East Clevelanders don't want to merge with Cleveland

"Cleveland takes small steps toward merger with neighboring East Cleveland," reads a Cleveland.com headline today.

Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson and council president Kevin J. Kelley have asked Cleveland State's urban school for info on mergers. Councilman Jeff Johnson told reporter Leila Atassi Monday night what he's also told me: he thinks the big city should annex its troubled neighbor, for the sake of both towns.

There's just one problem.  East Clevelanders don't want to be annexed.

While reporting in East Cleveland for my new commentary, "A City's Limits," I discovered public opinion there is strongly against a merger. The idea got booed down at a public forum in December. The long-suffering town doesn't want to give up its independence, its City Hall and cops, its mayor and council. Only one out of the town's 12 elected officials is pushing for a merger.

East Cleveland Mayor Gary Norton is against merging with Cleveland. Norton is evasive about this with reporters, and Plain Dealer columnist Brent Larkin is slamming him for not giving him a straight answer. Larkin doesn't know that when Norton was sworn in for a second term as mayor Jan. 2, he came out against a merger.

What's going on? Norton got burned by George Forbes, who claims Norton supports merging. But Forbes told me his conversation with Norton happened off the record, during Norton's reelection endorsement interview with the Call and Post. (Forbes is general counsel at the Call and Post and has a strong say in its editorials.) Forbes, trying to play journalist and power broker at the same time, botched both roles. He told the whole town about the "off the record" conversation with Norton -- or at least, his version of it.

East Clevelanders, who've been abandoned after waves of white flight and black flight, are skeptical that anyone else really has their interests in mind. Any move that comes off like a hostile takeover will backfire. Merger supporters like Forbes and even Larkin are in danger of coming off like Vladimir Putin coveting Crimea.

Johnson's metaphor of a marriage sounds a better note. But it'll be a long, difficult courtship.

For more on the fraught politics of a merger, check out my commentary, "A City's Limits." Written for the April issue of Cleveland Magazine, it's online now.

Rob Frost stokes draft-Mandel movement for Senate

Josh Mandel, the young state treasurer from Lyndhurst, is living a charmed political life. The 33-year-old Iraq war vet just got his new job, and already, conservatives are cajoling him to run fo the U.S. Senate against Sherrod Brown next year.

Last week the Washington Post profiled Mandel in its series "The Rising" about young elected officials with promising careers. Next, conservative talk-show host Hugh Hewitt hyped Mandel in his Washington Examiner column as Brown's "worst nightmare."

Rob Frost, Cuyahoga County's Republican chairman, likes the buzz. "Hugh has joined the chorus of Ohio conservatives, Republican leaders and business leaders who are trying to draft Josh into the Senate race against Sherrod Brown," Frost writes in an e-mail this morning. Frost wants to draft Mandel too: "Josh has made it clear that he's focused on running the Treasurer's office, but the consensus that is developing in Ohio and across the country is that Josh is our best bet to beat Sherrod."

Ohio Republicans have Sherrod-hunting on their minds this week. The senator is learning, the hard way, the first rule of cyber-era political debate: The first person to invoke Hitler loses the argument.

Meanwhile, Mandel's working to repair his biggest campaign foul, his fall TV ad against Kevin Boyce, widely criticized as Muslim-baiting. From the Post profile:

"I made a mistake, and I learned from it and put it behind me," says Mandel now. "I regret running the ad, and I've broken bread with my opponent and we've both put it behind us."

I get why Republicans dream of a Mandel candidacy, why his quote to the Post — "I'm not ruling it out" -- sounded to them like a horse race's opening bell. War veterans are attractive candidates, and experience in the Iraqi desert adds gravitas to Mandel's baby face. More mathematically, Republicans would be shrewd to run a Jewish candidate from Northeast Ohio -- it'd scramble the electoral map, peel away votes the Democrats usually count on.

