Turner makes impressive first step on long road to statewide office

The rising star that is Nina Turner’s political career entered a new orbit this morning when the state senator from Cleveland’s eastside stood before an enthusiastic crowd of 200 supporters and officially made the long- expected announcement that she was indeed running for Secretary of State in the 2014 election.

Asserting that “Ohio needs to be the gold standard for elections,” Turner said her opponent, incumbent Secretary of State Jon Husted, was the nation’s best-known Secretary of State because of his partisan efforts to suppress the votes of Ohio citizens over the past two years.

Turner said that “everybody should have fair and equal access to the ballot” and that she would “rumble for righteousness” to produce that status for Ohio voters. By way of contrast, she denounced Husted as the “Secretary of Suppression”.

An impressive collection of elected officials and Democratic Party leaders joined Turner on stage for her announcement, including Congresswoman Marcia Fudge, Cleveland mayor Frank Jackson, State Representative Nickie J. Antonio, D-13, county party chair Stuart Garson, and Chris Redfern, who chairs the Ohio Democratic Party and also serves in the Ohio House. All but Redfern spoke, in perhaps tacit acknowledgement of the state party’s mostly dismal record in support of African Americans who run statewide.

Jackson, whose eloquence generally goes unacknowledged because of his preference for pith to piety, said in introducing Turner that he had observed her career from its beginning, and that she had always been a “fierce advocate” and fervent “fighter” for the causes she believes in.

Turner was well prepared for today’s program. Her unusually smart professional appearance was noted by several of the veteran politicos in attendance.

State Sen. Nina Turner standing with youthful admirers after announcing her candidacy for Ohio Secretary of State. If she wins both a primary and the general election in 2014, she will become the first African American Democrat ever to win a statewide election.

“She has obviously stepped up her game,” said one, while another noted that was one of the benefits of running for statewide office. “Your network of supporters and advisers gets bigger”, he said.

The upfront support from Congresswoman Fudge and Mayor Jackson augur well for the huge local vote Turner will need if she is to become the first African American Democrat ever to win statewide office. Just last year Turner was publicly mulling a primary challenge to Fudge for the Eleventh District seat Fudge has held since 2008. And Turner stood virtually alone against the entire black political establishment in 2009 when she stumped for Issue 6, a reform measure that tossed out Cuyahoga County’s centuries-old system of governance that had rotted under old party leadership.

But today, standing in the Harvard Community Center, just a few blocks from the John F. Kennedy High School she graduated from as a first step to an eventual master’s degree from Cleveland State, and a position on the faculty of Cuyahoga Community College, Turner was surrounded and applauded by almost as many former political foes as longtime friends, including many labor and religious leaders who had sought to preserve the old-time political structures Turner was intent on demolishing.

As the first in her family to attend college, Turner likes to refer to herself as a “cycle-breaker”. If she goes to win the Democratic Party nomination next spring and then defeats the Republican incumbent in November 2014, she will be even more of a cycle-breaker. She will need a broad coalition of support to accomplish her goal. If the smoothness of today’s program and the support of those in attendance, who also included leaders of Cleveland’s feminist and gay communities, and key financial supporters, as well as political leaders from across northeast Ohio are any occasion, she is off to a good start in what will undoubtedly be a long and difficult campaign.

Turner is scheduled to campaign later today in Toledo. She will be in Dayton tomorrow, Columbus on Wednesday, and Youngstown on Thursday, July 4.

Change Coming — Slowly — to Local Democratic Party

Executive Committee members of Cuyahoga County’s Democratic Party are meeting tomorrow morning on Cuyahoga Community College’s Metro Campus to pick a candidate to run this November in an election to complete the unexpired term of the late Judge Peter Sikora.

Since Sikora’s died after this year’s primary elections, Ohio law provides that the party may select a candidate to run in the next general election to serve the balance of the unexpired term, which ends December 31, 2016.

Only a few years ago, tomorrow’s meeting would have been pretty much a formality. Party bosses Jimmy Dimora and Bill Mason would have lined up their candidates, and after some horse-trading here and there the result would have been determined before anybody showed up.

Some party regulars rue the new order slowly being installed by new party chair Stuart Garson, who was elected chair by that same process himself when party heavyweights — led by Congresswoman Marcia Fudge, and über-labor friend John Ryan in US Senator Sherrod Brown’s office, bypassed calls for an open process and put in Garson. The new chair was largely unknown among the rank and file. He was known as a prolific fundraiser, having raised campaign funds for a number of candidates, including Fudge.

An attorney whose practice specializes in representing injured workers in workers’ comp cases, Garson had no hands-on experience in the hard core ethnic politics county Democrats have long engaged in. In fact, he despises that sort of horse-trading, preferring the more sedate politics practiced in Cuyahoga’s tonier regions, where meritocracy is at least touted, even if not always observed, as the order of the day.

