COLUMBUS
- Eleven years ago, in a Cincinnati cafe, Hamilton County Commissioner Bob Taft sought political advice from an old friend, Mike Maloney. James A. Rhodes was running for governor again and wanted Mr. Taft as his running mate.
If Mr. Rhodes lost the governor's race, would the party somehow hold him responsible, Mr. Taft wondered. And if Mr. Rhodes won, would the job of lieutenant governor (sometimes derided as the ''light governor'') be the proper springboard to the top job?
Such cautiousness, coupled with attention to the party faithful, has helped Mr. Taft develop into one of the Republican Party's favorite sons, says the old friend, Mr. Maloney, a former Republican state senator and Hamilton County administrator.
Decisiveness needed
But as Mr. Taft prepares to formally announce Wednesday that he's running for governor next year, Mr. Maloney and other friends say he needs to temper his caution with a dose a decisiveness or risk losing the only major political job that has eluded his famous family: governor of Ohio.
''Sometimes you can sort out the facts involved in a decision for too long,'' Mr. Maloney said. ''Then people think you're indecisive. The public wants its governor to be an aggressive presenter of ideas, sometimes even change.''
For example, Mr. Taft, 55, is the only one of the four announced candidates for governor who has yet to offer or endorse a specific plan to address Ohio's unconstitutional school funding system. Instead, he issued ''guidelines'' this week that call for increasing the amount spent per pupil and making the state a ''permanent partner'' in school construction.
Similar hedging occurred in 1995. Days after leaders in both parties denounced a major loophole slipped into a campaign finance bill, Mr. Taft - a self-described champion of campaign finance reform - opposed it, too.
And last week, when it was clear voters had soundly defeated a workers' compensation ballot issue that Mr. Taft and other Republican leaders favored, he declined to comment - until the next day.
'Real McCoy'
Some of Mr. Taft's strongest supporters, however, say such delays should be embraced, especially in an era when too many politicians are overly slick.
''This guy's the real McCoy,'' said Greg Browning, director of the Ohio Office of Budget and Management and a longtime friend. ''He is a guy with a brain who thinks about things, and sometimes that means he wants to think another day.''
In the meantime, Mr. Taft faces an aggressive challenge for the nomination from state Treasurer J. Kenneth Blackwell.
Also a Cincinnati native, Mr. Blackwell is courting voters, especially conservatives, with detailed positions on everything from school funding to farmland preservation.
Mr. Blackwell likes to bill the race as a contest between a man with a great name (Taft) and another with great ideas (Blackwell). ''You play to your strengths,'' Mr. Blackwell said. ''My strength is in shaking the trees and making people think, pushing the envelope to the limits of what people think is possible.''
Mr. Taft said leadership can be approached in different ways. His strength, he said, is to bring divergent groups together and build a consensus. He concedes his style is more low-key than Mr. Blackwell's but argues he is no less effective.
Family legacy
The Taft name has been long revered in Ohio politics. Mr. Taft's father and paternal grandfather were U.S. senators, and his great-grandfather William Howard Taft was president and chief justice of the United States.
The usually affable Mr. Browning seems annoyed at any suggestion that Mr. Taft is merely riding on the family name.
''This stuff has to be reborn. You can't say, 'My dad was a banker, so I'm a banker,' '' Mr. Browning said. ''You have to do it yourself; you have to keep it alive. He's done that, and he's wanted to do that. Look at his record.''
After graduating from Yale University, Mr. Taft said, he was ''expected to move along the natural conveyor belt toward law and politics.''
He went to the Peace Corps instead.
''It was 1963,'' he recalled, ''an exciting time in the world. We had a new president, and there was new sense of hope in the world.'' The president was John F. Kennedy, the creator of the Peace Corps and a Democrat. At the time, Mr. Taft's father was among the Republican members of Congress.
While his parents made their disappointment known, they never tried to talk him out of the decision to spend two years living in a stucco hut and teaching in Tanzania, located in East Africa.
From there, Mr. Taft headed to Princeton for a master's in government, then worked for the U.S. State Department in Vietnam.
His entry to elected office came the easy way: Party leaders appointed him to fill a vacancy in the Ohio House. It was 1976 - the same year he graduated from law school at the University of Cincinnati. In 1981, Mr. Taft joined the Hamilton County Commission.
Gubernatorial trail
His entry to the statewide stage occurred in 1986, when he decided to run with former Gov. Rhodes, who wanted to make a comeback.
''Part of my motivation for running with Jim Rhodes was a desire to run for governor,'' he said. ''That had been my goal for some time.'' Ohio voters re-elected Democrat Richard Celeste. The Rhodes-Taft team went down in a landslide, losing 57 of the 88 counties and winning Hamilton County by just 636 votes.
Mr. Rhodes got much of the blame. Mr. Taft got lots of experience, exposure and contacts.
A rather timid campaigner, he focused his attention behind the scenes on the issues.
Mr. Taft took an interest in education, calling for statewide proficiency tests and better teacher training, both of which Ohio has since adopted.
When asked what he learned from Mr. Rhodes, he says this:
''I learned that you can have fun campaigning. I learned to really speak out, say what you have on your mind, project out to whoever you're talking to. I learned about being positive, always moving forward, and don't get bogged down by the naysayers.''
Mr. Taft was re-elected commissioner in 1988 and expected to be the party's nominee for governor in 1990, a nomination that ultimately went to George Voinovich.
Mr. Taft presided over a campaign that failed to inspire the electorate, underestimated the opposition and was beset by strategic blunders.
The problems helped set the stage for Mr. Taft's decision to enter the race for secretary of state instead - a job he still holds. HD:Secretary of state
Mr. Taft ran a spirited campaign for secretary of state and upset a Democratic incumbent with a famous last name: Sherrod Brown. The win enabled the GOP to take control of the State Apportionment Board and re-draw legislative boundaries more favorable to Republicans. As secretary of state, Mr. Taft kept a series of campaign promises. Among them: computerizing campaign finance reports and streamlining the system of corporate filings.
He easily won a second term in 1994.
Republican Party chairman Bob Bennett, officially neutral in this year's governor's race, is fond of pointing to Mr. Taft's 1990 decision as key to the GOP's current dominance.
Mr. Bennett called Mr. Taft ''honest and honorable,'' and said he'd carry forward Mr. Voinovich's management reforms.
Absent from the list, noted Mr. Blackwell, is any reference to leadership.
He sees Mr. Taft as ''quite capable of carrying on the Voinovich tradition of being attentive to the nuts and bolts of the managerial side of being governor.''
He gives himself the edge in the role of leader.
''Is that enough?'' Mr. Blackwell asks. ''We'll see.''
