jones and Attorney
Kyle Strickland kept the candidates on their toes.

faculty member at Franklin University with a research interest in criminal justice administration. Strickland, a Columbus native, is a Harvard Law grad attached to the highly regarded Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University.

They kept the discussion on point with strong and direct questions and were not hesitant to follow the occasional evasive answer with a focused challenge or in some instances even a rebuttal.

The "Down-Ballot" Candidates  

The program began with successive one-by-one dialogues with State Rep. Kathleen Clyde, running for Secretary of State; Cleveland lawyer Steve Dettelbach, candidate for Ohio Attorney General; former Congressman Zack Space, running to become State Auditor; and Rob Richardson, candidate for Ohio Treasurer.

State Rep. Kathleen Clyde, running for Secretary of State,
thinks Ohio should protect its voting equipment against cyber attack.

Each candidate had a few minutes to offer an opening personal sketch and to close with a pitch for support. In between they addressed questions from the moderators and the audience about their policy positions on issues relevant to the offices they seek. Clyde for instance, talked about automatic voter registration, GOP voter purging, and antiquated voting equipment vulnerable to cyber attack.

AG hopeful Steve Dettelbach answers
a question from the audience

Attorney General hopeful Steve Dettelbach emphasized the need to have one set of rules that apply to everybody. He singled out gerrymandering, payday lending, and the charter school industry as areas where special interests were served to the public’s detriment. He said consumer protection, doing a better job combatting the opioid crisis, and being smart on fighting crime would be among his priorities in office.

Former US Congressman Zack Space
is running to be Ohio's next Auditor

Auditor candidate Zack Space cited his Appalachian roots and talked about the communities he said had been forgotten by the political process. He said he would be a watchdog of taxpayer funds, and a fierce foe of partisan gerrymandering. He said he would fight to maximize the number of competitive voting districts. He also vowed to focus on the JobsOhio, the Kasich program that takes public tax dollars and converts them to an inscrutable private enterprise.

Asked what he had done to show that he was “not just here to pander to the African American vote”, Space talked about his middle-class upbringing and how he had volunteered in soup kitchens to learn about issues of poverty. He said that taught him to see people impacted by an unjust economy subject to rules they did not create and that aspirations to social, racial and economic justice were dependent upon political justice.

Rob Richardson of Cincinnati is
looking to become Ohio Treasurer

Rob Richardson talked about his leadership at the University of Cincinnati, where he founded the student chapter of the NAACP and later became the chair of the school’s board of trustees. He said that notwithstanding that his eight colleagues on the board were all Republicans, he nevertheless forged a consensus that effectively addressed the university’s positive response to issues of campus police misconduct, and fired the police chief. He said that he would use the platform of the Treasurer’s office to fight for people.

The state offices sought by the candidates discussed above are often referred to as down-ballot races because contests for those offices appear below the gubernatorial choices on the ballot. Too often voters —perhaps feeling overwhelmed by a tumultuous mix of attention deficit, information overload, and unfamiliarity with candidates and issues in these non-marquee races — will skip these important ballot choices or vote the straight party ticket they prefer. The consequences of their actions or lack thereof are often felt literally right where they live, in the measure of social, economic and political justice their neighborhoods receive.

Candidates for Governor

Following a short brunch break, the forum moved on to a lively exchange among the four candidates for governor.

Candidate O’Neill firmly planted his campaign flag on the issue of legalizing

Former Ohio Justice Bill O'Neill thinks Ohio should
legalize marijuana today, tax it and use the proceeds to
combat the opioid crisis and help the mentally ill.

marijuana. He wants to legalize it immediately, tax it at once to raise $500 million annually and combine those proceeds with a projected savings of another $100 million in annual savings realized from the release of an estimated 4,700 mentally ill people inappropriately locked in prison. He would use the $600 million to address the state’s mental health and opioid crises.