Over the objections of a number of party regulars, Garson has stood firm on a process that reduces the chaotic railroading prevalent in the Dimora era.

Tomorrow six or seven candidates will appear on a first ballot. If any of them receives 50% plus one of the assembled voters, he or she will be the party’s nominee. If no candidate gets a majority, only those who receive at least 15% of the votes cast will pass to the next round. It will likely take 3 or 4 rounds to determine the winner.

Mason candidate O’Malley has perhaps the most political experience and is the presumed frontrunner, but he is by no means assured to emerge as party nominee. Each candidate was required to answer a series of questions about his or her credentials, fitness for office, record of public service, stance on diversity, and other criteria. While there is no guarantee that executive committee voters read the responses, Garson is clearly working to put in place a process that over time should diminish style cronyism.

Competing for the party’s nomination in tomorrow’s vote:

John Lawson, Ed Lentz, William McGinty, Terease Neff, Michael O'Malley, and Michael John Ryan.

The winner will be heavily favored to defeat Republican Anjanette C Arabian Whitman, who was appointed to the seat last week by Gov. John Kasich.

Black Political Leadership in Cleveland & Civil Rights, Pt. II

A few weeks after last year’s November elections, a gaggle of black elected officials and political operatives met at the Harvard Community Center in Cleveland’s Ward 1 to assess the aftermath of the statewide Republican sweep and the uncertain landscape of local politics following the election of Cuyahoga County’s first-ever county executive and county council.

The meeting was the bright idea of State Senator Nina Turner and State Representative Sandra Williams, two of the area’s more diligent state legislators. They invited virtually every local black elected official they could identify, including every black Democratic precinct committee they knew about. 

The meeting drew plenty of suburban council people, as well as old political heads-without-portfolio like Lang Dunbar, and Bill Crockett; up-and-comers like Ward 11 Dem leader Anthony Hairston and Euclid councilman David Gilliham, and seasoned operatives such as Lynnie Powell, Kenn Dowell, Michael Taylor, and Bob Render.

The stated agenda was to analyze the 2010 election returns, to try and divine the reasons behind low and unenthusiastic voter turnout in black communities, and to craft a forward-looking strategy.

The approach was thoughtful. There was promise in the air when the meeting began with perhaps sixty-five attendees arranged in a semi-circle. People were initially respectful as Turner called the meeting to order, stated the agenda and offered the podium to Arnold Pinkney, dean of local black politics.

That was the high point of the meeting.

Mr. Pinkney’s account of the election was distressingly feeble, astonishingly devoid of insight, and absurdly self-serving in its assessment of the strategic and tactical errors of the Ted Strickland/Ohio Democratic Party-led statewide campaign. The essential takeaway from his presentation was that the state party should have hired him to get out the vote instead of some out-of-state crew.

No one challenged his eminence regarding this assessment so Sen. Turner then attempted to move to the agenda’s next item: abysmal turnout by black voters.

It serves no point to offer a blow-by-blow account of how the meeting quickly degenerated into a verbal free-for-all. Suffice it to say there were destructive efforts to derail if not highjack the agenda. These efforts had been primed if not planned and led to silly and distressing assertions of political primacy and potency. The leading protagonists were eventually restrained and the shouting match ended with desultory attempts to restore a semblance of stability.

This was such a depressing turn of events that I have been reluctant if not unable to write about it.

• • •

There was an elephant in the room that day whose gigantic shadow caused many of the attending elected officials to become discombobulated. They behaved as if they were playing musical chairs on quicksand. The music was cacophonous, and nobody knew which of the too few chairs were safe to sit in.

The cause of this erratic and discomfiting behavior was a radical realignment of political forces on many levels. New networks were being empowered and you couldn’t tell the players even with a scorecard.

On the state level — Democrats had been thoroughly ousted. Republicans were in, led by a combative governor who would soon demonstrate that black people had no rights the GOP was bound to respect.

On the county level, there reigned a new county executive, an Irish former G-man, Ed FitzGerald. He owed much of his electoral victory to support rounded up by newer black political leaders who were not in attendance: East Cleveland mayor Gary Norton Jr., Cleveland councilmen T. J. Dow and Kevin Conwell, and suburban leaders like Joe Fouche of Oakwood Village.

There appeared to be not a single person in the room with an inkling of how FitzGerald would deal with the black community and its established political leadership.

Moreover, the uprooting of the corrupted county government structure had facilitated the emergence of new leadership for the county Democratic Party. New party chairman Stuart Garson had been selected, courted, and ratified by Congresswoman Marcia Fudge as new party chair six months earlier, but his connections to the rank-and-file were even more a mystery than FitzGerald’s.

To cap it off, in two years on the job Fudge had yet to consolidate the mantle of leadership that had flowed so long from the 11^th District Congressional seat, first from the dynastic authority and political skill of Lou Stokes, and then from the dynamism and infectious indefatigability of Stephanie Tubbs Jones.

