Portraits of Power: Ohio and National Politics, 1964-2004

Part III. The Politics of Transition, 1977–1980

Part III The Politics of Transition, 1977–1980 The Politics of Transition, 1977–1980 Introduction After the 1976 election, Ohio politics entered into a period of transition as politicians began to adjust to the turmoil unleashed in the 1960s. Zaidan’s writings paid close attention to this transition. During this period two new political giants who served as mayor , Dennis Kucinich and George Voinovich, were introduced in Cleveland’s ongoing political saga. Each in his own way represented the displacement of the old industrial cities from the center of national life and the adjustment to new roles in an era of suburban dominance. Dennis Kucinich is captured by Zaidan in a 1972 portrait, “Strange Political Amalgam in Ambitious Young Man,” published five years before he ran for mayor.An ethnic Democrat with strong populist tendencies and a gift for confrontation, Kucinich had attracted considerable attention as he worked his way up the ladder of local offices in Cleveland. The story then picks up in the 1977 mayoral primary where Kucinich finished first, helping to oust a former ally, three-term Republican mayor Ralph Perk. Kucinich then went on to defeat the second-place candidate and endorsed Democrat in the general election by a few thousand votes, becoming the nation’s youngest big-city mayor at thirty-one years of age.The brash new mayor quickly alienated nearly every129 one in Cleveland, and, by the spring of 1978, a recall petition put him back on the ballot.After a bitter campaign, Kucinich survived the recall by 236 votes. In 1978, Governor Rhodes ran for reelection, seeking his fourth term in the Ohio statehouse. Rhodes chose as his running mate an ethnic Republican from Cleveland,GeorgeVoinovich,an important event in the politics of transition (“A Study in Ethnic Politics”). Rhodes was reelected in a close race against former Governor John Gilligan’s lieutenant governor, Richard Celeste, a charismatic new liberal from Cleveland, also with an ethnic background.There was much speculation that this contest would mark a transition as well, captured in “Can Celeste Stop Rhodes’s Last Hurrah?” However, Rhodes postponed that particular transition,as Zaidan puts it,in“In the Knack of Time.” The situation in the city of Cleveland continued to degenerate under Mayor Kucinich, despite his surviving the recall election. It reached a low point in December,1978,when the city defaulted on its debts—the first city to do so since the Great Depression. Cleveland and its boy mayor had become a powerful symbol of the crisis of urban America. Zaidan describes this grim reality in a feature article with the provocative title “Who Killed Cleveland?” In 1979,Kucinich faced a stiff reelection challenge from George Voinovich, Ohio’s sitting lieutenant governor and a fellow ethnic. Voinovich finished first in the primary and then handily defeated Kucinich in the general election. In many ways,Voinovich was the exact opposite of Kucinich: bland rather than colorful, stable instead of volatile. He served as mayor from 1980 to 1990 and was given credit for reviving Cleveland, an achievement he used as a springboard for successful statewide campaigns in the 1990s. Kucinich did not fade from the limelight, however. Instead, he pursued additional offices in his quixotic style—well described in the final essay in this section. Eventually, Kucinich had some success , serving as a state senator and congressman from the Cleveland area. But the old style reappeared in his 2004 quest for the Democratic presidential nomination. This section concludes with some of the best examples of Zaidan’s political writing, features published in Ohio Magazine in 130 Par t III the late 1970s.These longer pieces cover in vivid detail the political landscape of an era and are as relevant now as they were in 1979. They explain, for example, why Ohio is central to presidential politics (“Ohio’s Seal of Approval”) and the emergence of a new class of political operatives (“All the Candidate’s Men”). Zaidan’s penetrating analysis of modern presidential politics is found in “Carter in Steubenville:A Presidential Progress.”What these essays have in common is a clear sense of how Ohio and national politics had changed since 1964. The final pieces in this section are about the 1980 national conventions. Rebounding from his loss to Gerald Ford in the 1976 presidential nomination contests, former California governor Ronald Reagan defeated a leading moderate Republican, George H.W. Bush, to secure...