Reform and resumes, or activism and empathy? Schron & Budish clash in county exec debate

Finally, the Cuyahoga County executive race is heating up. Armond Budish and Jack Schron’s debate today didn’t upend or shift the contest to succeed Ed FitzGerald, but it did provide voters a good sense of the choice they face.

Is it a resume battle? Another reform election? Or just a liberal vs. a conservative? At the City Club of Cleveland debate today at the Renaissance Cleveland Hotel, it was all three.

Budish, the former Ohio House speaker, started the race with an advantage because of the magic D next to his name. He presented himself as a passionate advocate for the poor, a resurgent town, and an active government. “The most important skill for a county executive [is] empathy for people,” Budish said.

Schron, the Republican county councilman, aimed his message at independents. He cast himself as the candidate with the best resume, the experienced CEO who’ll sustain the momentum of the county’s post-corruption reforms. “Cuyahoga County needs someone who’s been there,” Schron said, “someone who’s created jobs.”

Budish, running as a new-economy Democrat, tried to out-entrepreneur Schron, the CEO of Jergens, Inc. “It’s tough to get banks to invest in new startups,” the Democratic state representative said in his opening statement. He proposed creating a county venture capital authority and offering microloans, “maybe $25,000 that a small barbershop or corner store might need to expand.”

Schron asked voters to look beyond party labels and compare resumes to the job description. “[I’m] an executive in charge of a multinational corporation that makes things and sends them all over the world,” he said. He retold the story of Jergens, Inc.’s decision to build its headquarters in the old Collinwood rail yards. Its diverse workforce, he said, “looks like the city of Cleveland.”

Budish boxed Schron with a right jab and left hook on the county’s other main task besides job creation: caring for the poor. He stole an idea I first heard from Schron months ago: using iPads and smartphones to sign up more social-service clients. After Schron, too, talked up iPads, saying they could streamline services, Budish claimed Schron was too much the penny-pincher, focused “strictly” on bottom lines, “efficiencies and saving money.” Budish said he wants to lift more people out of poverty by connecting them to existing county programs.

Schron struck back. “I would say [Budish] doesn’t know what it takes to run an organization,” he said. Efficiencies in government would free up millions more dollars for social service efforts, Schron argued. Budish replied he hadn’t seen Schron propose legislation about efficiency.

Throughout the debate, Budish brought up partisan differences between him and Schron, while Schron argued that the county executive job should be nonpartisan. Budish went after Schron on labor rights, voting rights, and Medicaid expansion, issues more relevant to a statewide campaign than a local one. Schron reminded listeners that corruption had festered during the old county system’s one-party rule. He hit Budish for opposing the 2009 county charter that created the job he now wants. He also implied Budish will use it as a path to higher office. “We want somebody who actually wants to be here,” Schron said.

During the audience questions, Bruce Akers, a Republican and a framer of the charter, tried to get Budish to pledge to serve two terms. As usual, Budish implied he wants to be executive for a long time, but left himself wiggle room for 2018. “I’d like to stay as long as I can, but it’s going to be up to two things, my health and voters of this county,” Budish said. “To talk about a second term or third term [is] premature.” Schron pounced, and pledged to run for a second term if elected.

The debate did expose some previously unseen differences between the candidates. Schron is against creating a county department of sustainability (he says he values all jobs, not just green jobs). Budish said the county government could encourage local governments, businesses and homeowners to become more energy-efficient.

Budish said he “strongly supports” FitzGerald’s proposal to float a $50 million bond issue to demolish abandoned houses. He added that he wants it spent as part of a larger strategy that also includes rehabbing some vacant homes. Schron also asked smart questions about whether the $50 million would be spent strategically enough to have an impact, but he sounded like he’s not a sure vote on council for the plan.

Both candidates sounded smart, qualified, and relatively well-informed. No one won the debate – which, given the electorate’s partisan imbalance, works in Budish’s favor.

Really, Budish and Schron were debating a bigger question: what is this county executive position? Do you want a CEO-style leader, or an activist liberal? Will all future campaigns for the position focus on jobs and social services, much like all mayor’s races are about jobs, schools and safety? Is the county a second front for the partisan debates in Columbus, or will a less partisan executive be more effective? Do we still need to focus on a post-corruption spirit of reform and bipartisanship, or is it time to pivot to activist government?

Jackson slams Lanci’s motives at contentious City Club debate

Frank Jackson saved his toughest lines for the end. With an anger he’s rarely shown since his 2005 campaign, he ripped into challenger Ken Lanci’s reason for running for mayor at today’s City Club debate.