So, with every traditional political lighthouse either adrift or under uncertain or foreign control, there should have been no surprise when the captain-less crew engaged in unseemly jousting for control of the helm, shouted mutual accusations of mutiny, and wanted to throw shipmates overboard.

This sorry state of affairs has continued for much of the last year, as evidenced by infighting among the leaders of the Ohio Legislative Black Caucus over state legislative redistricting.

We will look at that on Thursday.

Cuyhaoga Dems & Repubs: Confluence and Contrast

  This week found me attending the annual dinners of both the Cuyahoga Democratic Party and the County Republican Party. I’m not sure if they typically fall in a four day-period but the contrast was instructive.

  It had been some time since I had witnessed a GOP function in the flesh, and as it was my first-ever Lincoln Day shindig, I was uncertain what to expect. 

  I was struck immediately by subliminal markers as I entered the GOP turf and moved towards the Grand Ballroom of the downtown Renaissance Hotel. First, all I saw were white people. A lot of them old. Thin. Wealthy in appearance. No identifiable Hispanics, or even Asians. There was a smattering of young professionals. 

  Whether I moved around or stood near a central vantage, I seemed invisible to most attendees. I was looking for either familiar or friendly faces but found only a few. One belonged to Bruce Akers, the ever-gracious mayor of Pepper Pike, a consummate political insider who is always ready to listen and engage in reasoned exchange. 
  Another friendly face belonged to Skip Claypool, an affably dogmatic Tea Partier from Geauga County.

  Once I received my media pass [the volunteer handling that chore was, to my delight, a regular reader of the irregular Real Deal] I moved around with a little more verve, confident that I would not be unmasked and expelled.

  I stationed myself at the ballroom entrance, the better to observe  the entering celebrants. Like the Democrats three days earlier, the main event was preceded by a VIP reception. The GOP crowd was more subdued, notwithstanding their  November victories that have them feeling entitled to remake Ohio. ["Give them an inch, they'll make it a mandate."] 
  There was a cash bar and a silent auction display that seemed to feature mostly Reagan adorabilia. Laura Bush seemed more popular than her husband, and there was a heavily discounted offering of books by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi donated by “a former Democrat”.

  There were about 750 people in attendance, about the same number as attended the Democrats’ bash. The room was much bigger, however, so the evening seemed less intimate and the attendees were in the main less gregarious. The evening’s loudest roar came when final passage of Senate Bill 5 was announced.

  New Ohio Treasurer and hometown boy Josh Mandel was given a prime opportunity to speak. There seems little doubt that he will challenge Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown next year, as Mandel went out of his way to address standard GOP hot buttons like abortion that have little to do with state finances.

  The evening’s featured speaker was former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, who recently kicked off his campaign to be the Republican nominee in next year’s presidential campaign. While he was blunt, harsh, and direct in his assault on President Obama’s leadership, Pawlenty still managed to appear more reasonable and thoughtful than just about all of his rivals for the GOP nomination.
  Pawlenty denounced President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for not understanding that America is exceptional, and that “our place is to lead the world in everything”.

  I counted perhaps fifteen black faces in the crowd, exclusive of hotel staff, or about 2% of the nominal heirs to the party of the proclaimed "Great Emancipator".

• • •

  The foregoing account may fuel perceptions that I am race-obsessed. Rest assured that I did no racial counting at the Democrats’ bash last Sunday at the Intercontinental Hotel. The gathering was too integrated for that. In fact, by most demographic measure — race, gender, religion, geography — the Democrats were so thoroughly integrated as to render such considerations moot.

  A relaxed tone for the evening was set during the invocation by a priest who delightfully, naturally, enthusiastically and reverentially channeled his inner Father Guido Sarducci. Of course the mood of the Party was enhanced by numerous surprising touches initiated by new county party chair, Stuart Garson. There was  — gasp — an open bar [!], which adroitly shut down before relaxation could turn to mischief, and then reopened when the dinner ended exactly on schedule, as an inducement for attendees to continue mingling.

  The evening clearly reflected from beginning to end chairman Garson’s desire to obliterate any connection with the Party’s slovenly past, dominated by the hail-fellow-well-met atmosphere fostered by its disgraced former officials, Jimmy Dimora and Frank Russo.

  On this evening the effort was a complete success. Cleveland mayor Frank Jackson was characteristically brief, but several members of Congress spoke, and all were on and off the podium in record time. There was a professional video that radiated pride in Democratic core values, and a total orderliness to the entire proceedings at the Inter-Continental Hotel. The impression fostered was that of a party focused on its mission.

  The dinner was a pricey $175, in contrast to the GOP’s $50 affair, but the Democrats need operating cash.

  Keynote speaker for the evening was Cuyahoga County Executive Ed FitzGerald, who is the face of the new, leaner, inclusive, and effective party that Garson is intent on building. His demeanor — humble, professional, earnest, compassionate, and policy-oriented to serve county residents — seems to make him ideal for the role.

