Quiet mayor wins landslide; Jeff Johnson's comeback complete; will Sweeney hold on as council president?

He is who he is, and that's fine with Cleveland voters: Mayor Frank Jackson, the quiet and workmanlike mayor, buried his challenger in a landslide yesterday, winning 78% of the vote.

It's been interesting, in the last year, to watch business and media elites accept the soft-spoken, unambitious, competent mayor and shed their yearning for a pulpit-pounding, charismatic strongman mayor (like, say, Akron's Don Plusquellic). Last week at the City Club debate, former councilman Bill Patmon did his best to project himself as the forceful-mayor type, to no avail. Jackson held his ground, explaining details of his work to deliver services and trim the budget.

Patmon may be right that Jackson will soon have to carry out the sort of sweeping budget cuts he campaigned on having avoided -- Henry Gomez predicts as much in the Plain Dealer today -- but voters trust Jackson to make those decisions. Meanwhile, the people who want mayors to use the bully pulpit to rally the region can turn their attention to who the first county executive will be.

In Glenville's Ward 8, voters returned Jeff Johnson to city council, 20 years after he left it to become a state senator, and 10 years after he left the state senate to serve a prison term for extortion. Johnson worked his way back to the public's trust by serving in Jane Campbell's administration and working for the Ohio Legislative Black Caucus. Now, it seems, his rehabilitation is complete. (To read Cleveland Magazine's 1999 profile, "The Rise and Fall of Jeff Johnson," click here.)

Now, the political action at City Hall shifts to the council presidency. Johnson's election, and Zack Reed and Brian Cummins' victories in spite of redistricting, weaken Martin Sweeney's hold on the job. He and rival Matt Zone are competing for the 10 of 19 votes needed to be elected leader. The PD's Gomez has the news on this contest -- he reports that Sweeney got his council colleagues together at the Lancer Steakhouse last night, no doubt to try to consolidate support. A caucus vote on the presidency should come tomorrow; here's Gomez's handicapping.

Update, 11/5: Sweeney won.

Big leads for Issue 6, Mayor Jackson in early voting

A plan for a new Cuyahoga County goverment has a 2-1 lead in results from early voting, and Mayor Frank Jackson leads challenger Bill Patmon by almost 4-1, just-posted results from the board of elections show.

Issue 6, which would create a county executive and 11-member county council, has 102,000 votes for it and 53,000 against in the absentee ballot results. The competing Issue 5, which would create a charter commission to write a different reform plan, is losing more than 2-1, or 45,000 yes to 107,000 no.

Frank Jackson is out to a huge lead, 23,700 votes to 6,300, in his bid for a second term as mayor.

Most Cleveland city council members have solid leads, with three exceptions.

Former state Sen. Jeff Johnson is ahead of recent council appointee Shari Cloud in Glenville's Ward 8. Councilman Brian Cummins is somewhat ahead of Rick Nagin in Ward 14 on the near west side. Phyllis Cleveland in the Central neighborhood's Ward 5 is ahead of challenger Pernel Jones by only 35 votes. Each race could affect whether council president Martin Sweeney holds onto his job.

Absentee ballot totals can be a good early guide to where an election is going -- and now that it's so easy to vote by mail in Ohio, they make up a lot of the total vote.

Complete results aren't expected in Cuyahoga County until early morning.

Cleveland votes for mayor and city council tomorrow

Tomorrow, Cleveland will decide whether to replace Mayor Frank Jackson with challenger Bill Patmon. If you're looking for information about the candidates, here are some links:

-my coverage of their Wednesday debate
-a podcast of their appearance on WCPN last week
-the Plain Dealer's September analysis of Mayor Jackson's first term and the issues in the campaign
-the mayor's and Patmon's campaign websites

Voters in most city wards will cast a vote for city council too. The results may determine whether Jackson ally Martin Sweeney remains city council president, or whether Matt Zone, who would presumably lead council in a more independent direction, can unseat him. Henry Gomez's ward-by-ward look at who supports Sweeney and who may be a swing vote is interesting reading -- and one factor voters could look at as they decide which council candidate to choose in their ward.

The polls are open 6:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. Tuesday. To look up your voting location and see a sample ballot for your precinct, 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.

Patmon gets newspaper endorsement -- from Renner's Independent

"Bill Patmon Must Win!" shouts the cover of The Independent, the new alternative newspaper from ex-Scene writer James Renner. I'm sure the mayoral challenger would rather have gotten endorsed by the Plain Dealer or Crain's or the Call & Post -- Renner's endorsement editorial, titled "How you should vote if you're not a total d-bag," is unlikely to pop up on billpatmonformayor.com. {Update, 10/29: Wrong!}

Still, it must have cheered Patmon up to travel the city this week and see his proud, slightly smiling face next to the cover type, "Why this man should be Cleveland's next mayor." (The October issue, available at several bars and bookstores, is the third edition of the alternative monthly, which includes lots of cheeky political coverage and the whodunit crime investigations Renner's best known for.)