In his closing statement, Jackson teed off on Lanci’s oft-stated motivation, that the millionaire businessman decided to serve others after a near-fatal heart attack.

“When you face these challenges… from an ivory tower and just decide to move back to Cleveland because you believe you have a burden, you’re not going to get the result you need,” Jackson said.

For an hour today, Jackson and Lanci sparred on crime and education, the big two issues of any mayor’s race. Lanci aimed a blunderbuss at Jackson, calling the mayor a failure at both. He quoted Jackson lines from his 2005 campaign against Jane Campbell.

“We are worse off than we were four years ago,” Lanci said, echoing Jackson. “If I don’t restore hope to the ailing city within 200 days of taking office, I will consider myself a failure.”

In his opening statement, Jackson responded calmly with figures about City Hall spending in city neighborhoods. But by the end, he was worked up, in full populist mode.

Something about Lanci really gets under Jackson’s skin. That a rich businessman would move in from the suburbs to run against him rankles him. It gets him going on a favorite point, about “ivory tower” folks who don’t live working-class struggles. (“Ivory tower” usually means academia -- Jackson is really saying Lanci is acting out of noblesse oblige.)

“It is a contradiction of terms to empower those you intend to oppress,” Jackson said in his closing. “When someone is looking to feel good because they help somebody, that means that relationship always has to be in that way, where you’re in need, in order for them to feel good.

“I don’t feel good. This stuff is painful because I have to live it every day. It is painful when my wife, and my children, and my grandchildren, and their friends have to deal with this on a daily basis.”

Lanci blasted Jackson for the Cleveland schools’ F on the latest state report cards and declared Jackson’s old transformation plan and new school reforms failures. He also attacked Jackson for championing the school levy last year.

“Putting $70 million into the system, from people who could least afford it, is not going to get results,” Lanci said. “We have to mentor our children, and provide the leadership students don’t get in their homes.”

Lanci may have a point -- his idea of an enormous city-wide mentoring program reminds me of all-encompassing efforts, such as Promise Neighborhoods and the Harlem Children’s Zone, to improve kids’ academic achievement by improving the rest of their lives. But mentoring programs are paternalistic by definition, and Jackson pounced on that.

“It’s amazing -- children are the problems in school,” Jackson said. “Mothers being unmarried are the problems. It’s condescending and disrespectful, and it has a tone of disdain. You cannot serve those you disdain.”

Lanci tried to recover. “It’s disrespectful for the people of Cleveland to live with a failed school system,” he said.

But he struggled with a question from an audience member who noted that some have praised Jackson’s school plan as a national model. Lanci answered by quoting a teacher’s complaints about 100-degree classrooms in a heat wave and district staff jobs with jargony titles.

On crime and cops, the debate turned, as usual this year, on state attorney general Mike DeWine’s contention that last November’s 60-car police chase and fatal shooting was the result of a “systemic failure” in the police department. Moderator Rick Jackson brought up the quote, noted that Lanci got the police union’s endorsement, and asked him where he stood on the November incident.

Lanci repeated his campaign pledge that he’d fire safety director Martin Flask and police chief Michael McGrath. Then he went further, promising to let the police union pick the top candidates for chief for him to choose from. It was an attempt to blame the uncontrolled chase on the department’s leaders, not the officers who violated policy by joining the chase, and Jackson jumped on it.

“When [the police] union president [was] asked whether their opposition to the chief was because he was holding them accountable, he said absolutely so, that’s the only reason he wants him fired,” Jackson asserted.

“The systemic failure was not with the Cleveland police division,” Jackson argued, then turned to an attack on DeWine. “The systemic failure was with the attorney general’s office, denying due process and civil rights to the two victims. I’ve never heard you [Lanci] or the police union mention the two victims who were denied their due process and civil rights. And as a result of that, those officers are denied due process, because there’s no way in which even they can have a fair criminal hearing in regard to this, because it wasn’t done properly.”

The candidates' arguments showed how Cleveland can’t move past a simplistic either-or debate about the November chase and shooting. One side blames the leadership, one side the officers. No one ever holds both accountable.

The debate revealed more of Lanci’s platform: He said he wouldn’t continue the mayor’s attempt to develop the lakefront, that Cleveland has more urgent problems that trump building hotels. Instead, he said he’d focus on bringing container shipping, ferries, and lake cruise ships to the port.

In the debate’s weirdest moment, an audience member asked if Lanci had really told the teachers’ union in a questionnaire that he would have the Hell’s Angels and Zulu motorcycle clubs mentor seventh graders.