Once to Every Chair and Party Comes the Moment to Decide

Barring total revolution instigated by an energetic but unorganized cadre of newly-elected grassroots leaders known as precinct committee people, who would have to be abetted by a heretofore demotivated and enervated hodgepodge of old guard precinct people, Stuart Garson will be elected tonight, possibly by acclamation, to a four year term as chair of the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party.

This will be a good thing for the Party in many ways. First, it ends the Jimmy Dimora era without the made-for-television spectacle of federal agents hauling away the sitting party chief at dawn in pajamas and handcuffs. If this happens in the next seven months he will be described as County Commissioner and former Democratic Party chief. One word can make a big difference in both fact and image.

Second, it speaks to a new era of cooperation between the county and state Democratic organizations. Fact is, the stench of corruption cooked up by a few bad actors and ignored by too many others created a political Imperial Avenue that downstate Democrats avoided like the plague it was. They didn’t know who to talk to up here, or even who was in charge. They certainly had no confidence in who they could safely add to the state ticket. Lee Fisher is on the state ticket only because he went after it and could not be denied.

So CuyDems have avoided the worst-case scenario and can begin to brace themselves for whatever future shock may accompany the ex-party officials known in polite company, bar and barroom circles as Public Official No. 1 and Public Official No. 2.

But the party’s issues are far from resolved. It is easy to conflate official corruption and party problems. The voting public sees the Party as corrupt because its lead officials allegedly committed crimes while in public office. Dimora’s replacement as party chief by an ethical and highly-regarded attorney will eliminate the fact of questionable ethics at party HQ. It does not resolve either the electorate’s perception of how the Party operates or the more fundamental problems that enabled the see-no-evil atmosphere that made Dimora politically invincible.

Garson comes into office with the support of all major party officials. He brings with him a mindset of getting good people to run for office and supporting them in their campaigns. He is acclaimed as a fundraiser and possibly a superior tactician. He can articulate a vision for a better city, county, and region. But he is not a big-picture guy in the sense that he sees the same picture as the electorate.

I speak here of the electorate that rejected the status quo in virtually every quarter by astounding margins. No matter that the landslide vote for Issue 6 was the beneficiary of backroom dealing, GOP chicanery, tons of cash, and some of the most unbalanced journalism since the yellow days of Randolph Hearst a century ago. Cuyahoga voters emphatically said no to the old ways of doing business. "Anything but this!" was the overwhelming public sentiment.

Now what they get in January may be no more to their liking. It will depend in large measure upon what the Democrats offer up and how they are perceived to have done it.

This is Garson’s challenge and possibly his Achilles heel. He must find a way to re-arm a party whose campaign apparatus is far weaker than he realizes. And he must quickly learn how to deal with an environment in which transparency, emotional intelligence and consensus-building are increasingly as vital in an era of independent early voting as “boots on the ground”.

If Garson wants to create a user-friendly county Democratic Party that attracts voters who don’t bleed blue, he will open up the Party to new ideas not after this campaign is over, but simultaneously, starting tonight. He will re-energize the disaffected, encourage the disaffected, and invite in the reformers whose collective energy could propel party candidates to local, county and state success this November. He will do this not by his words, but by his actions. And there will be no better time to start than tonight.

The endorsement calendar and process the Democrats normally follow has fallen victim to larger forces, primarily the abomination of an election schedule that combines a June 24 filing deadline, a September 7 primary and early voting that begins in August. The endorsement process is furthered muddied this year by the Dems quadrennial election of new precinct people who won’t by law be fully organized until nearly September.

The fact that a retiring Executive Committee is scheduled to do the endorsements instead of their successors is Machiavellian only to the extent that GOP strategists secured the September primary date while the Democrats were asleep.

A political party has the right and sometimes the duty to endorse candidates who choose to run under its banner, and to do so at an early enough stage to allow preferred candidates the benefit of the endorsed status they presumably worked for and earned.

But these are perilous and unusual times, politically and otherwise. If Garson were to recommend to the Executive Committee that it support a no-endorsement process in this unprecedented time of transition, and then back his play with an inclusive cabinet comprising new and rising leaders such as Mark Griffin, and an unimpeachable commitment to party reform, he would go a long way towards establishing his credibility with both the rank-and-file who had little choice but to ratify him, and with the independents who will be watching with hawk-like intensity to see if it’s S.O.S., different day.

I wrote last fall that reforming the Democratic Party was more important than reforming the county government [here]. Stuart Garson has the opportunity to prove us all wrong or all right.

Party Chair a Done Deal

Last night’s meeting in Shaker Heights of assorted eastside Democratic clubs and affinity-based caucuses was designed to ratify the selection by county party brass of Stuart Garson as the next chairman and to offer him a platform to articulate his vision of the future of the party. Mission Accomplished. Mostly.