Jackson, Renner argues, has "fumbled away any real involvement in the Med Mart deal, a development opportunity the city should have had a say in." Patmon, he says, "has a plan, in fact several, for Cleveland ... real, doable improvements." The challenger outlines a few in an interview with the paper: using Cleveland Public Power to create green jobs, creating an immigrant welcome center, and breaking the school system into five sub-districts.

Two weeks before Election Day, Patmon is tearing into Jackson on the Cleveland schools, calling his education record "a dismal failure." Patmon has an op-ed in Sunday's Plain Dealer that notes the city's schools have a much lower graduation rate than any other big Ohio school district. Cleveland's district has more administrators and pays its top administrators more than the Columbus school district, which has more students enrolled, he adds.

I'd link to Patmon's op-ed, but it hasn't been posted on cleveland.com. His op-ed from last weekend, criticizing the plan to move the port, is online, along with the mayor's pro-port op-ed.

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.

Mayor gets 72% in tiny turnout; Patmon edges Kilo, goes on to November

Mayor Frank Jackson scored a huge but somewhat hollow victory tonight, winning 72 percent of the vote in a primary with extremely low turnout.

Jackson is at 24,085 votes, while former city councilman Bill Patmon has edged out businessman Robert Kilo for second place, 3,748 to 3,328, with all but one of the city's 345 precincts reporting.

That 72 percent to 11 percent spread cannot be encouraging for Patmon. But at least Cleveland will get a lively debate this fall with Patmon as Jackson's challenger. With his 12 years of experience on council, Patmon knows City Hall and knows how to campaign and make a case against an opponent. He's challenged the mayor on the city budget, the proposed port expansion, and leadership style. (Here is a profile I wrote about Patmon in 2001.)

If Kilo had finished second (which looked like a real possibility for much of tonight), the mayor's race would've been completely docile and uneventful -- at least, judging by Kilo's repeated praise for Jackson and vague message in the City Club debate last week. Kilo's disciplined businessman's approach to the campaign and his very religious message obviously appealed to a decent number of voters. But if Kilo had beaten the much more politically experienced Patmon, it also surely would have been proof that race can still be a deciding factor in Cleveland elections.

Instead, the biggest news is that a wide range of voters seem comfortable with Jackson, receptive to his steady but quiet leadership and thankful for his balanced budgets. On the other hand, Jackson and his challengers did not excite passion. Only about 33,000 people out of a city of 440,000 showed up to vote.

Here's a link to all of tonight's election results.

Mayoral candidates debate at City Club

The five candidates for mayor debated at the City Club yesterday. You can download the podcast here if you'd like to listen. Here's WKYC-TV's coverage of the event.



I couldn't make it, but Henry Gomez did. The Plain Dealer's City Hall reporter was unimpressed. "Jackson's opponents miss key chance to score points," reads the huge headline on his analysis on page 1B today. (He's followed up with further thoughts on his City Hall blog.) But Leon Bibb of NewsChannel 5 says the challengers hit the mayor on the state of the Cleveland schools.

This isn't the first time the candidates have debated. Gomez live-blogged from an August debate in the Lee-Harvard neighborhood: you can read his reports here and here.

WKYC, WCPN interview 5 candidates for mayor

In an election like Cleveland's race for mayor, reporters have a dilemma: do they give equal time to all the candidates, or do they use their news judgment, and the candidates' experience and past success, to figure out who the front-runners are?

If you don't want reporters handicapping the field, if you want equal info about all five candidates for mayor, then check out the interviews on wkyc.com and wcpn.org.

Tom Beres, Channel 3's veteran politics reporter, has posted his video interviews with the candidates. Here are the links to Frank Jackson, Bill Patmon, Kimberly Brown, Robert Kilo, and Laverne Jones Gore. (The videos take a few seconds to appear.)

WCPN reporters Rick Jackson and Eric Wellman have also interviewed everyone. Here are the links to podcasts of the interviews with Laverne Jones Gore, Robert Kilo, Kimberly Brown, Bill Patmon, and Frank Jackson.

The Plain Dealer has played it both ways. City Hall reporter Henry Gomez interviewed all five candidates and analyzed the race on the same day, then evaluated the mayor's first term and let all four challengers take their shots at him.

The City Club mayoral debate is tomorrow at 12:30 p.m. You can watch a live webcast or listen to a podcast afterwards. It'll be broadcast on WCPN, 90.3 FM, at 8 p.m. tomorrow night.

