CAN'T BEAT SOMETHING WITH NOTHING: Monday's Crain's Cleveland Business, in an article and an editorial (no longer accessible), says the Statehouse GOP's planned $2 billion Third Frontier-public works-brownfields cleanup ballot issue has been damaged by the Workers Comp scandals, and should be tabled. Yesterday's PD takes the opposite position, criticizing General Assembly Democrats who've refused to help put TF2 on the ballot. Today we learn that the proposal now includes a ban on Third Frontier financing of stem cell research projects.

From the Crain's article:

For the Legislature to put an item on the ballot, it needs 60 votes in the House and 21 in the Senate. If the Republicans in their respective chambers of the General Assembly all voted in favor of putting the bond issue on the ballot, they would have enough votes. However, at least three Republicans in the House are planning to vote against it, Rep. Trakas said.

"We are hoping that less parochial heads prevail," Rep. Trakas said. "We need some Democratic votes, and the Democrats have been very partisan about this."

House Minority Leader Rep. Chris Redfern, D-Catawba Island Township, said House Democrats will not vote for the measure unless it is restructured so that money will be evenly distributed throughout the state.

"If you live near a university campus, I can understand why you would want to support it. If you live in the 85 other counties not impacted, there has not been the argument made by the governor to sway the public," Rep. Redfern said. "I'm not interested in building up Ohio State University or creating three research institutes in the state of Ohio to the detriment of 85 counties."

Charges of "partisanship" coming from the GOP majority are laughable, of course. There's no good reason for Statehouse Democrats to come to the aid of lame duck Trakas, House Speaker Jon Husted or the floundering Governor Taft. And there's certainly no reason to attach Democratic sponsors to a tech-development plan that will screen for religious correctness.

But there are very good reasons for the Dems to have an alternative plan. And the big problem here is... they don't.

Recall that the 2003 version of the Third Frontier plan, Issue 1, was much more popular among Democrats than Republicans. While losing statewide by only 45,000 votes, it passed handily in Cuyahoga, Summit, Lorain, Montgomery, Stark and Erie Counties. Of the sixteen counties that went for Kerry in '04, seven passed Issue 1 in '03, one (Lucas) split dead even, and three more gave "Yes" at least 48% of their votes. The city of Cleveland supported the issue 61%-39%, with twenty out of twenty-one wards voting "Yes" including all the African-American wards. Counties that went for Bush in '04, on the other hand, opposed Issue 1 overwhelmingly.

Normally, this kind of support among their own base should have sent Democratic legislators scrambling to the head of the Third Frontier parade. They've resisted this impulse... wisely, I'm sure, in light of the GOP's total control of the legislative process and the governor's crumbling fortunes. But as recent events make clear, the GOP's need for sixty votes could have empowered the Dems to publicly negotiate a TF2 plan that was more to their liking -- if the minority caucus had taken steps since 2003 to develop and promote its own agenda for technology-driven job development.

But they didn't, and no such agenda exists. So once again, in the tech-jobs debate the Democrats are playing the role of pot-shotting aginners.

This may seem like clever tactics for a week or two (the stem cell nonsense certainly bolsters that view) but it's long-run suicide. If the 2003 Third Frontier vote proved anything, it proved that half of Ohio voters -- the half that includes most Democratic counties -- will vote for anything that resonates with the suggestion of more jobs. The Republicans are deeply vulnerable on this issue, but they have a jobs program which they're noisily enacting: lower taxes and high-tech investments. It may be horseshit, it may be corporate welfare, it may have far less real economic impact than the de-funding of higher education and the theocratic perversion of high school science education. But it's a program that speaks to lots of voters in the Democrats' own base -- including those evil urban/university enclaves in Cleveland, Akron, and Columbus -- as well as to the GOP's core anti-tax voters. What do Redfern and Co. have to offer as an alternative?

Oldest truth in politics: You can't beat something with nothing.

So, if I'm so smart, what would I propose for the Democrats' legislative agenda? Fair question. Here are a couple of ideas...

• A version of the Third Frontier investment program that also funds community-based technology training for inner-city and rural residents, so poor people have a shot at the jobs.
• An initiative for aggressive deployment of affordable broadband communications throughout the state, right now, by any means necessary.
• Reform of Ohio's development financing and corporate law to encourage grassroots models of enterprise development -- like employee buyouts to prevent plant closings, and new business formations by community nonprofits and cooperatives. (Check out the Employee Ownership Center at Kent State. Take a look at Spain's 70,000-worker Mondragon Cooperative Corporation. Or just consider the housing construction that's been driven by community development corporations in recent years.)
• Serious support for residential and commercial adoption of wind, solar, fuel cell and geothermal energy applications -- including changes in state utility law to promote distributed generation and reduce the power of distant monopolies in local energy markets.
  

If you aren't crazy about these ideas, put your own on the list. The point is, Democrats need to be fighting for something that will get more Ohioans gainfully employed in the new economy. Instead, we have the unlovely spectacle of Statehouse Dems blocking and sniping at the GOP's big initiative for technology job growth, while here in Cleveland -- a Democratic city that voted for that initiative in 2003 -- the Democratic mayor's "big ideas" for economic development are Wal-Mart and gambling.

This is ridiculous and shameful. And if it continues, it will keep Democrats out of power in Columbus forever.
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