Still, the buzz isn't entirely convincing. Hewitt's dismissal of Brown as an "off-the-rack lefty, tired, worn out" underestimates the Democrat's political talents, especially his ferocious campaign skills. I thought Brent Larkin sized up the race right last month: "A Mandel candidacy remains unlikely," he wrote, "as would an eventual victory." So far I haven't seen anything to lead me to disagree.

Lynne Thompson profiled Josh Mandel for Cleveland Magazine in 2008. You can read her piece here. I profiled Sherrod Brown in 2007, after his election to the Senate, and Rob Frost a few months later, when his entertaining missives, "News from the Pork Barrel Buffet," began to poke the seemingly impregnable Jimmy Dimora.

Why didn't the Plain Dealer catch county corruption?

Doris O’Donnell, one of Cleveland’s best reporters of the mid-20th century, asked the question first. Why didn’t the Plain Dealer expose Cuyahoga County’s corruption before the FBI?

“The reporters had to be pretty goddamn lazy if they didn't know that Jimmy Dimora and Frank Russo have been living on the hog for 10 years,” the retired reporter raged to Scene in 2008, after federal agents raided the county building. “How can they get away with those houses and that real estate company without anyone knowing?”

The ten houses Russo bought and sold, some for upwards of $400,000. The 619 gift-givers and 389 free meals Dimora meticulously reported to the state over 11 years. Why no stories about them before the FBI noticed?

Now, Ted Diadiun’s spent 4,729 words trying to answer the question. His review of the paper’s county government coverage in last Sunday’s paper wasn’t as harsh as O’Donnell’s. The PD wasn’t lazy before 2008, the reader representative wrote, but it was guilty of “sins of journalistic omission -- the failure to follow up leads, to cultivate sources and mobilize resources, to report aggressively on matters of keen public interest rather than accepting business as usual.”

Diadiun’s final verdict was fair and tough. But his story starts slow, leaving the best stuff toward the end. Fascinating details hang in the air, their implications never nailed down. Here’s my guide to the highlights – or, really, the lowlights.


The paper’s old hands let Gerald McFaul off easy. Dick Feagler, former columnist for the PD and the Cleveland Press, offered one of the story’s most honest and disappointing quotes:

I knew Gerry McFaul back in the old days. I knew he was probably playing fast and loose . . . but I think my mind was that that's the way the system was. I don't remember anyone fainting with shock when they found out that the sheriff was taking kickbacks.

Brent Larkin, the paper’s political sage and editorial page editor, also missed a possible chance to catch McFaul. Diadiun writes:

Larkin had a friendly relationship with the former sheriff. … One of [Mark] Puente's sources said that he saw Larkin jocularly talking to McFaul at public gatherings and concluded that he'd better keep whatever information he had about McFaul to himself. Larkin was just doing his job as a columnist by getting out and about, but that's not the way it appeared, at least to this potential tipster.

Diadiun cuts Larkin too much of a break here. He notes that Larkin wrote a column accounting for his failure to see McFaul’s true character, but he doesn’t quote this key line from Larkin’s piece:

There were periodic rumblings about the aggressive fund-raising tactics surrounding McFaul's annual clambake. But the overwhelming consensus in town held that McFaul was a pretty good sheriff.

Turns out those clambakes were a big story. Investigators say McFaul made deputies spend 500 hours a year selling tickets to them on county time. Also, McFaul pocketed $50,000 in cash over 10 years from souvenirs he sold at them. Oops!

The paper published warnings about Dimora and Russo’s character – then took its eye off them. Diadiun starts by summing up decades of the paper’s Dimora, Russo, and McFaul coverage. The PD ran tough pieces that foreshadowed today’s corruption scandal: 1992 reports on the political mini-machine Dimora assembled in Bedford Heights, coverage of Russo’s guilty plea to misdemeanor dereliction of duty in 1998.

But that sharp coverage begs the bigger question. When Dimora and Russo survived those scandals and became the local Democratic Party’s most powerful leaders, why didn’t alarm bells go off in the newsroom? Why wasn’t the paper watching to see if they’d cut corners on a bigger scale?

