Fall campaign for governor will be a hard-hitting affair

There’s a Democratic primary for governor on May 6, but you wouldn’t know it listening to Ed FitzGerald, Cuyahoga County executive, while on the campaign trail. FitzGerald has his sights firmly on Republican Gov. John Kasich. That’s because the other candidate on the Democratic ballot is a political phantom.

No one in this heavily Democratic region has seen Larry Ealy of Montgomery County. Ealy, who has never run for elected office, served time in a county jail.

His being a political no-show suits Fitz- Gerald just fine. The expected Democratic Party nominee for governor has spent the primary campaign sharpening the political knives that are bound to come out when he clashes with Kasich in the fall.

Here’s one of his mainstay issues:

“I don’t think the economy in Ohio is working for most people. In Ohio, you’ve got about half of the state that lives paycheck to paycheck. You have got some growth in employment, but very mild. The governor’s claims to the contrary, to me just shows he’s not in touch with the average person in Ohio.”

Not surprisingly, Kasich’s campaign handlers — unlike FitzGerald, the governor has chosen not to meet with The Vindicator’s editorial board — dismiss the Democrat’s broadside as nothing more than empty political chatter.

One of the pillars of the Republican’s re-election campaign is Ohio’s economic recovery over the past four years. Kasich and his team have pounded away at the fact that the state had a budget deficit of $8 billion when he took over from Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland.

The battle of the budget will rage, especially when the Democrats charge that the Kasich administration and the Republican-controlled General Assembly slashed funding for local governments, public schools and higher education in order to balance the biennium budget.

FitzGerald and his party also contend that the income-tax cuts were more beneficial to upper-income Ohioans.

“There’s been some very sweet deals for a very small group of people, but I don’t think that’s the way the state should be run,” FitzGerald told Vindicator editors and writers when he came in for his endorsement meeting.

It is clear that the former mayor of Lakewood is honing his message and also getting his name known to an increasing number of voters.

Polls show that less than 50 percent of Ohioans recognize his name, but FitzGerald contended that name recognition is “one political disease that has a 100 percent cure.”

That cure is television advertising, which Democrats will do once the fall campaign gets into full swing.

Money advantage

To be sure, Gov. Kasich will have the advantage of money and will outspend his Democratic challenger, but there also are issues that make the incumbent politically vulnerable.

For us, JobsOhio, the private entity created by Kasich to handle Ohio’s economic development program, is a major cause for concern because of all the secrecy that surrounds it.

JobsOhio is exempt from state audits and does not have to adhere to the state’s public records and open meetings laws.

We have long expressed our concerns about the lack of transparency and are encouraged by FitzGerald’s pledge to “open the books” if he is elected governor.

The Vindicator endorses FitzGerald for the Democratic Party nomination.