DeWine Debate Watch: Day 11
September 8, 2022
Columbus, OH — As debate season starts to ramp up in the closing weeks and days of the election cycle, Mike DeWine has continued to duck committing to debates across Ohio with Mayor Nan Whaley, even as the Mayor has already publicly agreed and challenged DeWine to a number of debates. DeWine also dodged a debate with his primary opponents earlier this year, signaling that he is scared to defend his record to Ohioans, especially since he’s debated political opponents in the past. It’s ‘DeWine Debate Watch’ Day 11, reminding Ohioans that DeWine won’t even try to make his case to them as he seeks re-election to the highest statewide executive office.
“Mike DeWine clearly knows his record over the last four years of selling out working families in favor of the wealthy and well-connected is not going to be popular with Ohio voters. If DeWine can’t even muster the political courage to tell Ohioans why they should re-elect him, he doesn’t deserve the job and should be held publicly accountable for his cowardice,” said Ohio Democratic Party spokesperson Matt Keyes.
Ohioans deserve answers from DeWine on a number of key issues, including his promise to ‘go as far as we can’ to rip away reproductive rights, his broken promise to ‘do something’ to combat gun violence in Ohio, his connections to the largest public corruption scandal in state history and his role in the failed redistricting process that produced GOP-gerrymandered maps and cost Ohioans millions of dollars.
Read more from WVXU-FM here and below:
WVXU-FM: Commentary: Mike DeWine Appears To Be Running Out The Clock On Debating Nan Whaley
Howard Wilkinson
September 7, 2022
- Why won’t Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine meet his opponent, former Dayton mayor Nan Whaley, in a good old-fashioned, face-to-face, debate?
- Well, the answer is that, after 46 years running for every significant public office in Ohio, he is flat-out afraid. Knee-knocking scared to death.
- Terrified of talking about issues that could motivate the Democratic opposition to vote in huge numbers or alienate his Republican base voters, many of whom already look at the governor with a jaundiced eye.
- “There’s only one reason for Mike DeWine to refuse to debate his opponent,” said David B. Cohen, a political science professor at the University of Akron. “Fear. Just plain fear. That’s the only possible explanation.”
- So what’s he scared of? Well, there are a number of subjects the governor would just as soon avoid talking about in this campaign, including:
- Abortion, and the likelihood that if the Ohio General Assembly passes a bill banning abortion, without exceptions, that he would sign it into law, thus firing up the opposition once again.
- His administration’s response to the COVID crisis of 2020. DeWine got high marks from some — mostly Democrats — but most of the Trump devotees in his party are still accusing him of trampling on individual rights.
- Gun control, which became a big problem for DeWine after the August 2019 mass murder in Dayton’s Oregon District. The governor promised action on gun control but abandoned his own agenda at the first sign of opposition from the Republicans in the legislature. Instead, he ended up signing a number of bills that will do nothing but make guns more prevalent.
- The governor’s links, as reported in the media, to First Energy and the House Bill 6 bribery scandal.
- I hate to break the news to the DeWine campaign, but “newspaper endorsement screenings” are nothing like “de facto debates,” even if they feature both candidates sitting in a board room together and even if they are live-streamed so that voters can listen in.
- Trust me on this. I sat in on more of these newspaper endorsement meetings than I care to remember in my 30 years at the Cincinnati Enquirer. They are not free-wheeling discussions of a broad range of issues important to the public; they tend to be limited to whatever parochial interests the newspaper editors have. And the interests of the editors rarely match the interests of voters at large.
- DeWine, over his 46 years in Ohio politics, has blown hot and cold when it comes to debating opponents. He does it when he thinks it can benefit him; he refuses when he thinks it could hurt him.
- “It would appear (DeWine) has no intention of debating,” Cohen said. “It’s really remarkable.”
- “A sitting governor should be able to go in front of the people of his state and make his case,” Cohen said. “If he can’t do that, he should get into another business.”
- Ohio voters deserve to hear from both DeWine and Whaley. If George Voinovich was still around, I have a feeling he would tell DeWine just that — suck it up and do it.
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