Politicians Need the Type of Accountability That Exists in Business — And Don’t Tell Me That Is What Elections Are For
Ohio is like a publicly-traded company that pays no dividends with the same share price today as it was in March 2000, with its CEOs made up of talentless insiders who just kept getting promoted.
In the last week, after yet another issue arose with its airplanes, Boeing fired its Chief Executive Officer (CEO), David Calhoun. CEOs routinely get terminated when the companies they run under-perform or perform poorly. Typically, the pressure to nix a CEO comes from institutional investors and shareholders who suffer valuation declines connected to the performance issues. No CEO can survive years of doing his or her job badly.
It really is too bad politics lack the same type of accountability forces as corporate America.
For those of you yelling at your screen “that is what elections are for!!!,” don’t be so naive. The American political system long ago shed what any objective person would define as fair elections. Primary elections are even less fair than General elections, as at least the latter has two opposing parties being funded and supported by different base groups. Primary elections rarely produce surprise winners, especially when it comes to Establishment career politician candidates versus non-self-funding outsider candidates who don’t possess millions to throw at the race. Without their own money or a wealthy backer’s money, J.D. Vance, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Bernie Moreno would never have made a blip on the political scene. Both Vance and Moreno needed money to earn Donald Trump’s backing to win, as Trump rarely takes long-shot gambles on candidates who first don’t have money behind them.
In Ohio, our political system has lacked any accountability measure for decades. If you read this column regularly, you’ve seen the unequivocal data on job growth, population growth, and other key issues in which Ohio is ranked consistently in the bottom third. If CEOs got the kind of results Ohio’s elected officials have gotten over the last few decades, those CEOs would have been kicked to the curb. Yet, the same Establishment career politicians keep winning and keep performing poorly without consequence.
Other than U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown who until this year has always run in very favorable Democrat election years (the anti-George Bush/Iraq War 2006 election, the 2012 Barack Obama re-election year, and the anti-Donald Trump 2018 midterm), the Democratic Party is largely non-existent outside of the large, urban counties, which is why Republicans have controlled statewide offices, most congressional seats, and the Ohio General Assembly for over thirty years, with a large chunk of those years possessing supermajorities in the state legislature. The fact that Democrats cannot use the poor results produced by Republicans to win just shows you how decrepit the Democrat Party is in Ohio. Within the Republican Party, no matter how often grassroots groups have tried to win elections, the Establishment candidates largely win. Those winners then adopt the same ineffective policies that haven’t worked in thirty years and Ohioans suffer because of it.
Let me give you three examples.
Lieutenant Governor Jon Husted has been sucking on the teat of government largely since graduating from college. I estimate Husted will have received over $2.8 million in taxpayer-funded pay since 2001, as well as gold-plated health care and a multi-million dollar government pension. In addition to serving in the Ohio Senate, he has been Speaker of the House, Secretary of State, and Lieutenant Governor for five years now. Husted is running for governor in 2026 unless the House Bill 6 fiasco finally catches up with him. Based on the latest campaign finance report, in 2023 (this excludes his PAC or the State Candidate Fund), Husted raised over $3.6 million and has $3.3 million cash on hand as of December 31, 2023. His donor list is a who’s who of the wealthiest Ohioans, with many of those donors being long-time donors to Ohio Republican governors going back to Voinovich. Even Big Labor has given five-figure donations to Husted, which is why he opposes right-to-work.
Given how poorly Ohio has done, one must ask, what exactly are these people funding? It ain’t a thriving, successful Ohio. Look, man, this isn’t some feel good cause or something you do because you may like the politician. Ohio is slowly dying and being left behind. The Wexners, Mathiles, and Farmers may have their billions so Ohio’s systemic weakness doesn’t impact them so long as the equity markets keep going up. The tens of thousands of rank and file Ohioans, however, on whose backs the Limited, Iams, and Cintas empires were built are suffering and being left holding an empty bag. Husted and the other Establishment career politicians won’t push a single policy that will fundamentally change the downward slide of Ohio so that the descendants of the Ohioans who built Wexner’s stores, mixed Mathile’s dog food, or delivered Farmer’s uniforms have the same opportunities to succeed as those men did way back when they started. Until wealthy Ohioans stop funding the campaigns of mediocre career political hacks, Ohio will remain a mediocre place where those who can leave, do, and those who can’t, wallow.
The most interesting and problematic Husted donations come from Heartland Bank, which employs Husted as a Director on its Board for roughly $20,000 per year at the same time he gets paid roughly $178,000 per year by taxpayers to serve full-time as Lieutenant Governor. I believe Husted is the only governor or lieutenant governor in America that has a private sector job in addition to his full-time taxpayer-funded government job. As if that wasn’t enough, Heartland Bank and Husted now double-down on their troubling relationship by Heartland Bank becoming one of the largest contributors to Husted’s campaign. Heartland Bank donated over $30,000 to Husted’s campaign in 2023. I’ve previously pointed out the various conflicts of interest that exist because, as a state-chartered bank, Heartland Bank has issues before state government, or its clients do, or its competitors do, or its competitors’ clients do. No bureaucrat in state government is going to take any action that harms Heartland Bank or its clients and could easily take action to harm Heartland Bank’s competitors or their clients knowing that the second most power person in government sits on Heartland Bank's board. Husted never has to lift a finger or utter a word, as every state employee who deals with Heartland Bank JUST KNOWS not to touch them. If Ohio had real journalists instead of JINOs, this issue would be front-page news. Lucky for Husted and Heartland Bank, it doesn’t.
