Plain Dealer - NE Ohio key to Senate contest

(The Cleveland Plain Dealer)

NE Ohio is key to Senate contest

The Cleveland-Akron-Youngstown tri ngle will decide the Sherrod Brown- Mike DeWine Senate race, and that contest will hinge on the economy, not Iraq or sleaze.

A jobs-and-progress campaign would seem to favor Brown, the Greater Cleveland Democrat, over incumbent DeWine, a Dayton-area Republican. And Ohio voters haven't given a Republican U.S. senator a third term since 1950, when Gov. Bob Taft's grandfather landed one.

Finally, Ohio voters can be contrary, like those in Hamilton County (Cincinnati), who in 1988, against all expectations, backed liberal Democrat Howard M. Metzenbaum for re-election.

Still DeWine almost certainly has a downstate edge as the kind of non-dogma Republican (like James Rhodes, William Saxbe and George Voinovich) Ohioans typically favor.

So, for Brown to unseat DeWine, Brown must weaken DeWine downstate and maximize the Cleveland-area vote. Conversely, DeWine must hold down Brown's vote in the Western Reserve while taking nothing for granted south of Brunswick.

For DeWine, that all may be easier said than done, given last week's eye-popping report by a veteran student of Ohio's economy, George Zeller, of Greater Cleveland's Center for Community Solutions. He studied what recession during George W. Bush's presidency had done to Ohioans' purses and wallets. To make a long story short, Zeller found that the downturn crimped Ohioans at every income level.

"Both the poor and the rich got poorer in Ohio as a result of the 2000s recession," he said. Big job losses in Ohio and lagging returns for Ohio investors have flattened - to a possibly unprecedented extent - opportunities Ohioans have to better their families' lives.

Given that, DeWine, at his annual Cedarville social 10 days ago, hinted what his strategy may be. He, like generations of challenged incumbents, honed two themes: the "Mr. Results" argument (my opponent talks about problems; I solve them) and the Sugardale song (look at all the federal bacon I bring home for Ohio). He also sounded an argument he's tested for a while: that the campaign should be about his vs. Brown's perspectives on Ohioans' future.

In 2004, for example, DeWine told the 50 Club of Cleveland that Ohio needs to "pivot to a new economy." Ten days ago, at his homestead, DeWine almost simultaneously bragged about helping shield Ohio steel jobs from foreign competition while (nothing like having it two ways) deriding Brown's anti- free-trade politics as nostalgia for an Ohio impossible to re-create. So DeWine this year is going to play problem-solving pragmatist.

But oratory is the just the icing on the layer cake of strategy. DeWine also told the 50 Club in 2004 that, over the 15 years then ending, he had spent more nights in Cleveland than anywhere else in Ohio, except his Cedarville house. All that Cleveland time - and his alliance with the White House's go- to guy in Ohio, Summit County GOP boss Alex Arshinkoff - suggests that DeWine sees Northeast Ohio as a competitive battlefield.

Moreover, DeWine has compiled an eclectic Senate voting record, by the standards of Republican rigidity today. He opposed oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and has just been endorsed by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

On the bleaker side of the ledger, DeWine is co-sponsoring a federal ban on same-sex marriage. In 2004, he opposed a similar Ohio initiative. DeWine's co-sponsoring the federal ban may appease Ohio's GOP kook- right fringe, though it's hard to imagine that Cincinnati's mouth-breathers would have gone over to Brown.

But the main point out-of-staters often overlook is that DeWine has run exceptionally well in Democratic counties. It's true that DeWine's challenger in 2000, Ted Celeste, brother of ex-Gov. Richard Celeste, was grossly underfunded.

Yet, Mike DeWine bested the familiar Celeste name by 6,100 votes in Cuyahoga County - at the very time George W. Bush was losing the county to Al Gore by 168,000 votes. And while Bush drew only about 35 percent of the vote in yellow dog Democrat Mahoning County (Youngstown), DeWine drew 47 percent of Mahoning's Senate vote. If vote counts like those don't daunt Democrats, they should.

Suddes, The Plain Dealer's former legislative reporter, writes from Ohio University. Contact him at:

suddes@frognet.net