Stuart Garson will be elected chairman of the party when the newly elected precinct leaders convene as the party’s 800-plus central committee on June 16 at John Carroll University. The party’s new crew chief brings an old-fashioned roll up your sleeves and outwork the other fella attitude to the task of electing Democrats and defeating Republicans. He projects a rough-and-tumble attitude that may be borne of his workers’ comp practice.

Garson will bring a strong array of assets to the party, the most obvious being his strong rapport with soon-to-be senior Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown and Congresswoman Marcia Fudge. Gov. Strickland is very much on board with Garson’s designation, as his spokesperson Anne Hill said at last night’s meeting. Garson’s manner exuded self-confidence without suggesting arrogance, and a glimpse of his sense of humor occasionally broke free of his straight-ahead approach.

Last night Garson offered his view of the party. He said there would be a zero-tolerance policy for self-dealing by party leaders. He wants to find, recruit, elect and support the best Democratic candidates for public office.

Garson deplored the stagnant vista from his 16th floor Rockefeller Building office, which he said for 21 years has offered up only surface parking lots on the Public Square. He sees this as representative of a collective community failure to create opportunities for young people in this region. Acknowledging that he has reached the stage of life where he is planting trees under whose shade he will never sit, he acknowledged a personal resonance to the city’s decline: all three of his daughters have moved so far away that he can see them only by flying cross-country. He decried the cost of this brain drain, observing the investment Clevelanders make in raising and educating our young who then spend their productive energies building other communities.

The analysis, both heartfelt and keen, did not mask the new leader’s potential problems with the “vision thing”. He seems not to appreciate the “soft skills” of communication and cultural sensitivity that make for successful people management in today’s complex society. He seems more a Woody Hayes disciple of the “three yards and a cloud of dust” football approach than to the fluid, evolving triangle offense of basketball’s Phil Jackson. Thus, he wants to defer party reform until some future day, without giving much thought to how the top-down, behind closed methodology contributed to the atmosphere in which malfeasance thrived. During the Q & A that followed his prepared remarks, he suggested without a shred of hubris that the party’s image had changed, because he was now heir apparent.

Voters, along with many rank-and-file, will more likely demand a transplant in operations instead of a makeover before agreeing to renew a courtship that ended in betrayal.


• • •

Mark Griffin made a concise and eloquent plea for the party to take responsibility for its past mistakes and to take ownership of its future by committing to achieving excellence in all endeavors. He played a difficult hand throughout the process with grace and intelligence and loyalty. What place if any Garson finds for the younger and energetic Griffin will send a clear signal about the substance and style of the Garson administration.

• • •

Michael Jackson, president of the Shaker Heights Dems, did a fine job of running the meeting on a timed agenda. He also deserves kudos for his quiet suggestion to Garson at meeting’s close that the party rank and file want reform and that if Garson seeks to extract a commitment from them to work hard through November, he should offer a reciprocal formal commitment to serious reform.

• • •

One of the brightest lights on the local Democratic landscape this past year has been Michael Ruff’s work with local political parties all across the county. Ruff was director of regional field operations for the Cuyahoga region for the state party. Party executive director Doug Kelly seems to have grossly under-appreciated Ruff’s effectiveness in healing much intra-party discord and tamping down simmering turf battles by reminding folks to keep their eyes on the greater good.

Terri Hamilton Brown wasted no time in outracing the competition for Ruff’s services. He debuted as her campaign manager this past Monday. His countywide contacts are sure to be an important boost to Brown’s field operations.

The kickoff itself was a successful affair, as more than 125 people walked through the door at Massima de Milano’s on West 25 Street, many with checks in hand. Brown, who has never run for political office, has assembled a top-drawer political team that has Burges & Burges for political strategy and the veteran Tom Andrzejewski as media adviser and spokesman.

• • •

A tidbit for the loyal reader who has continued to the end:

Shaker mayor Earl Leiken introduced Garson last night and said that Garson had never run for office. Not exactly. Garson was on the countywide ballot only last November. He came in 28th of 29 candidates for one of 15 seats on the charter review commission. Issue 5 did not win passage and thus the commission was not established.

Psst: Wanna Be Party Chair?

Local Democrats have operated for the last 40+ years with a focus on
1970s issues, a 1950s outlook, and a 1930s ideology. The party leadership
has been provincial, ham-handed, and shortsighted. Conceited but
lacking in self-respect or ambition, they have been content to win
electoral victories based on overwhelming numerical advantage.
Essentially they claimed success that was due largely to demographics.
Since their professional horizons stopped at the county line, it
didn’t occur to them to grow or consolidate their enormous potential political power statewide. Had not their leaders run into legal trouble and public disgrace, there is no telling how long the party’s sorry state would have continued.

