As brutal election results reflected, the Ohio Republican Party (ORP) was a scandal-plagued outfit circa 2006. I don’t relish the current ORP leadership fight, but if we don’t want second terms for President Obama and Senator Sherrod Brown we must avoid repeating our mistakes. Party chairman Kevin DeWine’s old-guard ways – combined with his public betrayal of Governor Kasich – make it hard to believe ORP can be effective with DeWine in charge.

Quick hits: this fall, a consultant with ties to Chairman DeWine produced $179,000 in advertising for one of the Big Labor fronts smearing Kasich’s union reform bill. A glance at last year’s ORP campaign expenditures reveals -

• $753,680 spent in the incredibly close Kasich-Strickland race
• $1.3 million spent in the secretary of state race, for DeWine ally Jon Husted – including $375,245 in the GOP primary
• $1.5 million spent in the attorney general race, for Kevin DeWine’s cousin Mike DeWine

If those figures don’t raise your eyebrows, there’s more. In the early aughts, Brett Buerck was a recognized name in Ohio Republican circles. Then, suddenly, he was known more widely… and not for a good reason.

Brett Buerck (BYOO-rik) is president of Florida-based Majority Strategies. In 2004, he was fired as an aide to former House Speaker Larry Householder after a federal grand jury began subpoenaing records on Householder’s fundraising practices. The U.S. Justice Department later declined to prosecute Buerck.

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For America to have any hope of averting fiscal collapse, the GOP presidential nominee will need to win Ohio in less than 11 months. Each day of Ohio Republican Party (ORP) infighting improves the odds for President Obama and Senator Sherrod Brown, redistributionist extraordinaire.

I’ve already given my two cents on the conflict between ORP chair Kevin DeWine and Governor Kasich, so I won’t belabor this point: DeWine should step down. I do not assume Kasich’s team is blameless, but the criticisms Ohio House Speaker Batchelder shared earlier this month cannot be discounted. Whoever threw the first stone, a public disagreement of this scope between a governor and a party chairman doesn’t leave many options.

My position was affirmed by an Ohio News Network (ONN) interview airing yesterday and covered in Friday’s Columbus Dispatch. The Dispatch story ran under the headline “Kasich’s staff used in effort to oust DeWine,” which says everything you need to know about how destructive a prolonged fight would be:

In an exclusive interview, Ohio Republican Party Chairman Kevin DeWine revealed that members of Gov. John Kasich’s staff were used in an ongoing effort to oust DeWine as head of the party.

So now Ohio’s Republican chairman is conducting opposition research against the sitting Republican governor and using it to criticize the governor’s staff on television. This makes a great headline and terrific fodder for leftists dying to smear Governor Kasich, even though the political activity in question was conducted on the staffers’ time off.

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A month after an election with mixed results for the small-government cause, Ohio conservatives are suffering through a very public GOP power struggle. Governor Kasich’s push to replace Ohio Republican Party (ORP) chairman Kevin DeWine has national implications: the Issue 2 campaign proved how low Democrats, Progressives, and unions (but I repeat myself) are willing to go to win the Buckeye state.

Sherrod Brown and Barack Obama would love nothing more than an Ohio divided, so let’s get this over with.

Even without the laundry list of inside-baseball complaints cited by House Speaker Bill Batchelder, it makes more sense than you might expect to oust DeWine despite ORP’s success riding the 2010 tea party wave.

Too many ORP leaders from the Taft era (concluded in 2007 amid scandal, scandal, scandal, and more scandal) were unprincipled go-along-to-get-along “moderates,” and signs abound that Kevin DeWine falls into that category. How could DeWine expect to chair an effective party in 2012 – to say nothing of 2014 – given his fracas with Governor Kasich? Why should anyone in the POTUS field trust that campaign stops with DeWine will reach the voters they need to reach?

Case in point, Romney and DeWine’s botched October visit to a Cincinnati call center, where Romney failed to endorse either of the issues volunteers were working to pass. Commentators speculated that Romney was being used as part of an ongoing DeWine/Kasich feud – not exactly the press coverage you want in a key swing state.

In early 2010, solid conservative candidates lined up for the attorney general and auditor races. ORP had other plans: enter Mike DeWine, Chairman DeWine’s cousin and a former US senator (lifetime ACU rating: 79.8) unseated by Sherrod Brown in a 2006 election fraught with Iraq war fatigue and aforementioned Taft-era scandals.

ORP nudged Dave Yost into running for auditor instead of attorney general, bumping Seth Morgan out of the picture to make room for Attorney General DeWine. DeWine narrowly defeated Richard Cordray – now President Obama’s Vital Bureaucrat of the Week – but DeWine family maneuvering contributed to lingering distrust between ORP and Ohio conservatives.

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One month ago Ohio voted with its heart against reforms portrayed as an attack on public workers. Ohio, DC, and New York union bosses spent more than $30 million drenching the airwaves in images of sad firefighters, sad police officers, and evil Republicans, convincing voters to overlook a broken status quo.

A month later, how are local governments celebrating the union victory on Issue 2?

Middletown is laying off 9 firefighters, despite the city’s police and fire budgets both increasing by nearly 1/3 in the past decade. In Hamilton, a $5.9 million death tax haul will delay the inevitable:

Inflation coupled with new technology costs and the significant rises in health care costs have contributed to the rise in safety services budgets [...]