Dennis Kucinich inveighed strongly against “government taking our wealth and accelerating it to the top” with misdirected and inequitable policies. He vowed to stop private charter schools, crush fracking companies, and resolve the state’s burgeoning housing crisis with new construction. He mixed his policy prescriptions with several references to his running mate that came across as unsubtle reminders that she was African American. In response to a question put to each candidate about diversity and inclusion about their campaign organizations, Kucinich said, “I come from communities of color” and that during his time as Cleveland mayor [1977-78] half of his top appointments came from the black community.

Answering the same question, Rich Cordray listed Ben Espy among his campaign co-chairs, referenced his senior strategist and scheduler as people of color, and announced that he had just brought on Nelson Devezin as his political director.

To his credit, Cordray didn’t brag about the Devezin appointment, but it may

Nelson Devezin is political director
of the Cordray gubernatorial campaign.

be historic: no political observer with whom we spoke could identify a previous instance where a black man had been entrusted with running a major gubernatorial campaign. [We have reached out to Devezin, a native Clevelander, and hope to bring you a report on him soon. For now we note that he is the son of former Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Lillian Greene and was the state party political director until he resigned late last year to become public affairs director for the Franklin County recorder.]

Ohio House Minority Leader Joe Schiavoni

Joe Schiavoni attempted to score points during his presentation by emphasizing his work holding down the fort against Republicans in the General Assembly while Cordray was off in Washington and O’Neill was on the bench and Kucinich was on Fox News. He backed up in the face of subsequent retorts from his rivals.

Former US Congressman and
Cleveland  mayor Dennis Kucinich

The candidates were in agreement on the need to address disparities in our criminal justice system. Kucinich and O’Neill were vocal in their opposition to the death penalty.  Cordray talked about how “we’ve been warehousing people”. But the fireworks erupted around twin peaks of social injustice: race and sex. These issues were encapsulated in the discussion around Scott Kaepernick and other NFL ball players kneeling in protest during the national anthem and O’Neill’s bafflingly ill-conceived attempt to defend then-U.S. Sen. Al Franken against calls for his resignation over the latter’s repeated sexually predatory behavior.

O’Neill was somewhat apologetic for his Facebook post in which he boasted of having bedded upwards of fifty women, and did so in a way that allowed two of the women to be identified. He attempted to diminish his post by calling them “silly words.”

Rich Cordray, right, with Stacie Bryant
following the OYBD forum

But Cordray would have none of it. He told O’Neill his words were intentional and said that “words matter,” referencing how the current President’s words regularly cause confusion and hurt, whether  used intentionally or carelessly.

The tension between O’Neill and Cordray was also stark when the NFL protests were discussed. O’Neill said he was an Vietnam Veteran with a bronze star and that “I will not be at an event where people disrespect the flag.”

O’Neill’s comment was not well received by most in the audience, probably because they considered the notion of “disrespect” to be a red herring, meant to deflect attention from the very issues the players were calling attention to, namely, the unrestrained overuse of deadly force by police across the country.

Cordray caught the mood of the audience in his reply, which united both his view of the protest and his reply about “silly words” noted above. He said that while protest at first seems to divide us, “ultimately protest unites us”. He said that protest was about respecting other people and wanting to engage with them. It was during his response that the audience appeared most animated, the women old and young nodding heads and the occasional injunction to “Preach!” being heard.

The Takeaways

The flawless manner in which the Ohio Young Black Democrats and their constituent area chapters pulled off their maiden event makes them the clear winner in terms of outcome. As Rowena Jelliffe, the co-founder of Karamu House once observed after a similarly impressive debut by a now-forgotten organization of young people, “The trick is to do it again. And again.”

We would also register mild surprise that media coverage of this event seemed limited to one local Columbus TV station and the Columbus Dispatch, whose account is here.

One might have thought that more of the state’s major metropolitan dailies, each of which we understand to have a political reporting presence in Columbus, might have been present. Likewise, no local black publication — we think Columbus has three — saw fit to cover this event in its own backyard.

Whether that’s a commentary on the candidates, the sponsor, the venue or the times, it made us especially pleased to have been present.

Finally, politicians often find it irresistible to pander to the audience. Our pander meter was plugged in for this event, but stayed pretty much throughout on the low register. We think that's a credit to the audience and the candidates, and the sense on behalf of most of the latter that there would have been little tolerance granted. It certainly made for a more robust and useful conversation.

