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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2010 > May > 03
Monday, May 3, 2010
Editorial: Strickland gives inmates too much rope
So much for the effort by top officials at the Ohio Department of Public Safety and the State Highway Patrol to spare Gov. Ted Strickland embarrassment.
The state’s independent watchdog released a 48-page report last week criticizing the head of the Department of Public Safety and the Patrol for nixing a criminal investigation that would have been routine but for the fact that it was to occur at the governor’s home.
The Patrol suspected that so-called “honor” inmates who work at the governor’s mansion were running a lucrative tobacco-smuggling operation. Since smoking has been outlawed in prisons, cigarettes are a hot commodity, with cigarette butts going for as much as $25 behind bars.
At the last minute, Public Safety Director Cathy Collins-Taylor, who oversees the Patrol, canceled the operation, according to the Office of the Inspector General, out of fear that the sting would make the governor look bad.
Director Collins-Taylor denies the conclusion, as does the head of the Highway Patrol, who says he called the whole thing off because he was worried about the safety of the governor, his wife and former U.S. Sen. John Glenn and his wife. The Glenns were going to be dining with the governor at the appointed time.
Even if the cancellation happened exactly the way Director Collins-Taylor and Patrol Superintendent David Dicken insist it did, the procedure was nuts. Director Collins-Taylor ordered law enforcement to go to the home of the woman scheduled to make the tobacco drop and tell her not to do so, warning that she would face arrest.
Inspector General Tom Charles didn’t find that Gov. Strickland or his top advisers had any role in stopping the sting. But the governor, a former prison psychologist, is implicitly criticized for insisting that inmates working at the mansion — a practice that dates back to the 1960s — have so much autonomy and freedom.
In an effort to show trust, reasonable precautions haven’t been taken. The inmates sometimes are supervised by maids; they have access to axes, chain saws and knives; they are allowed outside the mansion’s fenced area; they’re not required to wear clothes identifying them as inmates, and on and on the license goes.
Meanwhile, there are no clear rules about who’s responsible for the prisoners.
Prison officials don’t have supervisory authority (at the request of the governor and his wife); the Patrol, which is responsible for the governor’s security at and away from the mansion, isn’t in charge; and the Department of Administrative Services hasn’t taken responsibility, though it oversees the mansion.
If only for the sake of his neighbors — who are entitled to know that the inmates are under somebody’s watchful eye — Gov. Strickland can’t be so dismissive of the investigation or the criticism of his appointees.
“I don’t know that decisions were made to protect me from some kind of embarrassment,” he said. “If that occurred, it was certainly unnecessary. I believe that the actions were … undertaken in good faith with no nefarious or bad intent.”
He also needs to take responsibility for his own role in creating a climate that allowed prisoners to stash tobacco in his home and to think they could get by with picking up contraband on the street in broad daylight.
Finally, there’s the matter of Director Collins-Taylor, who hasn’t been confirmed by the Senate. Inspector General Charles accuses her of lying, hampering his investigation and of putting politics above police work.
Some people think Inspector General Charles is being too harsh. He’s a former state trooper, and the Patrol has been at war with the Strickland administration. In addition, his wife, Patrol Capt. Brigette Charles, is one of 11 people who interviewed for the Patrol superintendent’s post, but she did not get it.
Director Collins-Taylor is undoubtedly going to have a tough time before the Republican-controlled Senate. But when there’s a serious suspicion that she lied under oath, she should face brutal questioning.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Law Enforcement and Public Safety, Ohio government, Ohio politics
Editorial: Primaries show parties in different worlds
Two different worlds. We live in two different worlds…
So far apart.
They say we’re so far apart
And that we haven’t the right
To change our destiny.
That old pop tune — carefully excerpted here to minimize the boy-girl aspect — comes to mind if you listen much to the candidates in Tuesday’s primaries.
Not that the candidates actually facing each other are in different worlds. But the candidates in one party’s primaries are in a different world from those in the other’s.
In the world of Democratic candidates, the nation’s economic problems derive from the excesses of deregulation under a Republican president and Congress, and from the resulting excesses on Wall Street. In the Republican world, the problem is big government. And that’s just the beginning of the description of the great divide.
It’s like people haven’t been living in the same place.
In neither party is there any hot debate about the big issues, though in the Republican Party, some candidates are trying to pull incumbents even further from the center.
(An exception is U.S. Rep. John Boehner’s run for re-election. His politically weak Republican challengers find him too predictably conservative.)
In Florida, the rope pulling candidates away from the political center has finally snapped. Moderate Gov. Charlie Crist has given up on being nominated for the U.S. Senate by the Republicans, and has decided to run as an independent.
He got in trouble with the Republicans for hugging President Barack Obama and for praising the Obama stimulus package that virtually all Republicans in Congress had opposed.
Independent candidacies like Gov. Crist’s may be the best bet for lubricating the political system. So long as the two parties are always in reach of legislative majorities (or, in the case of the U.S. Senate, a 40-percent minority), they tend to put all their hopes on success through party loyalty, that is, through partisanship.
(A new study from the Brookings Institution finds that the most conservative Democrat in Congress is more liberal than the most liberal Republican. “The center has disappeared,” says the author.)
But a Crist-like candidacy is terribly difficult to launch. A candidate who doesn’t have a major party vouching for him typically has to start with a major public reputation.
But people who have already been elected under a party’s banner don’t want to split with the party if they can possibly avoid it.
They have to be practically kicked out.
In 2006, Connecticut’s popular Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman lost a primary entirely because his opponent was a staunch opponent of the Iraq war. So he ran as an independent and won. That was the last time something like this happened.
In Ohio, it’s possible to imagine a relative moderate like Sen. George Voinovich being challenged in a primary, facing defeat and turning in the Crist direction.
But such a scenario is way against the odds for a lot of reasons, not the least being that Sen. Voinovich (who’s retiring) has been with his party on the biggest issues.
There’d probably have to be some really big, hot-button issue separating him from the conservatives.
If such a candidate did break free of a party, a lot of voters would be receptive. Look how easily Gary Leitzell was elected mayor of Dayton as an independent, without big money, a big organization or name recognition. True, he’d have a much harder time at a higher level, because the fighting conservatives and liberals concentrate their efforts there. They shape the playing field.
But the point remains: the public doesn’t start out hostile to the idea of an independent.
The song ends:
But we will show them,
As we walk together in the sun,
That our two different worlds are one.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Elections, Martin Gottlieb, Miami Valley Politics, National Politics, Ohio politics