Lanci said he wants to bring back Golden Gloves boxing city-wide, so sons of single mothers have male mentors.

“I’ve asked some of the motorcycle clubs to sponsor teams, to be able to help mentor these kids, to give them something to belong to other than a gangbanger. We have to stop them from feeding that system. Even the motorcycle clubs are afraid of them. Because they don’t want to kill anybody. They know the consequences. The gangbangers don’t know.”

In his closing argument, Lanci promised an end to “broken promises and platitudes.” He slammed the mayor for his failed attempts to build a gasification plant and use a street-lighting contract to attract a lighting factory to town.

Then came Jackson’s brutal close, in which he painted Lanci as a do-gooder running to feel good. “I don’t go to a place of tragedy with hot dogs and hamburgers, to be disrespectful and condescending to that tragedy,” he said. The mayor’s campaign aide, Chris Nance, says he was talking about Lanci’s appearance on Imperial Avenue, site of Anthony Sowell’s 11 murders, earlier this year.

As Jackson finished, supporters of his, sitting near me, rejoiced gleefully. “This case is closed,” one said.

Brown-Mandel debate: The dodges, and what they revealed

Watch the dodge, watch the pivot. Pay attention to the answers the candidates don’t give. In a debate like Sherrod Brown and Josh Mandel’s today, with a rowdy crowd cheering attack lines we already heard in TV ads, it’s the best way to see the candidates for who they really are.

If you’ve followed the U.S. Senate race, most of today’s City Club debate between longtime liberal Brown and upstart conservative Mandel was pretty familiar. Mandel cast Brown as a failed Washington insider; Brown called Mandel overly ambitious and untrustworthy. Brown defended the auto bailout, health care law and economic stimulus; Mandel bashed the stimulus, the bank bailout, and part of the auto bailout.

The best moments came when a panel of journalists asked well-crafted questions, trying to get the candidates to say something new. The candidates mostly dodged, but the dodges revealed a lot.

-To Mandel: Doesn’t a no-tax pledge compromise your independence? Mandel has claimed he’ll be a less partisan senator than Brown. Tom Beres of Channel 3 poked a hole in that claim by asking Mandel why he signed conservative activist Grover Norquist’s pledge not to raise any taxes.

“You said if you got to Washington, you would not allow yourself to be bullied by political bosses or lobbyists or let anybody dictate to you [how] to vote,” Beres said. “Aren’t you already sacrificing your independence?”

“I’m proud to stand up for lower taxes in our state [and] our country,” Mandel replied. He talked about his role reducing property taxes as a Lyndhurst city councilman and trying to abolish Ohio’s estate tax. Left unanswered was how Mandel could compromise with Democrats and reach a budget deal if he’ll never raise a tax.

-To Brown: What would you give up to solve the fiscal crisis? Henry Gomez of the Plain Dealer asked Brown how Congress can avoid the “fiscal cliff,” the deep spending cuts and expiring tax cuts that hit Jan. 1 and could plunge the country into a new recession.

“What should happen in the lame-duck session?” Gomez asked. “What would you give up?”

Brown quickly called for a “balanced approach” -- the Democrats’ catch phrase for a mix of spending cuts and higher taxes. Then he went back to 1993 to assert his budget-balancing bona fides, citing his vote for that year’s budget deal (which raised income taxes on the wealthy and cut them for the poor). Brown began to blame the deficit on the Iraq war when Gomez interrupted him.

“What should happen in these next few months to address this problem?” Gomez asked. A balanced approach following the same principles, Brown repeated.

After rejoicing that Gomez had challenged Brown, Mandel responded that he’d save money by closing some military bases in Europe. That might not be enough to solve the fiscal crisis, but it was a more specific answer than Brown’s.

-To Mandel: Did the auto bailout help Ohio? Until today, Mandel has been vague about how he would’ve voted on the auto bailout. Instead, he’s blasted Brown for one aspect of it, the fact that it caused some workers at the auto parts supplier Delphi to lose their pensions.

“Do you believe, on balance, that the auto bailout has a boon for the Ohio economy?” Tom Troy of the Toledo Blade asked Mandel.

“I would not have voted for that,” Mandel said. “I couldn’t have, because it stripped from middle class retirees their pensions.”

But Mandel didn’t answer Troy’s question: whether the auto bailout did more good than harm in Ohio. Brown pounced, noting that Republicans George Voinovich and Steve LaTourette also voted for it. “To be against the auto rescue just boggles my mind,” he said.