Doug Clifton hunted corruption at the city, not the county. For years, the paper had only one reporter covering Cuyahoga County government, Diadiun reminds us. That inevitably reflects on Clifton, editor from 1999 to 2007.

Clifton hangs the reporters who held that beat out to dry. “We had people covering the county, and if they’d been doing their job, they should have been looking into it,” he told Diadiun. Yes, but guidance and resources come from the top.

Chris Quinn, now metro editor, defends Clifton by saying he woke up the paper and took on more serious journalism. True, but he’s reminiscing about the good old days when Clifton set Quinn and Mark Vosburgh loose to aggressively cover Mike White’s third term as mayor. Meanwhile, the county attracted less challenging coverage.

(Of course, Clifton’s hardly alone. Local media attention shifted from City Hall to the county building about three years ago, when the commissioners tried to launch a building boom with taxpayer money. I’ve written about this shift before, and I include myself: I moved here in 2000 and started reporting more about the county and Dimora in 2007. I first heard about Dimora’s gift lists in 2005, and looking back, I wish I’d sent away for them and asked, is this normal? Who are these people?)

What changed? Susan Goldberg – and Jim Rokakis. The Cuyahoga County treasurer outed himself to Diadiun as the corruption scandal’s super-source:

The politification of the county was complete, and in plain sight. All you had to do was match up the hiring rolls with the lists of precinct committeemen. This has been going on for years. As I told Susan Goldberg in my first lunch with her after she got here, this county was Sodom and Gomorrah.

Goldberg took Rokakis’ advice, Diadiun implies, and launched patronage exposés of Frank Russo’s and Pat O’Malley’s offices.

Rokakis also said the FBI interviewed him about county government in 2000, 2004, and 2005 – further evidence that, unlike the Plain Dealer, the FBI never took their eye off Russo after his 1998 conviction.

Rokakis has won a lot of praise for his honesty and conscientiousness in a corrupted county. Now we can add one more thing. When Rokakis knew, or suspected, that Russo was corrupt, he didn’t go along to get along. He blew the whistle to both the feds and the press. For reporters, that’s further proof of the importance of good sources.

Issue 6 approved: A new government for Cuyahoga County

Voters have reacted to two years of corruption and patronage scandals by throwing out every Cuyahoga County elected official. They approved Issue 6, a charter that creates a new form of government, with 66 percent of the vote.

We'll elect a county executive and an 11-member county council next year in a Sept. 7 primary and the Nov. 2 general election. The new charter will take effect Jan. 1, 2011.

The vote was overwhelming: Issue 5, the county commissioners' alternative plan to appoint a charter commission, failed with 72 percent of the vote. The Issue 5 side's vagueness about how they would reform government proved fatal. Their message failed to even make much of a dent in the 75 percent support for Issue 6 in a July poll.

Tim Hagan is on WMJI's Lanigan & Malone this morning, saying the vote for 6 shows how much power corporate political donors and Plain Dealer editor Susan Goldberg now have in Cleveland. Hagan complained the paper's county coverage was biased, and John Lanigan and Chip Kullik agreed that the PD's Oct. 2 headline about Hagan was misleading, which it was. But blaming the PD and business leaders for the new charter disrespects the voters. Hagan got it right later in the hour when he added that voters changed the government because they were disgusted with the behavior of some of their elected officials.

Everyone knows the biggest reason voters want reform: federal prosecutors are investigating Jimmy Dimora and suspect Frank Russo of stealing $1.2 million in cash. No one else in the current government noticed anything was wrong, and no one can fire Russo or Dimora now.

Hagan noted the charter will usher in a huge change in Greater Cleveland: the new county executive will be the most powerful elected official in the region, even more than the newly re-elected Cleveland mayor. Who might run for county executive? Jimmy Malone kept dropping Chris Ronayne's name. Hagan, perhaps thinking of Brent Larkin's August column on the subject, mentioned Gund Foundation head Dave Abbott.

Poll shows support* for reform

*Kind of.


