16 May 2008

He Went Back To Ohio

...but his city was gone.

Ohio's Attorney General, Mark Dann, resigned this week. Amid a giant sexual harassment scandal. Two women have filed suit against staffers of Dann's, who were fired earlier in the month. In true mafioso style, one of the women's offices was tossed as an intimidation tactic after the two were fired. (Something the organized crime folks love to do.)

Kind of a bitter irony that Dann entered the AG's office promising to clean up corruption in Columbus. Cronyism, giving jobs to old buddies, remains alive and well. The old boys network is still viable and intact.

Governor Strickland made a statement to the press which said that whomever he appoints to serve out the remainder of Dann's term will be someone, "mature." Read that as old white dude, folks. Because that's what he means.

I don't know which irritates me more, the fact that Dann's youth and inexperience worked against him, that he gave important jobs to buddies who weren't qualified, or that he overstayed his welcome by leaps and bounds. He should have stepped down before it got this far. In my ever so humble, that is.

The local news has been having a field day with this, doing a big "I told you so!" I've had a gutload of it, enough already, which is why I haven't written about this before. It has been going on since April, when the Columbus Dispatch wrote an expose` about the lawsuits.

I get despondent from time-to-time about politics, hopeless that it will ever change. The same terrible cycle gets repeated over and over, as the band Carbon Leaf says, love, loss, hope, repeat.

I went to a Rotary club lunch a week or so ago, with some friends. Around the table, the Dann scandal was the topic du jour, along with a discussion of pushing someone at my table to run for a township trustee position.

"Hell, no." She said. "Why would I want to get involved with that mess?"

Someone else at the table joked that those who should run, never do, and the conversation turned to other things.

There is a lot of truth in that. I think you've got to be a pretty big sociopath to run for President, and that there is a good chance that people who could truly change things never stand for election. That's a shame; but the ultimate beauty of the system is that anyone can run for a local office. The downside is that you've got to get your hands dirty and raise some money to do so.

Dann's parting shot (besides not shaking the gov's hand and stalking out of the press conference, immaturely and rudely) was that he was going to help his wife sell dishes on the internet. Good luck with that.

No comments: