There's nothing like a vote to separate the wieners from the losers. Even know-it-all newspaper opinionators like me can learn a thing or five from last Tuesday.
Such as:
The Queen City rules. America's Most Liveable City is now also America's Most Gutsy City. Who else could pass a stadium tax on the first try, by a 61 percent landslide? No other Gotham or Metropolis has the superhero strength and courage to build TWO major league ballparks at the same time. There's no problem with that vision thing here.
Next to our World Super Series Bowl, the Windy City is hot air, the Big Apple is just seeds and stems, and L.A. is Lost Angeles. And Cleveland - who dey? Cincinnati sees their glitzy Graceland-North-Elvis-Museum aces and raises two new sports palaces on a splashy remodeled riverfront. Full house.
Now we know what it takes to make Reds owner Marge Schott ''huggable'' to her arch-nemesis, Bengals owner Mike Brown: Only about 540 million wallet-sized pictures of George Washington.
The intoxicating aroma of all those dead presidents might even make Mrs. Schott giddy enough to pry open her checkbook and help out.
At the Issue 1 victory party, she looked at all the Bengals colors and asked where all the Reds banners were. Here's a clue: Mrs. Schott will see more red when she shows us some green like Mr. Brown's $35 million.
Now we know who are the real stand-up leaders in this town, and who are the doomocrats who spend sleepless nights worrying that someone might find a shortcut around the political orange barrels and get us moving again.
Hamilton County Commissioner and stadium-tax inventor Bob Bedinghaus is the undisputed No. 1 standup guy, with rotten-tomato stains and scorch marks on his best effigy suit to prove it.
Right behind him are County Commissioner Guy Guckenberger and Cincinnati Mayor Roxanne Qualls, with Gov. George Voinovich as best supporting actor for his blunt warning that frankly, my dear, Cincinnati without pro sports is ''a minor league community.''
Next are the local bosses who donated $1 million to win an election that will cost them a hundred times more for luxury seats and advertising.
I'm not exactly what you would call a cheerleader for the Cincinnati Business Committee, but Issue 1 leaders were sweating large caliber bullets until the CBC pulled it back from the brink.
It's not easy to say, but (gag, kaff, kaff, choke) the suits did something great for Cincinnati. Other cities are literally dying for CEOs half as civic-minded.
At the opposite extreme are the crabby, selfish labor leaders whose unions will profit a lot more than business from the stadium tax. They steered the local Democratic Party into a ditch and tried to kill stadium construction that will create thousands of new union jobs. Even their own members balked at the all-union-or-nothing ransom demands.
The labor bosses and their political lackies deserve imaginary jobs building imaginary tinkertoy stadiums in the ''plan B'' promises of Tim Mara and Councilman Todd Portune.
Now we know that some educators are slow learners. In the Milford district where I live, school officials used kids to carry home sheets of propaganda designed to brainwash voters with scare stories - but nearly everyone except the school board voted against a 1 percent income tax that went down 70-30.
It doesn't take a gifted student to see that it's time to use an eraser and work out another answer. But some board members are what educators might call ''reality challenged.'' One threatened to punish students and parents by turning schools into ''an academic prison.''
''There will be no prom. We are not going to have a homecoming,'' said Ric Van Lieu - the same guy who responded to our school-levy report cards by angrily demanding how dare we imply that he doesn't welcome public scrutiny.
Proms and dances are chump change in school budgets, but make great paddles to whack families senseless until they surrender to higher taxes. Unfortunately, too many districts extort tax hikes by taking children hostage. Maybe Ohio should require school boards and superintendents to pass at least a fourth-grade proficiency test in public service.
And to prove know-it-all opinionators can be reality challeneged too, I will predict that Tuesday's results also show that Bob Dole will win in November. My unscientific conclusion is based on the Mt. Rumpke landslide of gassy garbage that offered a good preview of the presidential race. Rotten fear-mongering and eye-stinging exaggerations about budget cuts represented the Clinton campaign; a decaying dump of rank hysteria about ''they'' and ''the rich'' stood in for Pat Buchanan; and piles of useless, empty packaging looked just like Ross Perot.
Somehow, voters waded through all the trash and separated the winners from the weenies. If the nation is as smart as Cincinnati, voters will do the same next fall and throw out the Clintons to recycle Bob Dole into the White House.
Peter Bronson is editorial page editor of The Enquirer. If you have questions or comments, call 768-8301, or write to 312 Elm Street, Cincinnati, Ohio 45202.
