Voinovich exits public life with fear for US

By Joe Hallett, Jack Torry and Jonathan Riskind

Columbus Dispatch

CLEVELAND

The modest two-story beige house with green shutters on a quiet street a half block from Lake Erie holds little evidence of the life George Victor Voinovich is about to leave.

Amid the clutter of his study, there are no photographs of him with presidents, fellow senators, governors or mayors. There are no plaques on the wall to commemorate Voinovich’s historic 43-year run in public office, no proclamations about his accomplishments.

The house where George and Janet Voinovich have lived for all but 10 of their 48 years of marriage instead is a shrine to their family. A painting depicts a church atop a Slovenian hill where Voinovich’s great-grandfather played the organ. Photographs of the Voinovichs’ three surviving children and eight grandchildren abound. On a table next to their love seat is a photo of George and Janet with daughter Molly taken a few days before she was struck by a van and killed while walking to school in 1979. Molly would have been 40 now.

This house, along with a one-bedroom condominium in Florida, is where 74-year-old Republican George Voinovich plans to spend the rest of his days. On Jan. 1, for the first time in more than four decades, Voinovich will have no office in a government edifice, no affairs of state to manage or legislate. How will it be for Janet to have him around the house?

“That’s yet to be determined,” she said, smiling. “The good news is that we like each other a lot.”

On Thursday, Voinovich’s unprecedented career in Ohio politics will be honored at a reception in the Statehouse. Invited friends and former staffers will attest to his effectiveness and place him among the most popular political leaders in state history, alongside the likes of former Gov. James A. Rhodes and Frank J. Lausche, Voinovich’s boyhood idol from Cleveland, a fellow Eastern European who was the only other Clevelander to serve as mayor, governor and U.S. senator.

RECORD VOTE-GETTER

Voinovich is the most prolific vote-getter in Ohio history. No gubernatorial candidate ever received a higher percentage of the vote than he did in 1994, almost 72 percent, and no Senate candidate ever received more raw votes than the nearly 3.5 million he won in 2004.

“If Jim Rhodes was the Babe Ruth of Ohio politics, then George Voinovich is the Henry Aaron,” said Curt Steiner, who was communications director and chief of staff for Voinovich during his first term as governor.

“It is hard to imagine that his record of service will ever be matched inside the borders of Ohio. This was somebody you knew you could count on year after year after year.”

On Friday, after the Statehouse celebration, Voinovich will go home to his new reality — retirement.

“My No. 1 priority in retirement is to take care of my physical, mental and spiritual health,” he said. “I want to do that so I can take care of my wife. And then, there are my children and grandchildren. Those are my priorities.”

Voinovich wants to write a book. He will fish Lake Erie earnestly for walleye, and he and Janet will take long walks along the lake, up to Wildwood Park, whose expansion and improvement are Voinovich’s doing, and they will gaze at sunsets.

“We live where you can see a painting by the Master,” and it changes every night.”

Voinovich contemplated running for a third term in the Senate, but thought better about being there when he was 80, knowing that he and Janet are of ages — she’s 77 — requiring them to stay close by each other. Besides, a frustrated Voinovich said, the politics of Washington have become so polarized and poisonous that it’s difficult to forge progress on what he views as the nation’s most monumental problem: the federal budget deficit and national debt.

“Somehow, we have got to get people to understand that you’ve got to work together,” Voinovich said. “Right now the country is as fragile as I’ve ever seen it. I could cry right now, that’s how worried I am about our future.”

Crying would not be out of character for Voinovich. Throughout his career, his emotions have been on public display. As governor in 1992, he wept before TV cameras as he announced amid a budget crisis that he was cutting a welfare safety net for 100,000 chronically unemployed Ohioans.

And he flashed his famous temper in 1995 when his gubernatorial plane was grounded on the tarmac by President Bill Clinton’s visit to Columbus. Grabbing the cockpit mike, Voinovich yelled to an air traffic controller that the Secret Service “can go screw themselves.”

Yet, Ohioans seemed to like the genuineness of the devoutly Catholic Voinovich, who often said that his service to the public was guided by the Holy Spirit. Famously frugal personally and a devotee of government fiscal responsibility, Voinovich advocated tax or fee increases or opposed tax cuts more than two dozen times since 1971 and was never punished by voters. He handily won his first race for Senate in 1998, even after 80 percent of Ohio voters turned down his request that year for a penny increase in the sales tax to help schools.

Voinovich’s fondest and most productive years in office were as mayor and governor. “Always in his heart he was a Clevelander, but he loved being governor as much as anybody who’s ever served in the job,” said former Republican Senate President Stanley J. Aronoff.

Voinovich’s eight years as governor were wrought from economic chaos, but they ended in prosperity. At the end of his first two years, he had cut $711 million from the state budget and raised taxes, largely on the rich, by more than $400 million to usher forth fiscal soundness in state government. Voinovich was anything but a caretaker governor: he implemented welfare and workers’ compensation reform, spent massively on children’s programs and for new school buildings, and allocated $600 million extra to poor school districts.

CONTROLLING A RIOT

Perhaps his greatest challenge came on Easter Sunday in 1993 when a riot erupted at the maximum security prison in Lucasville. Inmates controlled the prison for 11 days, the longest state prison riot in U.S. history, resulting in the death of a guard and 10 inmates. Under enormous pressure to go to the prison himself and, ultimately, to storm it with troops, Voinovich listened to the counsel of experts to stay away. The inmates relented, avoiding more bloodshed.

“If anybody wanted to study how a governor handles a crisis, they ought to look at what George Voinovich did during Lucasville,” said Attorney General-elect Mike DeWine, then the lieutenant governor.

Election to the Senate in 1998 fulfilled one of Voinovich’s chief ambitions. Throughout his career, he often had signaled he was more interested in becoming a senator than in being governor.

In 1986 when he was still mayor of Cleveland, he rejected pleas from Republicans to challenge Gov. Richard F. Celeste, preferring instead to run for the Senate two years later against Democrat Howard Metzenbaum. When Voinovich lost to Metzenbaum in 1988, he was left only with the option of running for governor in 1990.

Yet he quickly found the job of senator to be frustrating. The institution often seemed paralyzed by intense partisan divisions; his very first major vote was whether to convict President Clinton of impeachment charges approved by the House.

Gone were the heady days of Cleveland and Columbus, where he forged alliances with powerful Democrats.The Senate, Voinovich quickly discovered, was different. Because Senate rules allowed 41 senators to block any bill, passing laws was difficult. He once acknowledged to another senator that “it’s much more stressful being governor, but much more frustrating being a senator.’’

“He is much more willing to make compromises than his colleagues,” said Ted Hollingsworth, who served as Voinovich’s chief of staff in the Senate.

Just before last month’s congressional elections, Senate Republicans urged Voinovich to oppose a necessary measure to increase the national debt ceiling. Without an increase, the government would have shut down.

Instead, Voinovich provided the 60th vote needed to break a Republican filibuster and allow Congress to approve the measure. He complained that “a lot of my (GOP) colleagues didn’t want the president to have a victory before the election.’’

He acknowledged that he liked being mayor and governor much more than a senator: “I’m a leader. You come down here (to Washington) and you are not the orchestra leader, you are a member of the orchestra.’’

Throughout his two terms, Voinovich and his staff boasted that he was the No. 1 deficit hawk in the Senate. He reinforced that in his first term when he opposed Republican efforts to cut taxes without cutting spending.