And if all this equality seems way too neutral for a blog, here's my handicapping.

Patmon: more immigrants, more business retention, better schools

Tom Beres, political reporter for WKYC TV 3, plans to interview all five candidates for Cleveland mayor and post the interviews and stories from them on wkyc.com. He leads off with Bill Patmon, the former city councilman.

Patmon tells Beres that Cleveland needs to fight population loss by attracting immigrants. He says Mayor Frank Jackson should have tried much harder to keep Eaton Corp. from leaving the city. He gives schools CEO Eugene Sanders a mixed review, saying the school system "does not work." Beres' interviews with other candidates should appear on wkyc.com soon.

Henry Gomez of the Plain Dealer also interviewed all five candidates for a package of stories that ran Sunday. Patmon, former chair of council's finance committee, criticized Jackson on a subject that's considered one of the mayor's strengths: City Hall's balanced budget. Patmon thinks Jackson should have saved some of a $29 million surplus for 2010 instead of using it all to balance the 2009 budget.

That gets Jackson worked up. He says the criticism shows a "lack of maturity" and suggests he would've had to lay off employees if he hadn't used the surplus. Doesn't that sound like layoffs might loom next year, if the economy and tax revenues don't roar back?

Meanwhile, Cleveland votes in 5 weeks

Seems like all the political action's been at the county this year, thanks to the corruption investigation, Medical Mart, and dueling reform plans. But Cleveland's primary election is only 35 days away, and it's just starting to attract attention.

City voters will narrow down the mayor's race to two candidates on Sept. 8, and eight of the city's 19 wards will have city council primaries.

That day, we'll find out which challenger will survive to take on Frank Jackson in November, and the size of the Jackson and anti-Jackson vote totals. (I simply cannot imagine a late-breaking scandal so ruinous that it could knock the mayor out of finishing first or second.)

Here are the websites of the candidates running against Jackson: Bill Patmon, Laverne Jones Gore, Kimberly Brown, and Robert Kilo. My money is on Patmon to make it through the primary. His 12 years on city council give him some name recognition and the best credentials in the race. (He's also tweeting.)

For the city council races, the best source is Plain Dealer reporter Henry Gomez's Inside Cleveland City Hall blog. Though little of his reporting has made the paper's print edition, Gomez is working hard covering those eight primaries. Here's a complete set of links to his coverage so far. (And here's a ward map, if it helps you follow along. The wards with a primary are 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 14 and 18.)

The most intense race is in Ward 14, where councilmen Joe Santiago and Brian Cummins are running against each other thanks to redistricting, and a former councilman, Nelson Cintron, is trying to make a comeback. The near West Side ward includes Clark-Fulton, a neighborhood with a lot of Hispanic residents. Cummins hopes Santiago is weakened by the controversies during his term on council: he supported bars that people living nearby wanted shut down. Cintron, whom Santiago unseated in 2005, joined in the recall effort against his archrival two years ago.

The strangest race is in Ward 6, a weirdly gerrymandered East Side ward that includes the Buckeye-Shaker neighborhood. Incumbent Mamie Mitchell is trying to fend off four challengers, a couple of whom have rap sheets. Her feistiest challenger is John Boyd, who murdered a man while robbing a gambling house in 1973, when he was 16. She defeated him in a special election last year. Another challenger, Alvin Thompson, was convicted of gross sexual imposition involving his ex-wife in 1999. He says he didn't do it, and showed Plain Dealer reporters a doctor's note suggesting he was impotent and thus incapable of the crime.

The most dramatic comeback attempt is in Glenville's Ward 8, where former state senator and city councilman Jeff Johnson is trying to return to politics 10 years after going to prison on an extortion conviction. He's one of three candidates challenging Shari Cloud, who was appointed to the council seat a few months ago, when Sabra Pierce Scott resigned. She'll have support from council president Martin Sweeney. Roldo Bartimole recently wrote about his memories of Johnson and suggested he could add "sparkle" and "vision" to city council.

Speaking of big personalities, Zack Reed is running in a new ward -- Ward 2 in the city's southeast -- trying to stay on council even though his old ward got sliced up in redistricting. Six others want the job too. It's an open seat, because former councilman Robert White was convicted of bribery, and the guy appointed to replace him, Nathaniel Wilkes, isn't running. Wilkes won't endorse Reed, which will help keep the race competitive.

Lots of people want to represent South Collinwood's Ward 10. Former state Rep. Eugene Miller, who was appointed when Roosevelt Coats resigned this year, faces six challengers. Longtime councilman Ken Johnson and council president Martin Sweeney each face two opponents, and one-term incumbent Phyllis Cleveland has three.

