The Governor's Sub-rosa Plot to Subvert
an Election in Ohio
An in-depth investigative report by Daniel Forbes
for the Institute
for Policy Studies, Washington DC.
May 30, 2002
Ohio Governor Bob Taft
Ohio Governor Bob Taft and the highest reaches
of his administration have embarked on a concerted, months-long
effort to subvert the state's electoral process. With overall
control of budgets, jobs and sentencing policy at stake, the Taft
administration has organized a sophisticated, sub-rosa campaign
to defeat a drug treatment rather than incarceration amendment
likely to appear on the ballot in November. Starting last spring,
Gov. Taft himself, First Lady Hope Taft, his chief of staff, Brian
Hicks, two of his cabinet members and numerous senior and support
staff have - while on the clock, ostensibly serving the public
- conceived and directed a partisan political campaign.
A four-month long Institute for Policy Studies
investigation by freelance journalist Daniel Forbes details political
malfeasance, the misuse of public funds and the inappropriate
use of government resources in Ohio. The effort has been aided
by federal officials, including President Bush's publicly announced
nominee to be deputy director of the White House drug czar's office
(since confirmed), and a senior U.S. Senate staffer. The drug
czars of Florida and Michigan and a senior Drug Enforcement Administration
agent also participated in the scheme.
Ohio officials consulted with and enlisted
the aid of the wife of the former finance chair of the Republican
National Committee, who herself has played a key political role
for Jeb Bush, as well as several taxpayer-supported, staunch anti-drug
organizations, including the supposedly apolitical Partnership
for a Drug-Free America.
The Partnership was slated to produce TV
ads to sway public opinion in favor of the Ohio drug-policy status
quo. Its four top executives advised the Taft administration during
a day-long strategy session hosted by that Senate staffer and
held in the U.S. Capitol building itself. A representative of
New York-based treatment provider Phoenix House and one from the
federally supported Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America
also attended.
A mid-October strategy session held at the
governor's residence in Columbus was attended by 19 senior officials
and private executives from Ohio, Michigan and Florida. (A similar
referendum will likely be on the ballot in Michigan; in Florida,
proponents have postponed their effort.) Obtained through Ohio's
Freedom of Information process, a five-page memo summarizing the
day's thinking features such overt political exhortations as:
"Beat the Initiative back in the entire country, not just
in each state."
Ohio spent $106 million on "community-based
treatment" in FY 2000; overall control of vast sums of money
and vast numbers of jobs underlies the political struggle. One
Ohio official worried that the state will lose both "its
ability to control sentencing policy" and "control of
its own budget."
The effort has entailed hundreds of staff-hours
of state-paid time. Last fall, Ohio's first lady, cabinet officials
and senior staffers in the governor's office attended weekly strategy
sessions on the public's dime. State funds paid for out of town
trips and overnight lodging, and the administration even proposed
to divert U.S. Department of Justice crime-fighting grants to
fund their nascent campaign's eventual polling, focus groups and
advertising. As Hope Taft's chief of staff, Marcie Seidel, wrote
in her minutes of one strategy session: "This a political
campaign - must strategize as suchâ ¦. Look for enemy's
weaknesses."
Modeled on a similar measure, Proposition
36, that passed overwhelmingly in California in 2000, the Ohio
amendment proposes to offer treatment rather than prison to defendants
charged with a first or second instance of simple drug possession.
Judges may approve a few other types of nonviolent offender, but
typically any crime beyond possession precludes participation.
The measure is backed by the same rich trio - billionaires, George
Soros and Peter Lewis, and multimillionaire John Sperling - who
have successfully financed drug reform initiatives since 1996,
including Prop. 36, and several medical marijuana measures.
Should the Taft effort succeed, it will work
to maintain the Ohio status quo of incarcerating a disproportionate
number of racial minorities for possessing small, personal use
amounts of drugs. According to Ohio State Senator, Robert F. Hagan,
though an estimated 13% of Ohio's drug users are African-American,
"77 percent of the people sent to prison for drug possession
last year were black. This brings shame to us all."
The revelations from Ohio question the probity
of the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, which partners with
the White House in a controversial, nearly $2-billion (total-value)
anti-drug advertising and media content campaign. The media campaign
has recently come under attack from Drug Czar John P. Walters
himself as being ineffectual.
Its second, five-year appropriation is currently
under consideration in Congress. As the Drug Czar foists the equation
that Drugs = Terrorism upon the land, will Congress now take another
look at a program whose private strategic partner, the PDFA, was
willing to insert itself improperly into an election in Ohio?
M. Dane Waters, president of the Initiative
and Referendum Institute, said that politicians fighting initiatives
are guilty of "mind-boggling arrogance." He declared
it "a blatant abuse of office to work actively to stop an
initiative. Their role is to advise the public."
Inertia, resentment of liberal outsiders
trying to force change, money-and-jobs turf protecting and both
state and national political calculation explain much of the Taft
administration effort. Yet, the administration also seems to think
the very citizens who elected it possess scant faculties to decide
for themselves. So it endeavored to keep the amendment from the
ballot. Such contempt towards the electorate serves only to erode
faith in democracy. As previously proven in print and discussed
in the report, the White House has at least indirectly meddled
with state ballot initiatives for years. In fact, the effort in
Ohio is just a more sophisticated - and wildly blatant - manifestation
of the sort of public funding of partisan drug-war politicking
that has long befouled the nation's electoral landscape.
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supporting documents for offline use.
Here-
http://www.ips-dc.org/projects/drugpolicy/ohio.htm
----------------
New York freelancer Daniel Forbes (ddanforbes@aol.com)
writes on politics and social policy. He testified before both
the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives regarding his
series in Salon on sub rosa White House payments rewarding anti-drug
content in the media. He subsequently detailed the paid media
campaign's origins as an attempt to influence voters on state
medical marijuana initiatives. (See: Fighting
"Cheech and Chong" Medicine, Salon, 7/27/00.) He
also broke the story of the White House's secret deals with TV
programmers in Prime-time
Propaganda, Salon, 7/13/00. He wishes to thank Robert E. Field
for supporting the writing of this report.
