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Cleveland
Plain Dealer...
Kasich
is different, and that’s not
all bad: Thomas Suddes
By Thomas Suddes
August 30, 2011
One
of Ohio’s tragedies is that the
late Burton B. (“Buddy”) Kallick, a one-time owner of, and TV pitchman
for,
Buddy’s Carpet -- “I don’t care about making money, I just LOVE to sell
carpet”
-- never got into state politics.
Mr.
Kallick, then of Fairfield,
pyramided his spiel into prosperity (and, before he died in 2007, a
federal tax
fraud indictment). In zany, unscripted TV commercials, which sold acres
of
carpet, he took a Silly Putty approach to the English language: No need
to
break it; just shape it.
Columbus
officeholders and lobbyists
seem to have stolen that concept from Mr. Kallick, whose brother once
told The
Cincinnati Enquirer, “You talk to [Buddy] long enough, and he’ll
convince you
today’s Monday.”
So,
for a generation now, Ohioans have
been swamped with words more often than they have been offered real
change.
That,
and economic conditions, may be
why there is such orneriness in Ohio politics. That’s almost
understandable.
But what isn’t understandable is the fact that voters and officeholders
alike
often won’t admit that the same old way of doing things doesn’t work
anymore.
One
of America’s foremost radical historians,
the late William Appleman Williams, was a specialist in U.S. diplomatic
history. But his definition of “statesmanship” is one that can apply to
domestic and local politics as well. In his classic study, “The Tragedy
of
American Diplomacy,” Williams wrote:
“Politicians
become statesmen, not by
honoring pious shibboleths, nor even by moving men to action with
inspiring
rhetoric, but by recognizing and then resolving the central dilemmas of
their
age.”
That
is to say, words and promises are
as nothing. It’s the “vision thing” that matters. But too few Ohio
officeholders have it.
Today,
you have to wonder what would
happen if Ohio’s 1913 floods recurred, and another James M. Cox were
governor.
The
bipartisan efforts to tame the
Miami and other Ohio rivers might be lambasted as some kind of
socialism --
“big gummint” run wild.
Likewise,
whether or not an Ohioan
agreed with the first Bob Taft (Ohio did give him three U.S. Senate
terms),
there’s no question his perspective on foreign policy might have kept
the
United States from becoming, today, the world’s unpaid, unappreciated
-- and,
face it, often unwanted -- cop.
Taft
also believed the federal
government has, or should have, a role in promoting public housing. Can
anyone
imagine one of today’s purported conservatives arguing that? Of course,
a lot
of what passes for conservatism is just meanness -- a “principled” way
to be
nasty.
The
sad truth is that for too long,
Ohio officeholders have essentially pledged to -- and tried to --
uphold the status
quo. (An honorable exception was Democrat John J. Gilligan.)
The
late Republican Gov. James A.
Rhodes’ many admirers would include him in the roster of Ohio
visionaries. But
while Mr. Rhodes was and remains perhaps this state’s greatest modern
practitioner
of nuts-and-bolts politics, he didn’t poise Ohio for a world in which
service
jobs would replace factory jobs.
That
doesn’t mean Rhodes didn’t do a
lot of other things Ohio needed. But he didn’t do that.
Which
brings us to our often annoying
and typically impulsive incumbent governor, Westerville Republican John
Kasich,
whose personality can get in the way of his plans.
The
fact is Ohio has been treading
water for way too long, regardless of party. No one can say Kasich runs
a
business-as-usual administration. Business-as-usual administrations got
Ohio
where it is today. Can anyone really think that’s a good place for it
to be?
Read
it at the Cleveland Plain Dealer
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