A changing of the guard is now underway in the Cuyahoga Democratic
Party, driven by that external force known as a U.S. prosecutor. The
federal investigation appears focused on the public misfeasance of
elected officials, but the public is right to make no distinction
between a party chief and a public official. Both are positions of
public trust. In fact, the public officials known as precinct
committee persons elect the party chiefs in Ohio. Leading Democrats
have finally come to grips with the fact that the head of the party
should not simultaneously be an elected official.

So who will be the new party chair? It’s a pretty thankless job,
apparently, because no one is seeking it openly. The job pays zero if
you are honest. No salaries, no perks. Just thousands of demands from
people who want jobs, favors, endorsements, assistance, advice,
direction, encouragement. You have to raise your budget while enduring slurs, assaults, and subversion, usually but not always coming from the other side. You are kind of like the Daddy of a humongous family with
legions of always hungry and perpetually ill behaved children. Your job is to organize this crew around noble political objectives and win victories that make your community a better place to live. Good luck with that!

So who are the candidates? Well in this corner is a brilliant labor
lawyer who fights by any ethical means necessary to achieve justice
for his injured clients. He’s wealthy and he’s earned it. His friends
see him as compassionate. He raises money for political causes and he
donates money to a variety of candidates, some even outside his party
who hold views contrary to his own. He doesn’t suffer foolishness, which means he has little patience for retail politics. He’s sixty but looks older. You wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t kiss his own grandchildren. Don’t expect him to be patient with questions from the party faithful, who may work 12 hours at the polls in November rain. Nuance is not his thing.

In the other corner is another brilliant trial lawyer. He’s expert in election law, has a passion for public policy, is open and refreshing,and is so transparently candid in a 21st century kind of way that in the smoky atmosphere of county politics people can’t figure out that he too says what he means. He’s 46, looks younger and probably rolls in the grass with his kids. He comes from a family of respected and honored public servants; his father and grandfather served roughly half a century between them as county trial judges. He was honored with fellow team members as Ohio Democrat of 2009.

The choice only seems clear. The candidate first described — Stuart Garson — doesn’t want the job but is willing to serve because party leaders have importuned him. He knows strong leadership is needed to avoid disaster in this fall’s elections. He wants to put any talk of openness and transparency and reform and communication and party reorganization aside until after the next election cycle or two. His will be a top-down, command and control administration. That’s the way it’s always been in the Party, so why change? Get busy and grind out victories at the polls.

The second candidate — Mark Griffin — wants the job but won't exactly say so, because he is willing to stand aside because if senior party leaders actually have command of their troops, it would be detrimental to the party to have a division over party leadership. His manner and style would clearly be effective in helping the party distance itself from its scandal-ridden image. And he is clearly more appealing to the scores of newly-elected and energetic precinct committee people, but they have yet to be
consulted, courted, or even welcomed into the leadership in any coherent, healthy or affirming manner. And, without a champion to lead them, they may not be organized in time to have any impact before the party chair vote looming on June 16.

Tonight, both the reluctant candidate and the reticent non-candidate
are expected to be at what promises to be a lively evening at the
Stephanie Tubbs Jones Community Building, 3450 Lee Road in Shaker Heights. The fun will start at 7pm. Come early for a ringside seat. Expect jabs, some crosses, perhaps a few uppercuts, and certainly a few haymakers. But be prepared to duck, because most punches are likely to be thrown from the audience.

PART II: New Day [not the Bedford Court clerk] on Horizon for Dems as Election of New Party Chair Nears

I promised a follow up to yesterday’s report on the efforts by Cuyahoga Democrats for Principled Leadership to encourage/support/nudge/shove/drag the county Democratic Party towards a 21st century, Obama-era stance of openness, modernity, and inclusiveness.

Specifically, I indicated I would be reporting on the westside CDPL forum held last night. I am going to do so succinctly, because an analysis of where the Party sits suggests a situation so explosive that more time is demanded. I will endeavor to do that over the weekend. So if you come back Monday I promise something for you to think about around the Memorial Day grill or the muni fireworks, assuming money woes haven’t caused your community to cancel them.

So, without my notes, and thus apologies to any community omitted, here goes: About 65 Democrats showed up at Rocky River Civic Center. No city had a large contingent, but almost every westside municipality was represented, including Rocky River, Parma, Bay Village, Westlake, Old Brooklyn, Cleveland Ward 16, Strongsville, North Olmsted, and Broadview Heights. East Cleveland and Shaker Heights were also in the house. Most attendees raised their hands when asked how many were newly elected precinct committee people.

All likely candidates for Party Chair were invited to attend and offer remarks. Only Mark Griffin accepted. A letter from John Ryan, a senior aide to Senator Sherrod Brown, D-OH to co-convener Jan Roller was read, indicating that Ryan could not attend, and was deferring any interest in becoming party chair and endorsing Stuart Garson for the position.