A quartet of Ohio Young Black Democrats [L-R]:
Chadd Smith, William Washington, Daniel Woodley and Julian Scott

All photos by Daniel Porter, digital director at Ohio Democratic Party

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[1] Lt. Gov. candidate Betty Sutton was the sole absentee, not counting Connie Pillich, who was negotiating her imminent withdrawal from the gubernatorial race. She withdrew yesterday and endorsed Rich Cordray.

CPT | Desperate Times: Dark Money, Gatekeepers and the Public Square, Part I

Cuyahoga Politics Today

Cleveland's Crumbling Political Order

The emergence of "dark money" in this year's mayoral campaign is a harsh but illuminating case study on how the intersection of race, power and privilege in Cleveland retards the region's redevelopment into a first class twenty-first century metropolis.

Ironically, this object lesson of primitive politics is on display front and center this week as Cleveland hosts not one but two national conferences focused on smart cities and intelligent planning for urban communities.

We will have more to say about our national visitors in a companion post, but suffice it to say here that they are some of the brightest minds currently operating on the cutting edge of technology, urban planning and intelligent design. Stepping outside their conference headquarters to experience our downtown vibrancy, the more attuned can hear disturbing echoes from the local corridors of power emanating from our airwaves, unlike the soothing welcomes they are receiving from official local representatives.

Like most big cities, a status Cleveland now holds more in memory, longing and pretense, our direction and pace are largely set by the interplay between our business and civic leaders. In healthy communities, these forces are complementary competitors. Like Howard and Hampton, two of the nation’s best historically black universities, they battle fiercely but enjoy both a mutual respect with the understanding that beyond the struggle on the playing field, they each share a common interest in the other's prosperity and well-being.

More than a century ago, Cleveland was at the national forefront of municipal leadership. We had nearly one million residents within our borders. We had a progressive mayor, Tom Johnson, who left a successful business career to run for public office in service to his community — not just to his class. While Johnson is justly celebrated today for his bold, visionary and courageous leadership — his statue adorns our Public Square — his former business associates at the time vilified him for daring to represent the public interest at the expense of their immediate profits.

Mostly since then, it seems that our business community has made it a cardinal principle to ensure that organic leadership in the public interest would never reemerge. The dominance of that first principle has coincided with Cleveland's steady decline ever since 1930.

Cleveland's population growth was fueled first by middle and Eastern European immigrants who came to toil in the filthy factories, foundries and refineries that forged the area's wealth. The unhealthiness of those sweatshops and the griminess of the teeming masses in their ethnic central city enclaves led people with means to seek greener pastures. Even Millionaires Row did not escape the exodus as wealthy Clevelanders moved outward to create some of the world's first and finest modern suburbs: Shaker Heights, Cleveland Heights, East Cleveland.

In so doing, they had to abandon direct control of city politics. By and large, good government forces refocused on emerging suburban city halls, replaced in Cleveland City Hall by waves of competing ethnic politicians sent downtown from their respective enclaves — Little Italy, Slavic Village, Collinwood, Clark-Fulton, and so forth — to gain public power to improve their neighborhood's and living conditions.

A tacit bargain was struck between the business community and the ethnics. The latter could run the city politically but would not interfere with the city's powerful money making apparatus, which was slowly becoming more corporate, with the attendant development of powerful legal and financial service muscle centers.

Cleveland ethnics developed a unique and powerful "Cosmopolitan" political machine, best exemplified by Frank Lausche, who blazed a trail to stunning success as judge, mayor, governor, and ultimately US Senator. (George Voinovich would follow Lausche's Cosmo path a generation later, but even though he took some of his rough and tumble homies along to ride shotgun, his saddlebags always carried a corporate agenda.)

Black people, eventually to become the area's largest and most indigestible ethnic group, were initially barely a blip on Cleveland's municipal radar. Restricted initially to the city's Central neighborhood, they were only a minor irritant in the civic arena until a modest immigrant from Alabama, John O. Holly, began agitating for equity in 1935. Seemingly overnight he organized 10,000 working class black to support his contention that black lives mattered. Under the banner of “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work”, his Future Outlook League forced dozens of businesses in the central area and then downtown, to begin desegregating their workforces by hiring Negroes.

