The big picture; Give Strickland a little elbow room

Columbus - One of this town's favorite Republican pastimes for the past few weeks has been to dispense not-so-subtle sarcasm aimed at Ted Strickland, the first Democrat elected governor in 20 years.

Some GOP legislators, including House Speaker Jon Husted, have mocked the governor's campaign promise to fix the school-funding for-

mula.

State Sen. Kevin Coughlin, a Cuyahoga Falls Republican, went so far as to deride Strickland's "Turnaround Ohio" plan with daily news releases counting down the days until the governor fixes Ohio's badly broken economy.

How interesting that Coughlin would employ a calendar-type gimmick to make his point.

You see, Coughlin's countdown calendar is make-believe.

Here's one that isn't.

Coughlin's Republicans ran this state for the past 16 years.

And where they ran it was right into the ground.

By almost every indicator used to measure the condition of higher education and the economy, the numbers scream out that Ohio is in far worse shape today than it was 16 years ago.

By my calendar, that's a 192-month record of failure, with a few successes (tax reform, Third Frontier to name two) sprinkled in merely to prevent the GOP losing streak from reaching the 5,844 days.

Sure, saddling Republicans with all of the blame for what has happened to this state would be grossly unfair. Ohio's demise is largely the result of forces that were at work for decades.

But given the sordid history of the post-1990 era, it would have been laughably easy for Ted Strickland to engage in prolonged and effective blame-placing on Wednesday during his first State of the State speech. Instead, he took the high road. Not a word of his speech smacked of recrimination.

If you don't count the obsession many Republicans have with social engineering - and you shouldn't - by the time Strickland walked out of that House chamber, he had offered up almost as many big and bold ideas in 57 minutes as Republicans managed to toss out during their 8,415,360-

minute rule.

That's not to say all of Strickland's ideas were good. To the contrary, his proposals to snuff out school choice smack of overkill to appease his supporters in the education unions. But if the legislature had done a better job regulating the greedy and corrupt influences that have invaded so many charter schools, perhaps that element of school choice wouldn't have become so vulnerable to gubernatorial attack.

To nit-pick Strickland's ideas would be to miss a larger point: At a time when tinkering on the margins of change is a surefire recipe for failure, Ohio finally may have a governor willing to think big.

Now the deliberations over Strickland's ideas move to the Ohio General Assembly, hardly a place that inspires confidence. Far too many Republicans live up to that "caveman" tag stuck on them in the early 1990s. As for the Democrats, their ranks are populated by a troubling number of legislators who don't belong there - due to a shortage of brains, political skills, or both.

Worth watching in this budget process will be House Speaker Husted, a Dayton-area Republican with gubernatorial potential. But his stock with opinion leaders will plummet if he derails many elements of the governor's plan merely to appease all the nuts in his caucus.

The Statehouse and its environs are an incestuous place. So many political whores lurk in hallways and watering holes that it's a wonder anything good ever gets accomplished. Maybe those sharks will so gnaw the Strickland budget plan that the final product will be unrecognizable. Maybe the details of the plan will prove so suspect that it rightly collapses of its own weight.

But however this turns out, for 57 minutes last week, it was nice to watch and listen to a governor of Ohio who acted the part.

Larkin is director of The Plain Dealer's editorial pages. To reach Brent Larkin

blarkin@plaind.com, 216-999-4252

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