Roldo studies Frank Jackson, "caretaker Mayor"

Reporters have a hard time getting their minds and pens around Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson. They expect mayors to lead through stirring words, to exude charisma, to embody the city in an exciting way. Then their expectations run up against Jackson, and fail. He is the opposite of all that.

Roldo Bartimole is the latest to take on Jackson, the low-key enigma. For his new piece, "Mayor Jackson: A Mayor for the Times?", he interviews Jackson about his late friend Lonnie Burten, a city councilman in the 1980s. Roldo's piece revives vivid memories of Burten, then judges Jackson as a politician and mayor. He perceptively notes Jackson's lack of ambition, so unusual in an elected official. He notices Jackson's wariness, his "streak of stubbornness," his loyalty to his neighborhood. (I've seen these traits in Jackson too, when I wrote about him in a 2006 profile, "The Populist.")

"He projects a steady hand at the helm, even if that’s the mark of a caretaker Mayor," Roldo writes. I would have expected Roldo to be satisfied with that. He and Jackson have a lot in common. They're both longtime students of how the city runs. Both have populist streaks in their politics. Roldo's journalism is built on facts, not flash, just as Jackson says his leadership is built on tasks, not words.

But even Roldo wants Cleveland's mayor to be the bully pulpit figure that Jackson is not.

"It may not be long, I believe, when Cleveland will want someone who gives them something to look forward to, some spark and flair," he writes. "Someone who will promise more than a balanced budget."

Just when I think Roldo's building up to predicting a dramatic mayor's race this fall, or maybe a kind word for charismatic challenger Bill Patmon, he goes the other way.

"I don’t think it’s this election. I don’t think we can wait too much longer. Cleveland needs a big lift."

Sounds like Roldo's predicting the reelection of the caretaker mayor this year and a swing back to charisma in 2013.

Jeff Johnson: I'm neutral in mayor's race

Jeff Johnson, who's campaigning to return to city council, sent me an e-mail responding to my post about Bill Patmon.

I knew Johnson and Patmon used to be political allies and speculated they might support each other this year as Patmon runs to unseat Mayor Frank Jackson. Not so, Johnson says.

"I have no interest in getting involved in this year's Mayor's race," Johnson writes. "I have shared with both Bill and Frank that I will neither hurt them or help them."

Johnson, who served in Jane Campbell's mayoral administration, did acknowledge that Jackson and council president Martin Sweeney do not consider him an ally. "I am not part of any joint effort with Bill to bring back or create a political bloc to challenge the power brokers of Cleveland City Hall," he writes. "I don't consider myself an enemy of Jackson or Sweeney, despite their anticipated effort to stop me from winning the City Council position in Ward 8. I will answer whatever they choose to bring against me."

Johnson says he's running for council as an independent voice. If elected, he says, "I will use my experience and aggressive approach to policy development and issue advocacy to assist in finding solutions to our many problems in Cleveland."

Bill Patmon challenging Frank Jackson in mayor's race

In January, I wrote that no one of any stature was planning to run against Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson this year. Turns out, one person is: Bill Patmon, who was a city councilman from Glenville from 1989 to 2001.

Patmon ran for mayor in 2005 and got only about 2 percent of the vote. But that's not a good measure of his political abilities, or the prominence he held for a time in Cleveland politics.

Check out "Lone Wolf," a profile I wrote about Patmon in 2001, if you want to know more about him. The story describes how he broke away from then-mayor Mike White (a former ally), helped engineer a "coup" that brought an anti-White faction of council to power, aggressively challenged the White Administration as council's finance committee chair -- and paid for it in the 2001 elections.

Patmon lost his council seat that fall. Did out-of-control ambition bring Patmon down, or principled opposition to an out-of-control mayor? Patmon himself admitted his fights with White and attempts to become council president helped bring him down -- he said so when I interviewed him for our coverage of the 2005 mayor's race. (For that interview, click here and scroll down to the 4th item.)

I think we're witnessing the rebirth of a dormant political bloc that will challenge Frank Jackson and council president Martin Sweeney. While Patmon runs for mayor, his friend Jeff Johnson is also mounting a political comeback, trying to get elected to the Glenville city council seat both men once held. Johnson is not a Jackson ally -- he served in Jane Campbell's administration. I wouldn't be surprised if Patmon and Johnson work together on each other's campaigns. Update, 7/1: Not so, says Johnson. He e-mailed me to say he's staying neutral in the mayor's race. See this new post.

Of the other candidates for mayor, the only one I know anything about is Laverne Jones Gore, a perennial candidate for various offices who I interviewed in 2001 for a story about how lonely it is to be a Republican in Cleveland. Henry Gomez previews the mayor's race on his City Hall blog today.