-To Brown: What free-trade deals would you vote for? Brown is one of Congress’ most reliable opponents of free-trade agreements. Gomez mentioned the senator’s opposition to free trade deals with Colombia, Peru and South Korea and asked what would ever lead him to support a trade deal.

“These trade agreements have clearly sold out the middle class,” Brown said. He argued that Obama’s enforcement of trade rules had led the opening of a steel mill in Youngstown. He said he’d written legislation about the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade talks “that will make a difference in putting trade agreements on the side of American workers and American manufacturers.”

What Brown didn’t say was that he’s almost never met a trade deal he liked. He’s only voted for one in two decades: a 2000 agreement with Jordan.

-To Mandel: How would you pay for the popular parts of the health care law? “As unpopular as Obamacare is among conservatives, some elements of the plan have popular support,” Troy noted. He asked Mandel how the government could maintain those goals, such as requiring insurance companies to accept people with preexisting conditions, without requiring people to buy coverage.

“We’d have to make cuts in other parts of the government,” Mandel said. “In order to pay for covering folks with pre-existing conditions, young adults on their parents’ insurance, if there’s leaders in Washington who want to do that without Obamacare on the books, we’ve got to make significant cuts.”

It’s a confusing answer. How would he help people with pre-existing conditions? Does he mean he’d have the government pay insurance companies to insure them? Or pay to set up a high-risk insurance pool? He didn’t say, and his website’s health care page doesn’t either.

People in the audience of 1,300 definitely noticed most of the dodges. The Renaissance Cleveland Hotel ballroom buzzed as Mandel meandered through his answer on the auto bailout and as Brown tried to steer his answer away from the fiscal cliff. Partisans on both sides cheered and laughed and razzed the candidates, loudly interrupting the debate several times but also calling out Brown and Mandel when they wouldn’t give a straight answer.

Live-tweeting Brown-Mandel debate today

I'm live-tweeting the City Club's U.S. Senate debate between Sen. Sherrod Brown and challenger Josh Mandel today.  It starts at 12:30.  Click here to read my tweets during the debate. 

I'll be posting a report about the debate here this afternoon.

My live coverage of Dems' county executive debate

The leading Democratic candidates for county executive -- Ed FitzGerald and Terri Hamilton Brown -- are debating at 12:30 p.m. today at the City Club. (Minor candidates James F. Brown and Dianna Hill did not accept the club's invitation.) I'll be covering the debate live on Cleveland Magazine's Twitter feed and blogging about it this afternoon.

To read my tweets, click here.

Patmon challenges Jackson at City Club

Today was Bill Patmon’s one big chance. For an hour, his lack of money, ads, and campaign staff didn’t matter. At the City Club debate, he challenged Mayor Frank Jackson as an equal. Criticizing Jackson's record and quiet persona, Patmon argued that Cleveland can only succeed with a more forceful mayor.

"I ran because there is a decade of decline going on in this city," Patmon said, noting that Jackson has been mayor or city council president for most of that time. "During that decade, we've lost hundreds of jobs, 22,000 students have left the Cleveland Municipal School District, and our neighborhoods has become ground zero for foreclosure." Only one U.S. city has lost population faster than Cleveland, he said: "That's New Orleans. And I haven't seen a tsunami or hurricane or anything else blow through Cleveland."

Patmon charged Jackson hadn't fulfilled the vision he articulated when he first ran for mayor. "I remember 2005. There was someone who said, 'Expect great things.' I'm still waiting. There was somebody who said, 'Make the city a city of choice.' We're losing 6,000 [residents] a year."

"You should expect great things," Jackson replied. "And you know what? There's no promises I haven't made -- just check my 2005 campaign -- that I have not either fulfilled, or worked on and made substantial progress on.

"There is no distinction between campaigning and governing," Jackson added, then jabbed at Patmon's political ambition: "Some of us like the game, and I do the work."

The mayor, calm as ever, reiterated the themes that gave him a runaway lead in September's primary: a balanced budget with no layoffs and increased services in his four years as mayor, 3,600 vacant buildings demolished, overseas travels to bring business to town, support for the Medical Mart and the new port.

"If you look at Cleveland, and compare us to other urban centers, I don't think we're that bad off," the mayor said. "I really don’t."

Patmon dented Jackson's incumbent's armor on the issue of the Cleveland public schools, citing their low graduation rate and saying he would replace Cleveland schools CEO Eugene Sanders: "If the superintendent can't do the job, he should find another job."