Griffin declined to say specifically, “I want to be Party Chair.” Instead he repeated his remarks from the previous evening, saying that he was “a candidate for change,” that Stuart Garson was a fine fellow who had the votes, that the Party needed major changes, and that he wanted to play a significant role in bringing about that change.

Griffin did say that he was interested in being a vice chair or some other major position of leadership. He emphasized that he did not want to be divisive candidate in any way that would hinder the Party in the critically important fall county and statewide elections.

Translation: Griffin wants the job but sees that the Party hierarchy prefers Garson. So he is willing to support and work with Garson for the good of the Party.

This wasn’t good enough for those in attendance. Some were clearly ready to throw their support behind Griffin’s reserved candidacy, but most wanted the standard “I’m running and I’m here to ask for your support.”

But disenchantment for Griffin’s nuanced non-declarative statement of readiness was mild compared to the anger directed towards party brass and presumed designee Garson. Few in the meeting had ever heard of him, almost everyone who spoke expressed concern about the high-handed manner of his anointment as preferred candidate, and the feeling was virtually unanimous that the Party has performed abysmally in failing to communicate with the newly elected committeepersons about process, scheduling, responsibilities, or anything else.

When Chuck Germana of Parma rose to put in a kind word for Garson, he began by acknowledging that he too, was “disappointed that he is not here”. But when he tried to suggest that Garson would be a concerned and effective party chair, Germana was practically hooted into silence, one woman angrily proclaiming that “if Garson gave a damn about what we thought, his butt would be here tonight!”

Long story short, the precinct committee members present wanted answers that no one present could provide, and by the end of the evening people were talking about strategies that could be employed to make their displeasure known, and perhaps to change what some may have only recently thought would be a pre-ordained conclusion.

Come back Monday! Have a great weekend!!

New Day [not the Bedford Court clerk] on Horizon for Dems as Election of New Party Chair Nears

The sun doesn’t rise in the east but it dawned there last night. In Cleveland Heights. That’s where a surprisingly large and energetic rainbow of party regulars gathered publicly for the first time to envision a new era for the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party. A spirited crowd of more than 125 came together on the initiative of a small band of concerned party members who refer to themselves as CDPL, short for Cuyahoga Democrats for Principled Leadership. They have been quietly meeting around the county for several months — mostly in midtown, Lakewood, or Euclid — talking, analyzing, organizing, and acting for several months with the goal of achieving what came into view last night: the potential for not just a new party chairman, but a rejuvenated, holistic, more effective political organization.

The purpose of this week’s public meetings — a second will be held tonight in Rocky River’s Civic Center — is to foster party revitalization in light of the upcoming meeting to elect the new party chair on June 5th. Ohio law provides that every four years each of the major parties elect members of a central committee by precinct. There are 1068 precincts in the county, which means there were 1068 separate races for committee positions, albeit not all were contested. (A county board of elections spokesman said that to keep the ballot at manageable length, Republicans elect their central committee on a different four-year cycle; their most recent precinct level election was last year.)

Precinct committee people, as they are also known, may be thought of as second lieutenants, an army’s lowest ranking commissioned officers. They are supposed to know their local political terrain, to recruit new party members, to serve as two-way channels between the party brass and the privates, the latter a hopefully informed citizenry of regular party voters. A dynamic and effective precinct leader will organize his or her constituency via neighborhood, street, and block clubs, etc. to pass the word, get out the vote, know the pulse of the man on the street, and just be in the know about all things political in their territory.

It’s a 19th century form of urban political organization by proximity. At its essence it is rooted in personal contact and interaction. In an era of too much to do in too little time, at a time when so many have so much anxiety over having too little money to meet so many responsibilities, this grass-roots system had become too attenuated in the Democratic Party to be any relevance. The party itself had calcified at the top by too large a sense of entitlement, too much parochialism, and with no mechanism and even less desire for self-examination.

That is why, by the way, the Obama campaign essentially bypassed the clogged arteries of the Democratic Party, set up a parallel organization along the same lines outlined two paragraphs above, and delivered victory margins that the bloated party apparatus has not delivered in a generation of election cycles.

Pssst! The President of the United States was once a community organizer.

Some of those folks who came to Cleveland to work the 2008 political campaign, as well as some 2004 Kerry people, found enough to like about our little city with the big lake to put down roots. A few of them were instrumental in finding enough local Democrats with sufficient pulse, conscience, and sense of personal agency to begin planning for a renewed party based on principle and not personal power.

That first meeting was a tentative after-work gathering of nineteen at Café Ah-Roma across from Cleveland State. It was full of bewilderment, idealism, and excessive legalism. Lawyers are lousy at revolution planning. By the time of the next gathering, at 7:30 a.m. on a sunny day in December, a more veteran and politically astute cast of fifty or sixty had been assembled. That meeting birthed the group’s name — CDPL— and began to stitch the core of those who with some sense of constancy would keep the group more or less focused on the task at hand: getting the public Party to clean up after the private party of Public Officials Numbered You Know Who and Him Too.

