No easy path for FitzGerald

COLUMBUS

I was sitting in church the other day when a guy I know started asking me about election stuff.

He knows I’m a Statehouse reporter, and he heard me on the radio a few days earlier, which is why he brought up the subject.

He’s similar to a lot of people I run into away from work — familiar, in general terms, with the offices that are up for grabs next month but probably unable to name all five incumbent statewide office-holders.

There are lots of issues folks like these could ask about in casual conversation. Tax policy, environmental regulations and election-law changes come to mind.

But he looked at me, with a smirk, and asked the inevitable: What’s up with that driver’s license thing?

It’s the battle Cuyahoga County Executive Ed FitzGerald has been fighting for weeks, trying to engage an electorate on topics that will affect their lives and not the years he drove with a learner’s permit or without a valid license.

Losing battle

And it’s a battle that he has been losing, if last week’s Quinnipiac Poll, which had him down 22 points to Republican Gov. John Kasich, is any indication.

I don’t think average citizens are completely ignorant of the issues in the race. It’s just a lot easier to think about someone not having a driver’s license for that many years.

And it’s difficult for the voting (and driving) public to understand why somebody would neglect their license for so long.

“Sometimes you get stuck talking about something you’d rather not talk about,” FitzGerald told me and my editors this week during a meeting here in Columbus. “That’s the way it goes. If you can’t take it, if you can’t take the criticism, then you need to find a less stressful profession.”

He added, “There’s just times in American politics where somebody does something really egregious and gets away with it and people don’t talk about it, and there’s times when something is incredibly silly and inconsequential and people do talk about it. If those are the cards, I’ll just play them as best I can and try to run a campaign that’s substantive.”

FitzGerald is still out on the campaign trail, trying to convince voters that he’s a better choice for governor. He said his campaign has made contact with some 350,000 Ohioans in recent weeks, with hopes of persuading like-minded voters to visit the polls.

“My job as a candidate is to talk about issues that I think are important and that I care about and that I think voters need to hear,” he said. “That’s what I’ve been trying to do for a year and a half, and that’s what I’ll do in the 33 days remaining.”

FitzGerald had an uphill battle before the driver’s license issue came to light. It’s even more so now. And it’s hard to envision a scenario where he could pull out a victory on Election Day.

The question remaining is whether his past driver’s license status will pull down the rest of the Democrats running for statewide office.

As Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, put it last week, “If Kasich wins by 20 points or more, it will be difficult for any of the under ticket Democrats to survive. The Ed FitzGerald campaign, for which Democrats once had high hopes, could turn out to be a disaster for the party as well as for FitzGerald.”

Marc Kovac is The Vindicator’s Statehouse correspondent. Email him at mkovac@dixcom.com or on Twitter at OhioCapitalBlog.