Running mates provide insight into top of ticket

7:21 PM Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Lieutenant governors generate attention when they are selected for their tickets and when, on rare occasions, they advance to the governorship. In between, not so much.

Lee Fisher was something of an exception. He (like former Dayton Mayor Paul Leonard when he was lieutenant governor) was simultaneously the state development director. He approached the job with special vigor and visibility (only to run into a national recession).

The exceptions are worth keeping in mind in judging the current candidates.

Gov. Ted Strickland has chosen somebody you’ve probably never heard of, Yvette McGee Brown.

Kevin DeWine, chairman of the Ohio Republican Party said, “The best he could come up with in the face of an unprecedented fiscal emergency is a social worker with no experience in public finance or state government.”

It’s an amazing statement about somebody who, at 48, has been, for starters, an assistant attorney general and the chief lawyer for two state agencies.

(In that work, she met the late state Rep. C.J. McLin, of Dayton. “I got some of my best political lessons sitting in C.J.’s office,” she says.).

She’s also been on the state elections commission and a trustee of Ohio University (not to mention chair of the Ohio State University alumni board). And she was a common pleas judge for a decade.

But party chairmen are a special breed.

Apparently what Mr. DeWine meant by “social worker” is that she is the founding president of the Center for Child and Family Advocacy, a highly respected operation at Nationwide Children’s Hospital that battles child abuse and family violence.

Much honored by local organizations for her community work, well connected in the Columbus business community, an experienced fund-raiser, she is also reputed to be, as one newspaper said, a “charismatic speaker.”

The selection has been widely analyzed as an effort by the governor to win back the affection of a liberal base disappointed by his cuts in social programs, while adding racial and gender diversity to the ticket.

But beyond that it’s an interesting, slightly out-of-the-norm choice that, at the moment at least, reflects well on him as somebody trying to be bring exceptional people into state government.

Republican candidate John Kasich has chosen state Auditor Mary Taylor. Mr. DeWine’s Democratic counterpart, Chris Redfern, immediately trashed her as a partisan, absentee auditor, who wil be “John Kasich’s Sarah Palin.”

Like Mr. DeWine, Mr. Redfern was over the top in his criticism. It’s true that when Ms. Taylor has made headlines, they’ve mainly consisted of Strickland-bashing. But Democrats haven’t made the case that she’s been a bad auditor.

Mr. Kasich apparently liked that Ms. Taylor was the one Republican to withstand the Democratic tidal wave in statewide elections in 2006, and that she brings youth (43), intense conservatism, a northern address (the Akron area) and gender diversity.

If Ms. Taylor hasn’t been the failure that the Democrats say, she also hasn’t stood out in Columbus. When she flirted with running for U.S. senator, she didn’t have much to brag about other than victory in 2006.

One reason she gave for possibly running was her gender. In the wake of Hillary Clinton’s defeat, there was a little movement for more female candidates across the political spectrum. But the case didn’t wash.

And yet, now both the lieutenant governor nominees are women. It’s no coincidence.

And the selection of each says something about the guy at the top of the ticket.

— Cox News Service

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