Fast forward to last night. The Cleveland Heights forum was not a civics class. The invited were the newly elected precinct people, and many showed. They came from Euclid, Pepper Pike, Hough, Collinwood, Shaker, and even from as far as Bay Village. They introduced themselves and then listened to co-convener Jan Roller outline the Party constitution [soon to be online here], and talk about key party process and central committee member duties. Then came highlights and firecrackers.

All six potential candidates who whose names were bruited about as in the mix for party chair were invited by letter to the forum, either to state a case for their candidacy, to say why they had chosen not to compete, and also to share their vision for what the Party should be. Additionally, each was called and if not reached, called again.

Of the six, it appeared only Mark Griffin would show. The trial lawyer came prepared. He didn’t say he was running but he certainly presented himself as the eligible bachelor, capable and ready. He was idealistic, he was earnest, and he was practical. He would be a new face and a strong and clear voice for the Party. He would love to be selected because he relishes both the challenge and the opportunity, though he didn’t say so. Not in words.

Questions and complaints began before Griffin could finish. These are Democrats, and orderly meetings are often but rumor. Most of the complaints had to do with alleged Party rules, excessive favoritism of incumbents, the rejection of new blood and new ideas, and most especially, the failure of rumored frontrunner Stuart Garson to show up.

We skimp on the details here so as not to deprive tonight’s meeting of its anticipated freshness. Suffice to say, the surprise of the evening was the arrival of said Stuart Garson at 8:25 p.m., five minutes before the scheduled closing. He was as blunt as a rifle butt.

Part II of this report will appear tomorrow, after tonight’s meeting in Rocky River. I don't want to spoil the fun for west side Dems who will show up tonight…

One Lap Down, Three to Go in Race to November

Last week’s primary election marked the quarter-pole of the critical 2010 political season. The major political parties settled on their statewide tickets, while on the county level, several candidates for county executive popped through the starting gate and began running. Also, nearly a hundred people — an intriguing mix political novices, veterans, and perennial also-rans — have pulled and in some cases have filed petitions for the new eleven member county council to be elected this fall.

The second quarter — the next six weeks until the June 24 filing deadline to run in the September partisan primaries for county executive and county council — would be a fairly quiet time of candidate maneuvering and alliance building were it not for the end of the Jimmy Dimora reign as Democratic Party chair. The party’s central committee is scheduled to elect a new chair on June 5. Dimora, who has been under the cloud of a federal investigation for nearly two years, long ago made clear that he would not seek to retain the post he has held since 1993.

Intra-party politics in the past have usually resulted in a closed-door selection process of the party chair. A small but influential group of party faithful, calling themselves Cuyahoga Democrats for Principled Leadership* [CD4PL] is making plans for two forums on May 25 [Cleveland Heights] and May 27 [Rocky River] for candidates for party chair to state the case for their election.

The names most commonly bandied about include longtime party insiders Tom Day, clerk of the Bedford Heights Municipal Court, and Rudy Stralka, currently serving as party treasurer. But it appears that senior party officials, including Rep. Marcia Fudge, county prosecutor Bill Mason, and Cleveland mayor Frank Jackson have decided to support attorney Stuart Garson and commission him to restore integrity to party process, rebuild infrastructure, and unify Democrats for what will be a challenging election season. Assuming Garson becomes chair, he will face stern early tests: a county primary in September and the general election in November.

One key to watch: whether Garson steps forward to attend the CDPL forums later this month.

Grits ain't Gravy [Miscellaneous Political Notes]

Last week also offered a possible preview of what may be a new future for the county Democratic Party, which is sorely need of a new young leadership cadre. We refer to the kick-off party for Phil Robinson’s campaign for the District 11 county council seat. Robinson is a bright, young, articulate aspiring public servant who in his first try for public office just missed winning a seat on the University Heights City Council last year. These sorts of events are usually attended by one’s oldest and closest friends, so the ethnic, religious and geographic diversity — to name but a few measures — of his kickoff crowd was notable insofar as it suggests his appeal might carry across municipal boundaries stretching from Euclid to Beachwood.

Speaking just before the candidate was State Senator Nina Turner, who encouraged Robinson for the new county council. Turner was the leading black public official to support the change in county government. Also in attendance was Julian Rogers, like Robinson a progressive political activist and African American male seeking a county council seat and enjoying Turner’s support. Rogers is running for the District 10 seat that covers Cleveland wards 10 & 11, Cleveland Heights, East Cleveland, and Bratenahl.

Two candidates for the county council District 2 seat — State Senator Dale Miller and independent Stephanie Morales — also found their way east to be at the kickoff.



*Disclosure: I am an active member of this group, whose statement of principles may be found on their website: (www.cuyahogadems4pl.org/)