So, unless someone with personal wealth like Ramaswamy decides to run for governor in 2026 or Husted gets swept up in the HB6 criminality, it is highly likely Husted will become Ohio Governor in 2027. As a quick aside, I did explore a run for Ohio Governor for nine months in 2023, but ended that exploratory effort once it became clear that (1) Ohio Republican primary voters just don’t care unless they see you on Fox News or you have money to throw around to get noticed and (2) those voters get too distracted by too many less important races to focus on the one state race that actually could change their lives. Husted will become Ohio Governor despite the fact that under his tenure, these things occurred:
Ohio’s private sector job growth is among American’s weakest over the last twenty years, five years, and since the DeWine-Husted pandemic shutdown;
Ohio’s population has been stagnant over the last twenty-plus years and decreased over the last several years;
Ohio had one of the most severe pandemic shutdowns in America harming our private sector and kids’ educations;
A majority of Ohio’s counties have hollowed out of both people and jobs;
Ohio adopted one of America’s most radical abortion measures; and
State spending exploded to over $86 billion in the latest two-year budget.
Equally important, under his tenure, these things didn’t occur:
Adoption of right-to-work to make Ohio competitive;
Elimination of the state income tax;
Freeze state spending;
Repeal Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion;
Enact universal school choice where every state dollar going to K-12 follows the kids to wherever they go;
Re-balance state funding between higher education for the minority of kids who go to college and tech/trade options for the vast majority who don’t;
Solve the "4pm to 8am” problem harming Ohio’s most vulnerable kids;
Consolidate local government to reduce local tax burdens;
Act to build a world-class airport in Ohio;
Adopt anti-transradical policies to protect kids (this policy only got adopted after overriding DeWine’s veto with Husted remaining cowardly silent for years and only opening his weaselly mouth just hours before DeWine issued his veto); and
Ensuring “woke” ideology stays out of K-12 classrooms.
I could go on. Not one Ohio leader can deny the above statements. At best, they will divert attention by saying Ohio has record low unemployment, which it does, but that low is high compared to other states. The bottom line is that if Ohio had political accountability, Husted would not only lose his bid for governor, but would never run to begin with. He, like so many other Establishment career politicians, lack any semblance of shame when it comes to how badly Ohio has performed under their “leadership.” After all, he’s become a multi-millionaire, as most Ohioans have lost ground. As long as uninformed (or just plain gullible) big donors keep writing big checks, the Husteds of the system will keep getting elected and Ohio will keep its moniker as a dead state walking.
In all seriousness, what is the honest case for Husted? What positive metrics support his tenure, especially when compared to how other states have done during the same period of time?
Next, the above analysis related to private sector job growth applies equally to JobsOhio. In its thirteenth year of operations, Ohio’s private sector remains among the weakest in America. Ohio’s recovery from the pandemic is in the bottom third of all states. JobsOhio should have been eliminated; instead, the unaccountable bureaucrats who work there get paid handsomely with many getting yearly bonuses despite Ohio adding so few jobs every year. This failure would never fly in corporate America.
Finally, there is the lack of accountability surrounding the “Blue 22” legislators who voted with Democrats to elect a moderate as Ohio Speaker in January 2023. Lots of well-intentioned people worked hard to defeat the Blue 22 in primaries three weeks ago, but only four incumbents were defeated, with thirteen re-elected and five others term-limited or opting to do something else. Those twenty-two races demonstrate just how powerful money (and incumbency) is when it comes to winning elections. Again, given the poor results above in conjunction with their betrayal, they should have been easy to beat. They weren’t because we simply don’t have fair elections in Ohio.
As I said repeatedly on the campaign trail, if Husted didn’t have such a large money advantage that allowed him to paper over his piss-poor record with primary voters, I would have wiped the floor with him in a debate and with voters. Upon winning, I would have taken the legislature by the throat to start getting the tough stuff done, including eliminating JobsOhio and shifting its resources to build a world-class airport in the Columbus area (and shutdown land-locked Port Columbus that requires you to fly somewhere to get somewhere). Unfortunately, Ohio’s political system totally lacks any accountability for those who get elected then get nothing done. The moment the revised data on private sector job growth came out two weeks ago showing that Ohio had far less growth in 2023 than DeWine and Husted claimed they achieved, both men should have been fired, which is what would have happened had they been running a company. Instead, Ohioans likely will get eleven more years of mediocrity at best. It must be nice to be an Establishment career politician in Ohio.
Ohio is like a publicly-traded company that pays no dividends and is worth the same price per share today as it was in March 2000, with its CEOs made up of talentless insiders who just kept getting promoted to the top spot.