The challenger used the Monday assaults against two Cleveland School of the Arts students against Sanders and Jackson: "Our most talented children can't walk down the streets of Glenville, can't walk down the street with an iPod, because of a poor decision on where to locate them." A CSA student in the audience seconded Patmon's complaint during the Q&A, telling the candidates he was afraid to go to school. Patmon said he hoped CSA will be moved from its temporary location near E. 107th and Superior.

Jackson told the student the police are now on top of the problem. Prompted by moderator Dan Moulthrop, Jackson said the school won't be moved. "Regardless of where children go to school, they have a right to be safe in school and out," he said.

The mayor said he still has confidence in Sanders. "Even though graduation is low, which is unacceptable, the same report card said there was value added" -- which means that Cleveland students outperformed the state's expectations. Between successes with magnet schools, conversations about bringing well-performing charter schools into the school system, and a pending report about how to "right-size" the district (close schools because of declining enrollment), Jackson said, "I think Dr. Sanders has done a very good job positioning us going forward, and 2010 will be the proof."

Patmon offered some new economic development ideas: creating a series of business incubators and a business center to make it easier for companies to interact with City Hall. He wants to use the city's public utilities, which spend almost a half-billion dollars a year, to stimulate a greener energy economy. Federal stimulus money could bring solar energy facilities to town, and the schools should teach eco-friendly LEED certification, he said to applause.

But the challenger's assertion that he would have tried to buy National City when it faltered and made it a city-owned bank (using federal bank bailout money, I think) drew no response from the crowd. When he said he would triple city spending on economic development to $4 million a year, Moulthrop cut him off.

"Where would you cut?" the moderator asked.

Patmon gave the eternal response of all political challengers. "There's enough waste, you don't have to cut anything," he said. "You also have to grow the pie."

That gave Jackson an opening. "Can I respond? First of all, I do not waste anything," the mayor asserted. He made the case for himself as a financial steward, saying he talked weekly with a group called Operation Efficiency, which has spent his first term looking for cost savings in City Hall. Now, with the budget still tightening, another consultant is digging deeper, he said. Jackson's answer partially blunted Patmon's prediction that big holes will appear in the city budget in 2010.

The debate ended with Jackson and Patmon pitching themselves as optimists who refused to accept Cleveland's decline. Moulthrop asked them about a recent think tank report that says Cleveland should accept its shrinking population as inevitable and focus its resources on certain vital neighborhoods.

"I absolutely disagree, categorically, with every fiber in my body," Patmon said. "If other cities can grow themselves, what's wrong with us?"

"We should not be dealing with a shrinking city," Jackson said. "I come from a neighborhood, if you we were to follow that pattern, it would never exist. We turned that neighborhood around. And there are good people there."

Patmon suggested Cleveland needs a stronger mayor. "The difference between good cities and great cities is leadership," he said, then added that leadership is also "the difference between good cities and failed cities."

Jackson's closing statement rose to a peculiar crescendo: a play on the phrase "It is what it is," which Patmon and others attack him for saying. "No layoffs, no reduction in service! It is what it is!" the mayor said. His supporters cheered. Councilwoman Sabra Pierce Scott shook with excitement, almost dancing in her seat, then high-fived the woman next to her -- a surprising amount of enthusiasm for a steady performance from a soft-spoken, workmanlike mayor.

If you'd like to watch the debate, the City Club is posting it on YouTube.

City Club announces debates for mayor, ballot issues

The City Club announced its election debates today.

-Tomorrow, Wed., Oct. 14, county commissioner Peter Lawson Jones and Parma Heights Mayor Martin Zanotti debate Issues 5 and 6, the county reform plans.

-Mon., Oct. 19, Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert and Youngstown Mayor Jay Williams debate Issue 3, the casino proposal. (Gilbert plans to open a casino in Cleveland if 3 passes; Williams is against 3.)

-Wed., Oct. 21, radio host Tom Kelly and attorney Ron Johnson debate Issues 5 and 6. Both represent slates running for the county charter review commission that Issue 5 would create. Kelly is with the Citizens Reform Association slate, which supports Issue 6's idea of a county executive form of government. Johnson is part of the Real Reform Done Right slate, which opposes 6.

-Wed., Oct. 28, Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson debates his opponent, former city councilman Bill Patmon.

The events kick off at noon with lunch. The debates start at 12:30 pm. They're all going to be broadcast live on WCPN, 90.3 FM. They should also be available online as live webcasts and as podcasts afterward.

I plan to blog about the Jones-Zanotti debate and the Jackson-Patmon debate.