Holly's intrusion into how the city did business had political overtones and fostered the business community's resort to gatekeepers, respectable black people whose primary chore was to keep their unwashed and rebellious kinfolk under control.

This quasi-colonial system has been in place ever since, with continuous refinements that extend until the present day. Its use was instrumental in the undermining of the opposition to the Q deal, and can now be seen in the ferocious effort to derail the populist challenge to City Hall that threatens to put neighborhood native son Zack Reed from sitting in the mayor's seat.

What Cleveland’s civic leaders continually fail to understand its that its adherence to a post-colonial reliance upon a gatekeeper mentality retards our entire community, keeps us in a defensive stance, limits our attractiveness to immigration from anywhere, makes us wholly ill-equipped to compete for Amazon HQ2, and ultimately undermines our most earnest efforts to enter world class competition even at the middleweight level, notwithstanding our enormous public assets.

We approach today the 50th anniversary of the election of Carl Stokes as mayor. We are right to celebrate that achievement: Cleveland was the FIRST big city in America to elect a black man as mayor.

(Richard Hatcher was elected mayor in Gary, Indiana the same night in November 1967; however, Gary barely registered on the roster of the city’s larger cities, Its 178,000 citizens ranked it #70 in 1960, while Cleveland came in as the nation’s 8th largest city, with a population of 876,000. 

Today, Cleveland has shrunk to a ranking outside the top fifty cities, with a population of about 385,000, placing it below such lustrous venues as Tulsa OK, Arlington TX, Colorado Springs CO, and Mesa AZ.)

The Stokes era at City Hall, 1967-1971, busted open the old order. Black people, confined almost exclusively to the overcrowded neighborhoods of Cedar-Central, Hough, Glenville, and Mt. Pleasant, used their concentrated mass to break down decades of exclusion, and to bring a measure of meritocracy to the public space. The establishment, which had long resisted such a development, embraced it in the wake of Stokes’ near-election in 1965, and in fear of the tumultuous conditions erupting nationwide in places like Newark, Watts, and Detroit.

Those were exhilarating years for black people in Cleveland. Doors were kicked open on every front as black people found new opportunities in employment, housing, and the civic space. There was opposition all along the way, but led by Carl and his brother Lou, who became Ohio’s first black Congressman in 1968, the black community stuck together and persevered.

While the Stokes years at City Hall led to unquestioned improvement in the quality of civic life for all Clevelanders, certain problems, most notably in the justice and public education systems, proved intractable even as significant progress was made in other arenas. Hardcore resistance to public school integration was tolerated and even supported by key elements of the business community, and the promise of the Stokes years quickly waned. And when an ambitious, audacious inner city ethnic westside kid named Dennis Kucinich rode the unrest into City Hall, all hell broke loose.

Kucinich was mayor for only two years, every day of which seemed as tumultuous as what we currently observe in the White House. The business community found George Voinovich, a Cosmo Republican, retook control of City Hall and community politics, and found complicit partners it could control with a multifaceted system of financial controls in the form of salaries, grants, contracts, and other more nefarious fiscal tools.

Today, Frank Jackson sits in City Hall as the embodiment of that system. A good man, conscientious, diligent, he is the virtual embodiment of a political metronome. Super dependable, predictable to a fault, he can be counted upon to support almost every business community initiative, irrespective of its merit or the disproportionate aspects of its benefits and burdens.

Jackson has done a lot of good during his unsurpassed twelve years as mayor, but almost everybody knows and believes the baton should be passed.

And therein lies the problem: the natural stream of selection has been corrupted, choked with pesticides, and clogged, perhaps inadvertently but nonetheless primarily as a direct consequence of the gatekeeper system that restricts access, development and advancement of talent, ambition, and potential in the civic, commercial and cultural spaces that matter in Greater Cleveland.

In tomorrow’s post, we will talk more about the gatekeepers. We’re likely even to name at least a couple of the most obvious ones.

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