With the news that St. Rep. Bob Mecklenborg is going to do the right thing and resign from office following his tangle with the law in Indiana, it is time to take a look back at the story and draw some conclusions.
Bob Mecklenborg: He needs to reconnect with his family and make amends in order to atone for his sins. From what I understand, this may be the most difficult thing to accomplish and serving in the state legislature would be a distraction he couldn't afford if he wants to salvage anything of his personal life.
Speaker Batchelder: He started off with rather weak platitudes but as details of the story emerged and it became crystal clear that Mecklenborg needed to go, The People's Eyebrow stood up and said what needed to be said. Happy to see a Republican is capable of Leading Ohio.
Governor John Kasich and ORP Chairman Kevin DeWine: You couldn't find either one of these guys with a search warrant. And that is probably just as well. While I would have preferred to see a united Ohio republican Party speaking out in support of the Zero Tolerance Policy, I understand the desire to not want to elongate the story in the news cycle with trickled out statements.
Hamilton County GOP Chairman Alex Triantafilou: His performance was probably the weakest of them all. At no point did Alex make any recommendation that what Mecklenborg did was wrong and that he should step down. I get why Kasich and DeWine stayed out of it, but I think Alex failed to lead on this one.
Ohio Republican Party: It became painfully clear to me that the new guys at the ORP are excellent at politics, but appear to have very little sense of the history of Ohio politics before the election of John Kasich. And that is to be expected, they are new guys after all. Don't get me wrong, they know who Ted Strickland was and why he made our problems worse; but I get the impression that if somebody asked them about Bob Taft and Tom Noe, we'd get a blank stare. Fortunately, I think these guys can get up to speed and we'll see improvement on these kinds of issues in the future.
Center-Right Blogosphere: Mostly absent...granted there really wasn't a whole lot that anybody could add to the story, but moral support and a few more voices in the choir calling for action would have been nice. The center-left blogosphere broke the story and pretty much left us in the dust. In my not so humble opinion, we bloggers have a responsibility to hold our own side accountable to the standards and campaign promises that ALL of our elected officials sign on to and when we fail to do so, we lose integrity. We can...we MUST do better.
WMD: Well, there are things that I think we could have done better too... As much pressure as we applied publicly, I probably could have done more behind the scenes. Sometimes I forget that it isn't enough just to simply write about these sorts of things. We all have to get involved.
