Posted on 04/30/2004 10:00:51 AM PDT by Deadeye Division
How true!
When Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder and Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell are in the same room, someone has to go get an adult.
By pandering for coronation as darling of the Republican right, Householder and Blackwell have embarrassed their party, themselves and, maybe, unwittingly undermined their chances of winning statewide office in 2006.
That these two blindly ambitious southern Ohioans might be sent packing by voters —Householder back to Perry County and Blackwell home to Cincinnati — would be a fate richly deserved.
The two have played childish bullies ever since Blackwell took the overtly political step in September of forming a committee to seek voterrepeal of the temporary penny-onthe-dollar increase in the state sales tax rightly enacted by Householder and fellow Republicans to balance an already cut-to-the-bone state budget.
Rather than simply advocating repeal of the tax, Blackwell immediately embarked on a course to set himself apart as the GOP’s only true conservative statewide officeholder.
Accused of leading the tax-repeal campaign solely for political gain, Blackwell pointed to his long record of advocating lower taxes and smaller government.
But he undermined his own credibility with a March tax-repeal fund-raising letter that cynically broke Ronald Reagan’s hallowed 11 th Commandment. Blackwell enraged GOP leaders by castigating them for espousing policies closer to "Teddy Kennedy and Bill and Hillary Clinton than Ronald Reagan."
Blackwell also used the letter to attack Householder and Gov. Bob Taft, who signed the tax increase into law. And he blistered his GOP rivals for governor in 2006, Attorney General Jim Petro and Auditor Betty D. Montgomery, for supporting the tax increase. Blackwell couldn’t resist a cheap shot at Petro and Montgomery by contending neither "would have signed the recently passed bill allowing for the carrying of concealed weapons."
If Blackwell were so committed to the tax repeal as good policy, why not just make that case without attacking leaders of his own party? The letter exposed Blackwell’s true motive to use the tax-repeal campaign as a vehicle to imprint his conservative credentials for the expected 2006 gubernatorial showdown with Petro and Montgomery. It showed a ruthless willingness to divide his own party to further his ambitions.
The tax vote and Blackwell’s attacks put Householder in a pickle. While he acted responsibly by getting House Republicans to pull Ohio, albeit temporarily, from the throes of a budget crisis, Householder is preparing to run for state auditor in 2006 with a potentially politically fatal taxincrease vote on his record.
Oh, sweet justice! For years, Householder and his band of nasty boys — Team Householder — have strongarmed Statehouse lobbyists and GOP corporate sugar daddies for campaign contributions to buy television ads to bury Democratic and Republican opponents alike.
A favorite tactic has been to simply lie in TV attack ads, assigning taxincrease votes to candidates who never voted for a tax increase or, in the case of a recent GOP House primary race, label an incumbent who actually voted against the salestax increase as a tax-raiser.
And now here sits Householder, his path to statewide office threatened by a tax vote. "It’s his tax increase," a 109-page document written by Team Householder lamented, perhaps previewing words destined to appear someday in an anti-Householder attack ad.
The document, written in January, was leaked last week, with devastating consequences for Householder. With Machiavellian arrogance and Nixonian duplicity, the document detailed an $8.5 million campaign to be led by Householder to defeat Blackwell’s taxrepeal effort.
True to Team Householder’s modus operandi, it wasn’t enough simply to defeat the tax repeal. The document elaborately outlined a plan to destroy Blackwell’s political career, while duping Democrats, labor unions and private groups into supporting a campaign "to help underwrite Larry Householder’s political future."
Maybe Blackwell and Householder will make peace and run as a team for governor and lieutenant governor in 2006. Ohioans deserve a chance to send them a message.
Joe Hallett is senior editor at The Dispatch.
jhallett@dispatch.com
Maybe Bob Bennett didn’t get out soon enough. The Republican state chairman thought he had problems before in lining up his thoroughbreds for the statewide starting gate in 2006.
Now he’s got to be scratching his head over how to keep the GOP aspirants from killing each other before 2006 even gets here.
Bennett, nearing retirement age, needs to be concentrating on getting out the vote for President Bush and Sen. George V. Voinovich, not settling food fights in the Republican dining hall.
The latest episode has House Speaker Larry Householder and Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell at each other’s throat, making the sparring between Auditor Betty D. Montgomery and Attorney General Jim Petro for governor in 2006 look like a marble game in the schoolyard.
Not that Bennett isn’t up to the task. In 1989, he skillfully persuaded Bob Taft to drop out of the next year’s primary contest for governor with George Voinovich and to run for secretary of state, which the GOP badly needed to control the process for drawing state legislative districts.
In 1998, he induced Blackwell to back away from a clash with Taft for the good of the party, and there has been room at the table for all Republicans since then.
Until now. Knives, forks and other weapons of individual destruction are in play.
Blackwell got under Householder’s skin last year by declaring that he could produce a better budget than the Republican legislators did — and without raising the sales tax from a nickel to six cents on the dollar.
Householder fired back, saying it was easy to carp about the budget, but that Blackwell never had to deliver critical services to the people and come up with the votes to fund them.