The Hamilton fire union contract contains a minimum staffing clause, which means overtime if people are out sick or on vacation. When staffing dipped to 106 between 2008 and 2010, overtime was a significant factor in the fire budget increase, city officials have said.

Emphasis mine. Cleveland City School District is eliminating preschool, high school busing, and 75 security positions:

With labor costs making up the majority of school budgets, the district has sought to make up much of that ground through negotiations with unions representing Cleveland school employees. Negotiations with the teachers union have continued since March, with the district seeking significant pay concessions.

Westerville City School District is firing 62 support staff, cutting busing, and eliminating all sports:

Officials from the teachers union have said the plan also would cut about 175 teaching positions.

The proposed cuts follow a Nov. 8 levy defeat in which 61 percent of voters rejected a combined income-tax and property-tax request.

In Lancaster, where income- and property-tax issues also failed:

One of Lancaster’s three city firehouses was closed last month after the mayor laid off 13 firefighters to help balance the budget. The 68 firefighters remaining have predicted response times will increase in the city of about 37,000, but they could not say by how much.

In Trumbull County:

The state Controlling Board has approved an advance payment of more than $1.9 million to help the Liberty Township school district pay its bills.

The reforms in Issue 2 would’ve helped localities control health & pension costs, ended last-in-first-out layoffs, instituted merit pay, and equipped elected leaders with some flexibility at the expense of union bosses. Good thing we avoided that miserable fate!

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As Ohio’s SB5 (collective bargaining reform) goes to a vote on November 8th, pressure is being ramped up in the final week and a half. According to the Columbus Dispatch, unions and their fellow reform opponents have bankrolled the We Are Ohio anti-SB5 campaign to the tune of $19,048,680, dwarfing the pro-reform Building A Better Ohio’s $7.6 million.

Democrats and their union cronies have dominated Ohio for decades and the collective bargaining reforms signed into law earlier this year pose a very real threat to their continued base of power. As a result, the Democrats did something incredibly arrogant on Thursday afternoon when the official Twitter account for the Ohio Democratic Party released the names of several businesses that have contributed to SB5, then told their 4,000 followers to “contact them.”

Although the Ohio Democrats promised to tweet the names of the businesses and outside organizations “bankrolling unfair attacks on Ohio’s middle class,” they only listed three businesses before removing all four tweets. (more…)

A couple of weeks ago, we wrote a piece about how the left wing in Ohio has such a burning hatred for Governor John Kasich, that they will use any and every piece of news about him to launch an attack. Even when he makes a decision that is an act of compassion, they write some scathing critique, portraying him as evil incarnate.  When he reduced Kelley Williams-Bolar’s crimes to misdemeanors, even the most reliably liberal Ohio personalities agreed he did the right thing.  But the union supporting blog Plunderbund criticized his decision after they themselves had previously said she should eventually be pardoned. We summed it up as follows:

And yet they attack anyway. Personally, I could go either way on whether Williams-Bolar deserves leniancy or not. But I bring it up to show that when you’re this rabidly hateful of someone, I guess you will use every single possible thing he does as a reason to attack him. Even an act of compassion. Even if it means contradicting yourself.

Last week, however, they and the AFL-CIO sunk to a new low.  Check out this headline they ran, quoting him: ”Kasich on public employees: ‘we are at war with these people’.”   The union webpage repeats the same story and quote.

Wow. That’s a pretty fiery statement by Kasich.  Except, they have no proof he ever said it!  Zero.

Do they have the governor saying this on video?   No.

Do they have audio of Kasich saying this?   No.

Are they quoting a piece from a reputable news source who was at the event where this supposedly happened?  No.

Want to know where they got this supposed quote? You aren’t going to believe this.  It came from one of those viral emails that gets forwarded around by hundreds of different people. You know, the ones where when you receive it, your first reaction is to check Snopes to see if it is a hoax or not. One of those emails. Some school superintendent named Mike Shreffler wrote an email saying “Kasich said this!” and all the We Are Ohio lefty union clones forwarded it to each other as if it were rock solid fact.

Let’s look closer into Plunderbund’s own post to see even more.

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It sounds like a mythic tale of heroic salvation: A former Republican congressman with a fierce reputation as a cost-cutter comes out of retirement, runs for governor of one of the largest states in the country, and is swept into office by an anti-incumbent, anti-spending wave. Frustrated voters also give the new governor’s party control of both houses in the state’s legislature.

He promises to tackle a historic deficit by slashing spending in his first budget and then…tries to jack up spending by 11 percent during his first two years in office?

If the state of Ohio – “the Heart of it All” according to the state’s license plates – is a political weathervane, then Gov. John Kasich’s first proposed budget represents an ill wind for fiscal responsibility.

Kasich won a narrow victory in November by promising to create a business climate that would grow the state’s shrinking private sector, which has bled nearly 600,000 jobs since 2000. He inherited a historic $8 billion deficit, a consequence of out-of-control spending that spiked outlays by 41 percent in inflation-adjusted dolars since 1990. (That huge bump, incidentally, happened mostly under Republican legislators.)

To call Kasich’s opening budget a massive disappointment to the small-government proponents and Tea Party types who put him in office is an understatement.

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