Ohio Duers: How is Blackwell doing in his guv race?

I'm afraid to ask.

My hometown "home boy" Ken Blackwell is running for Governor

He is asking for donations it would be a shame if he got a bunch of "empty envelopes." That would tie up a lot of time and help suppress his candidacy. I would feel awful about it. Now, PLEASE do not pass this address around the internet to pissed off people. I beg you, do not do that.

Ohioans For Ken Blackwell
ATTN: Ken Blackwell
829 Bethel Rd., Suite 316
Columbus, Ohio 43214

Heaven forfend that his staff go through another round of failed expectations.

lol

..... why don't you write his staff and ask. Write early and write plenty.
And please don't send this address to other pissed off voters.

:bounce:

Do we let someone steal their way up?

If I were a betting man, which I am, I'd bet on Jim Petro. Betty Montgomery doesn't have a shot in the primary. She's too much for the Republican voters, she's pro-abortion and anti-gun.

Stephanie Tubbs-Jones!

I hear they are "close".

What do you mean "close"?

What do you mean, "they are close"?

http://www.cleveland.com/search/index.ssf?/base/opinion/1112450138295780.xml?oxins
INSIDE POLITICS

A tangled Web: Blackwell's running - but for what?
Sunday, April 03, 2005
TED WENDLING

With all of the face time he's gotten since the election and the recent antics of gubernatorial candidates who are trying to out-conservative him, Secretary of State Ken Blackwell's campaign for governor in 2006 seems to be picking up steam.

But wait. Did you know that Blackwell actually is running for another term as Ohio's chief elections officer? That's what it says if you click on the "contribute" icon on his Web site, www.kenblackwell.com at least that's what it said until a few minutes after a reporter inquired on Friday
As the former mayor of Cincinnati, Ohio's state treasurer for five years, and secretary of state for three years, I know how to wage a winning campaign," the site quoted Blackwell as saying. "Your generous support will enable me to run an effective campaign and serve another four years as secretary of state."

Technically, raising money for an office for which you're not running is a violation of state elections law, which prohibits candidates from disseminating information "either knowing the same to be false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not, if the statement is designed to promote the election, nomination or defeat of the candidate."...

it's a few days old he probably knows about it now... it would be one more thing to ding him on (though he'll just say an over exuberant staff member posted the information on the website, that he didn't have anything to do with it....)

Sunday, April 10, 2005
SABRINA EATON

Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell took his gubernatorial aspirations on the road this April Fool's Day with a fund- raiser at the City Club in Washington, D.C., that netted at least $35,000.

GOP luminaries listed on his event's fund-raising committee included former Reagan administration Cabinet secretaries William J. Bennett, James C. Miller and Edwin Meese; Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas; Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform; the Heritage Foundation's Paul Weyrich; and David Keene of the American Conservative Union.

Blackwell said the roster shows he is backed by the national con servative community, and it's "not only luminaries, but folks that put troops on the ground with networks in Ohio."

Blackwell and his spokesman, Gene Pierce, said not all of the listed luminaries appeared, although former Housing and Urban Development Secretary and presidential candidate Jack Kemp attended. Blackwell served as a HUD undersecretary under Kemp...



http://www.cleveland.com/search/index.ssf?/base/opinion/1113051328128130.xml?oxins

Monday, April 25, 2005

Brent Larkin

Plain Dealer Columnist

If you think education is important to a state's economic future, you'd better start looking for a new place to live.

That's because Ohio is only one election away from becoming perhaps the worst place in the na tion to educate the young - from kindergarten all the way through graduate school

And that election isn't the one they will hold next year for governor. It's the one apparently headed for the ballot this November.

Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, the GOP front-runner for governor in 2006 and the darling of the far right, wants to amend the state Constitution in a way that would restrict state spending by using a formula based on inflation and population growth. The idea resonates with voters in a huge way, with polls showing it passing by a ratio of nearly 2-to-1...

http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/thomas_suddes/index.ssf?/base/opinion/1115804226139061.xml&coll=2

Thomas Suddes
Plain Dealer Columnist

Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell wants to do for Ohio's state and local budgets what he's done for Ohio's elections, and - leaving aside his rivals for the governorship - the state's GOP "leaders" seem unwilling or unable to take Blackwell on.

Cincinnati Republican Blackwell, a darling of Ohio's flat-Earth rightists, doesn't take a breath without calculating the political value of respiration. So, with one eye on the Governor's Mansion and the other on headlines in Ohio's papers, he peddles a lunatic plan he claims would cap state and local government spending.

In fact, Blackwell's doubletalk "plan" could actually guarantee a constant rise in state spending from now until the Rapture. But of course, the constitutional amendment Blackwell seeks has nothing to do with budgeting and everything to do with political "gotcha," assuming his Frankenstein does lurch on to Ohio's ballot.

And political "gotcha" - voting "score cards" and the like - is what has landed Ohio in the soup by guaranteeing a play-it-safe legislature. Moreover, Blackwell's automata would stoke a round-the-calendar fund-raising orgy to finance, pro and con, the statewide referendum campaign that any cap-lifting legislative act would require...

http://crainscleveland.com/page.cms?pageId=489&rh=40

Tough talk

Conservatives nationwide are making it a top priority to see that Ken Blackwell, Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State, is elected governor next year.

FrontPageMag.com, an influential conservative web site, runs a commentary arguing that “leftists” find Mr. Blackwell “particularly dangerous because he’s a socially conservative African American — an evangelical Christian — who is becoming ever more popular with voters.”

The commentary, by Tom Minnery, vice president of government and public policy for the aggressively conservative Focus on the Family, argues that criticism of Mr. Blackwell by Democrats such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Rep. Maxine Waters amounts to pure racism.

“It’s no less ugly when it’s practiced by blacks rather than by whites,” Mr. Minnery writes. “The last time the country saw racism this naked was in the battle to keep Clarence Thomas off the Supreme Court. Blackwell, like Thomas, risks political lynching because he has strayed from the plantation of liberal black politics and espouses socially conservative ideas, like traditional marriage.”...