Blackwell loudly announced a campaign to repeal the penny on the sales tax — which is worth $1.3 billion a year — six months early, earning Householder’s contempt.
What we didn’t know until last week was that the speaker’s political cadre, known to themselves as Team Householder, had an $8.5 million plan to not only combat the repeal but to make Householder so popular that he’d be a natural player for statewide office in 2006.
The plan, written secretly in January, was kept under wraps until it leaked out a week ago, proving to be another embarrassment to Householder, who has been raked before on his heavyhanded fund-raising and campaigning style.
Press Secretary Dwight Crum took the rap for writing the plan, to which political operatives Brett Buerck and Kyle Sisk contributed. Crum said Blackwell’s continued hostility toward his boss ate at him until he sat down at his personal computer and wrote in a fit of pique and frustration.
Crum’s flying fingers produced 109 pages of a campaign plan down to the finest detail before the anger wore off. He ended with a disclaimer that the document was only a draft for internal consumption and had nobody’s approval.
"I don’t know how anything like this could be put in writing," Bennett said last week in promising to try to get Householder and Blackwell together to drink some sort of ego-reducing toast. He didn’t get a chance to invite them before Blackwell vetoed the idea.
Only those who live and breathe political campaigns could have put this document together. It covered all the bases. It’s not unusual for political strategists to map out plans for their bosses, but most never see the light of day until the proper time, if then.
Consultant Jerry Austin, a Democrat who just happens to be plaguing Householder with a spate of negative TV commercials, chortled at the Republicans’ dilemma.
Austin used to do the dirty work for Gov. Richard F. Celeste and Anthony J. Celebrezze Jr., who was secretary of state and attorney general in the Democrats’ glory days. "I kept ’em all in my head," Austin answered when asked how come nobody ever leaked out his strategies.
The Householder leak was reminiscent of 1997, when Senate Democrats left in a committee room the draft of a plan on how to hang the Republicans on raising taxes for school-funding and then running against them on the issue.
Republicans shut the Democrats out of the process, the school-funding problem was only half-solved and the Republicans won all the elections after that.
Now, the shoe is on the other foot. Bennett will have to step lively to stem the tide of disarray. And Householder, who will be out of office in January, will have to get a new plan and hope the Republicans are in a forgiving mood.
Lee Leonard covers the Statehouse for The Dispatch .
lleonard@dispatch.com
Householder vs. Blackwell
Internal attack memo is an embarrassment to state’s Republicans
Tuesday, May 04, 2004
Maybe Ohio’s Republican leaders can blame the intraparty blood-letting on the Democrats. Had the other party put up a fight in the past decade, Republican officeholders might not be slashing each other.
Two combatants risk mucking up their political chances in 2006. House Speaker Larry Householder, who covets the state auditor’s job, and Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, presumably a candidate for governor, were bruised in the family feud.
Team Householder’s 109-page blueprint for boosting the speaker’s political stock while undercutting Blackwell’s was not illegal, but it was pretty stupid. Why do political operatives put such thoughts in writing?
The leaked document forcefully sets out a strategy for destroying Blackwell. The attack would be propelled by an $8.5 million campaign to defeat Blackwell’s initiative to repeal a temporary sales-tax increase approved by the General Assembly in 2003 and signed into law by Gov. Bob Taft.
That Householder would battle Blackwell over the political opportunism of a tax-repeal drive is hardly surprising. But ruthless tactics, seen as business as usual in politics, often backfire as people who land on enemy lists fight back. Richard M. Nixon’s mind-set was captured on audiotape; Larry Householder’s was spelled out in writing.
The document played into the hands of Blackwell, who referred to Householder and his staff as "thugs and racketeers." But how is Blackwell going to boost his political capital by attacking the party leadership whose support he needs? His anger at other Republicans — expressed in a fundraising letter — is astonishing, accusing the party leaders of "selling our party’s position to the highest bidder."
The House speaker has downplayed the blueprint as an internal memo that went "over the top" and promptly was discarded by him. He would have the public believe that a lengthy clarion call for political battle was a mere memo that didn’t have his approval. Dwight Crum, Householder’s press secretary, fell on his sword for writing this "overly aggressive" report, but there’s no doubt who really runs Team Householder.
It wasn’t the first damaging leak. In March, an anonymous memo made public accused Householder’s fundraising efforts of fraud, bribery and kickback schemes. The claims were "half-truths, innuendoes, rumors and outright lies," Householder responded.
Those charges emerged after news reports of strong-arm tactics used by the speaker’s fund-raising team. Blackwell’s office referred the allegations to two U.S. attorneys based in Ohio.
The disclosure of the plot to "dismantle Blackwell" ends up embarrassing statewide GOP leaders, including Ohio GOP Chairman Robert T. Bennett and Taft, whose spokesman called the memo "garbage."
Intraparty fights in a minority party often are a healthy sign of an organization struggling to redefine itself to win its way back into the majority. But in a party holding a monopoly on power, a fight like this likely is a sign of decay. Only a party smug in its supposed invulnerability would allow personal rivalries to trump unity.
Those who engage in these fights also should remember that political ruthlessness has a dangerous recoil that frequently destroys the one who unleashes it.
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