Ohio Attorney General race unclear

Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) Presumptive Democratic Presidential Nominee

By Julie Carr Smyth
Wire Service Correspondent

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - This fall's unexpected race for Ohio attorney general will feel about as short as the presidential race does long.
With only five months until Election Day, neither Democrats nor Republicans have picked a candidate to run for the state seat, vacated last month by scandal-scarred Democrat Marc Dann. And the high-stakes presidential contest will consume much of the media attention and TV ad time needed in this political swing state to wage a decent fight.
Voters won't know what hit them.
"It will be completely overshadowed," said Democratic consultant Jim Ruvolo, a former chair of the state party.
Political advertising guidelines guarantee access for TV and radio advertising to federal candidates, but not to state candidates, he said - which means attorney general candidates may have trouble buying access during the most visible time slots.
Ohio figures to be key in the presidential race, again. It gave President Bush the electoral votes he needed for re-election in 2004.
The attorney general is both the state's top attorney and its chief law enforcer. The post is generally viewed as second to the governor in the power it wields.
So with revelations that a Dann aide and close friend sexually harassed two junior staffers and that Dann, 46, had an extramarital affair with an employee, Democrats reeled and Republicans rejoiced.
Dann, just 17 months in office, also conceded publicly at the time that he had fostered cronyism by hiring unqualified friends and that he felt unprepared to run the massive state agency. Those statements prompted fellow Democrats - led by Gov. Ted Strickland - to lead a charge to pressure him out of office.
But how to go about filling the slot, which Dann could legally have held for two, four-year terms?
Strickland has named Nancy Hardin Rogers, a respected dean of the Ohio State University law school, as a temporary replacement to Dann - to restore order while Democrats field a more seasoned politician to run in the fall. Republicans, likewise, formed a committee to begin screening likely candidates.
Widely recognized names - Treasurer Richard Cordray, former U.S. Sen. Mike DeWine, Lt. Gov. and former attorney general Lee Fisher - began to surface, in part because it is difficult to imagine how anyone without statewide name ID would have time to build support among voters.
But Nancy Martorano, a professor of political science at the University of Dayton, said the presidential contest may be more than a simple distraction in the attorney general's race: It may be an asset.
"On some level, it's going to help that there is a presidential race going on, because that will probably be the thing that gets the voters to the polls," she said. "If it had been some kind of odd-year special election, voters would be less inclined to go to the polls for a single race."
Ohio's statewide races typically enjoy the limelight. They take place every four years - on a cycle so they don't coincide with presidential races. Most recent state campaigns have taken shape, and begun raising money, two years or more ahead of Election Day. The first ad in the 2006 gubernatorial race ran in August, at which point the campaigns had already raised millions of dollars each.
"It will be harder to analyze the money," said Catherine Turcer, who monitors campaign spending for the government watchdog group Ohio Citizen Action. "It's all going to come in at the last minute."
Ruvolo added: "The real question will be whether there will be any TV time to buy. In 2004, it got scarce; I'm guessing in 2008 it's going to get scarcer."
Presidential contenders Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton spent a combined $8 million on 16,000 television spots in Ohio's March primary, according to an examination by the Wisconsin Advertising Project. That number is expected to increase as White House contenders vie for victory in November.
Democrats have seen record numbers of new registrants participating in the lengthy presidential primary contest that culminated Tuesday in Obama becoming the party's presumptive nominee. Martorano said that could tend to favor whatever candidate the Democrats pick for attorney general.
Republicans, however, see hypocrisy in Dann's fall from grace _ and they intend to say so.
Dann crusaded into office on a pledge to clean up the Republican "culture of corruption" in Ohio. He surprised everyone, including himself, when he beat veteran Republican officeholder Betty Montgomery, who had served as both state attorney general and state auditor.
"Marc Dann won because Jupiter was aligned with Mars," said Democratic strategist Jerry Austin.
And Republicans wasted no time attacking the one-time anti-corruption candidate as corrupt.
"This embarrassment is far from over," Kevin DeWine, deputy chair of the Ohio Republican Party, declared on the day Dann resigned. "Marc Dann's resignation is overdue, and the investigation into his mismanagement and corruption must continue. We've spent the past 15 months pointing out that Marc Dann was not suited to be Ohio's attorney general..."
A new Quinnipiac Poll, however, suggested the label isn't yet sticking.
Among 1,738 Ohio voters interviewed between May 29 and June 2, 23 percent said they would be less supportive of the Democratic Party because of the Dann scandal. Sixty-seven percent said the scandal would have no effect on their view of the party. The margin of error was plus or minus 2 percentage points.
The poll also found that 38 percent of Ohio voters still most associated political corruption with Republicans, while 30 percent associated it with Democrats. A third couldn't decide.
Ruvolo said he believes the strong action by elected Democrats will win favor among voters.
"I think more people will give us credit for how we handled it than will punish us," he said. "The way the governor handled it eliminates it as an issue, because they can attack but we can say, wait a minute, nobody removed Bob Taft (after he was convicted of violating state ethics law)."
That argument may not play out as well as the Democrats would like, however. According to the Quinnipiac Poll, 12 percent of voters view Dann's acts as more serious than Taft's - while only 20 percent view Taft's as more serious than Dann's. Well over half, 57 percent, said the two were about the same.