It didn’t seem to bother DeWine in the least that his opponent, Democratic incumbent Attorney General Richard Cordray, was in line ahead of him in the Grove City parade or that they were marching through Cordray’s hometown and past houses decked out in Cordray yard signs.
The campaign printed 100,000 copies of Fran DeWine’s cookbook, now in its 11th edition. Fran came up with the idea back when her husband first ran for political office in 1976 — Greene County prosecutor — and she felt she needed something to hand out as she went door to door for him.
After 30 years in political office, hundreds of thousands of copies of the cookbook, and 31 annual ice cream socials at his house, Mike DeWine is well known to Ohio voters.
DeWine, now 63, moved from the county prosecutor’s office in 1976 to Ohio Senate in 1980 and then Congress in 1982. He left Washington, D.C. to join George Voinovich’s ticket as lieutenant governor in 1990 and then ran for U.S. Senate two years later against Democrat John Glenn but lost. In 1994, he beat attorney Joel Hyatt for a U.S. Senate seat. DeWine held the seat until 2006 when Democrat Sherrod Brown beat him by 11 percentage points.
“I’m very competitive. No one likes to lose,” he said. “I don’t like to lose. I didn’t like to lose when I was playing baseball when I was 7. I don’t like to lose.”
Experience as prosecutor stressed
After the loss to Brown, DeWine called the presidents of Cedarville University and Miami University and lined up teaching positions.
Swept out in a Democratic wave in 2006, DeWine could be swept back into office in what many are predicting will be a Republican wave in 2010.
Wave or no wave, De-Wine is putting every ounce of energy and a big pile of money into the attorney general’s race. This year through the end of September, he raised $2.8 million and the most recent publicly available poll — conducted by the Columbus Dispatch in early September — showed him grabbing 44 percent of the vote compared with 42 percent for Cordray.
Cordray is serving the remainder of Democrat Marc Dann’s term. After Dann was pressured to resign in May 2008, Ohio State University law school dean Nancy Rogers served as interim attorney general while Cordray ran in a special election in November 2008.
DeWine did not run for attorney general then but later decided it was an office he could lead.
On the campaign trail and in his political ads, DeWine is stressing his four years experience as a county prosecutor in the late 1970s and promising to be a pro-cop attorney general.
“The opportunity to run for attorney general excites me. I started as a county prosecuting attorney. When you are prosecutor, you see all the problems of your county. It shapes you, it affects you, it changes you. You see things that you can’t believe actually exist in your own county,” DeWine said. “One of the jobs of the attorney general is to work with (and) serve police, prosecutors, sheriffs. Help them protect people.”
A centerpiece of De-Wine’s campaign has been that he will improve the state crime lab, which is run by the attorney general. The labs, located in Bowling Green, Richfield and London, process evidence samples collected at crime scenes.
DeWine argues that the lab under Cordray’s leadership is inefficient and mismanaged. Cordray rebuts that, saying backlogs for DNA and other biological samples are down.
DeWine promises to do a management audit and make management changes.
He also criticizes Cordray as being too slow to join the public corruption investigation in Cuyahoga County that involves Democratic officeholders. Cordray said the investigation began before he was elected attorney general but that he was in touch with federal authorities early on to offer assistance.
DeWine also promises he would join other states in seeking to block the new federal health care reform law from taking effect — something Cordray declined to do. Last week, a federal judge in Florida allowed the 20 states to go forward with the lawsuit.
Prosecutor, senator favorite jobs
DeWine likes to tell people that his two favorite jobs were prosecutor and U.S. senator. When asked what are his top five proudest accomplishments in his public life, DeWine names broad topic areas instead of narrow, incremental bills or cases.
DeWine said he is proud that he played a significant role in the development of national DNA and fingerprint databases used to help solve crimes, pushed through laws requiring drug makers to test how pharmaceuticals are tolerated by children before marketing them to kids, worked to get health care and other benefits to families of troops killed in service, and convicted rapists as a county prosecutor in a day and age when victims were treated differently and the prevailing thought was convictions were too difficult.
He also noted that he worked to pass tougher drunken driving bills at the state and federal levels and to get regulations on the books so consumers are given information on vehicle stickers about the car’s safety rating.
“When you see a star rating on a car sticker, that’s my bill,” he said.
Making roadways safer has a special place in De-Wine’s heart. Fran and Mike DeWine lost their daughter Becky, 22, when she was killed in an auto accident in August 1993.
The DeWines have seven other children, the youngest of whom just went off to college this fall, and they have 13 grandchildren and another on the way. “These kids are spread out over 25 years. We had kids born in four decades. We had kids in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s.... I guess our only regret is that we didn’t have more kids,” DeWine said.
Outside the political realm, the DeWines raise money for a school named after Becky in a Haitian slum near Port-au-Prince. The couple stopped in Haiti on the way back from Colombia when DeWine was in the U.S. Senate. They were overwhelmed by the poverty. When they heard about Father Tom Hagan’s work at the school, they offered to raise money. The Becky DeWine School now serves 8,000 students in grades one through 12.
Some of the DeWine offspring followed Mike’s footsteps into public service. His son Pat is a Hamilton County Common Pleas Court judge and former county commissioner and Cincinnati City Council member. His daughter Alice, who is an assistant prosecutor, starred in De-Wine’s first political commercial for his attorney general campaign.
Outside the governor’s office, the attorney general runs one of the busiest, most high-profile offices in state government. With 1,400 employees, the attorney general represents the state in civil lawsuits, defends laws passed by the General Assembly, prosecutes Medicaid fraud, investigates consumer complaints and assists local law enforcement through the Bureau of Criminal Investigation and Identification and the crime labs.
“What brought me back to this really is the job. I had a lot of people call me and say, ‘Run for this, run for that.’ But there’s a compelling reason for me personally to run for attorney general because I know what I can do. I know how I can make a difference,” DeWine said.
Contact this reporter at (614) 224-1624 or lbischoff@Dayton
DailyNews.com.
About the Author