Check out the Plain Dealer front page today and you'll see a sidebar with some eye-popping poll results. It says 75 percent of Cuyahoga County voters would definitely or probably vote to approve a new charter for county government.

That convinced the Greater Cleveland Partnership, which hired the pollster, to support the county charter petition drive with $100,000.

But I can see at least three reasons to attach big asterisks to the results.

The first reason is right in the 2nd paragraph of the story:

"Slightly more than half of the 400 people surveyed... said they favor the Go Cuyahoga reform plan. The approval rate jumped to 75 percent after respondents were asked seven questions that outlined the plan's goals."

The "slightly more than half" number is the one I'd trust. Polls commonly start with a neutral question, then ask leading, one-sided questions to see if they change people's minds. It's a way of testing possible campaign messages.

But during an election, the other side will counter with its own message. Fund-raising will determine which message voters hear more often.

So imagine how that "slightly more than half" figure would decline if another poll used just one of the common arguments against the reform plan: "Opponents say the new county charter would concentrate too much power in the hands of one person, who would appoint almost all other officials in the government. Now how would you vote?"

(The proposed charter would replace the current county government with a county executive and 11-person county council. Here is the proposal as a Word document.)

Another reason for skepticism: only 13 percent of those surveyed were black, even though Cuyahoga County is 29 percent black. Attracting black voters is one of the reformers' biggest challenges, since most black political leaders in town, including U.S. Rep. Marcia Fudge and Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson, oppose a charter.

Brent Larkin, who's read the poll, reported in his Sunday column, "Among black voters, results differed only slightly from the total numbers." But the reformers will have to work hard to hold onto black voters' support if Jackson and Fudge hit the airwaves to urge a no vote.

Finally, getting on the ballot can be as hard as winning on Election Day. Go Cuyahoga has until Monday to get 45,458 signatures. (If some of those signatures are ruled invalid, they would have a chance to collect more.) Parma Heights Mayor and Go Cuyahoga leader Martin Zanotti says he's confident the petition drive will succeed. But a similar county charter effort in 2004 turned in 74,000 signatures -- yet so many were invalidated, it fell 153 signatures short of making the ballot.

More than libraries are at stake

I was wondering when the Plain Dealer would run a story that clearly dramatizes what's at stake in the state budget crisis: not just Ohio's libraries, but a huge part of our safety net for poor kids, the elderly, and the mentally ill. The story came yesterday: Brent Larkin's column, "Strickland doing an appalling job."

Don't call Larkin retired. His freelance column this week calls out the governor (pictured) -- and House Speaker Armond Budish -- with a clarity that's been missing from a lot of the state budget crisis coverage:
--
If Strickland were a Republican, this state's many advocates for children would be burning him in effigy on the Statehouse lawn. ...

... In tough times, governors have to cut spending. But good governors don't:

Abolish funding for a program that provides preschool to 14,400 low-income children.

Eliminate state aid to food pantries, especially in a recession.

Whack deep into programs for the mentally challenged and the elderly.

Permit the plundering of funding for their most important accomplishment -- in this case, higher education, the cornerstone of Ohio's economic future.

--

The budget crisis is going into overtime, with Strickland and Republicans at an impasse over slot machines and other issues. If they can't agree on a budget by tomorrow night, they'll have to pass a temporary budget and keep negotiating. Here are the Columbus Dispatch's reports from yesterday and today.

Akron votes today on mayoral recall, ancient feud

Akron voters will decide today whether to recall longtime mayor Don Plusquellic -- the Sexiest Politician in Greater Cleveland, as his fans call him, or "King Don," as the haters say.

The recall leaders accuse Plusquellic of all sorts of tyrannical behavior, but don't have one specific explosive charge of abuse of office. They just don't like the guy. The pro-Plusquellic faction says he's Akron's indispensable man.

I have no opinion about this fight, except that I think it's cool that a recall committee includes a college student known only as "Miss Tia" and is using a "fake Bass Pro deal" as ammo.

Brent Larkin, who retired as editorial page editor of the Plain Dealer a few weeks ago, got back in the game with a reported commentary in the Sunday paper. He knocked on doors in a swing neighborhood of the city and proclaimed Plusquellic Ohio's best big-city mayor (with a sideswipe at Frank Jackson about Eaton leaving Cleveland).

Plusquellic's archenemy, Warner Mendenhall, is masterminding the recall campaign. The two men have been at war for about 15 years now. This is the climactic battle.

Reading about it takes me back to 2000, my first year in town, when I interviewed both men for a story about an Akron ballot proposal. Mendenhall and his allies claimed the mayor ruled Akron through fear.

"We beat them before, and we'll beat them again," Plusquellic replied. "I'm not going to stand for the crazies taking over the city, if I can help it."

Yeah, I'd say they don't like each other.

Brent Larkin, PD's political voice, retires

Brent Larkin, Plain Dealer editorial page editor for 18 years, retired this weekend. I think he'll go down in history as Cleveland's last big power-broker journalist, the last guy who single-handedly pens the town's conventional wisdom.

Larkin, who's covered Cleveland politics since 1971, has written about all our epic political figures: the Stokes Brothers, George Forbes, Mike White. His January 1980 Cleveland Magazine article about the end of Dennis Kucinich's term as mayor is the definitive explanation of the Boy Mayor's downfall. As editorial page editor, Larkin's been the town's political referee, analyst, and judge. He may not have had the power to make or end political careers and start or squelch movements, like Louis Seltzer (Cleveland Press editor from 1928 to 1966) or Tom Vail (at the 1960s-1980s Plain Dealer). But in the 1990s and 2000s, he was their heir, the guy whose support politicians cultivated over lunch at Johnny's on West 6th as Larkin interviewed them for insider knowledge.

I expect someone will write or blog that Larkin was too much the insider. (Update, Tue. a.m.: Roldo more or less says so, citing the guest list at Larkin's retirement party.)

But his editorial page could also use its power as a voice for good government and reform, exposing the cynical political games that only succeed when no one pays attention. Take a look at this 2006 editorial, one of many in the PD's campaign to get Joan Synenberg elected judge over Christine Russo.

With Larkin gone, political coverage (and clout) at the Plain Dealer will be spread around. The powerful won't know whom to invite to lunch. Terry Egger, the publisher, or Susan Goldberg, the paper's editor? (Both have seats on the editorial board.) Larkin's successor as editorial page editor, Elizabeth Sullivan, is a foreign-policy expert. So, much of the deep local political knowledge will come from Joe Frolik, now the chief editorial writer. But these days, Frolik's been writing more about national politics, while political reporter Mark Naymik's columns read more like Larkin's -- summaries and critiques of the insider buzz.

In his last regular column, Larkin notes that many of Cleveland's leaders of the early 1970s are still wielding power. He says it's time for young leaders to emerge. Without criticizing the huge spending coming soon on the Medical Mart and the Opportunity Corridor, Larkin says Greater Cleveland should spend similar amounts on aggressive early childhood programs, college scholarships, and building a new economy on our Lake Erie location (as water becomes scarce elsewhere).

Here's Mike McIntyre's exit interview with Larkin:

New PD editorial page editor

Last week I wrote about the Plain Dealer editorial page moving from center-right to center-left during the Bush years. Well, it's going to keep moving left.

Brent Larkin, the editorial page editor, is retiring in May after 17 years on the job. Elizabeth Sullivan, the paper's foreign-affairs columnist, will take over the page.

Sullivan wrote a lot of critical columns about the Bush Administration and the Iraq war. While the editorials under Larkin reflected a sort of sad disappointment toward Bush, Sullivan was angry. A recent piece of hers about Dick Cheney is a good example. (Not that there wasn't a lot to write about -- 25 U.S. senators recently said this about Donald Rumsfeld, another frequent target of hers.)

These archives of Sullivan's recent print columns and online columns include lots of pieces with a more moderate take, including a nice story on George Voinovich. But overall, I think her appointment means the editorial page will become more reliably liberal.