BY MICHAEL HAWTHORNE and SANDY THEIS
Enquirer Columbus Bureau
COLUMBUS -- A state panel reprimanded Republican Bob Taft's gubernatorial campaign Friday for airing a misleading TV ad that violated the state election laws he is charged with upholding.
In what was believed to be the first such penalty against a campaign for governor, the Ohio Elections Commission ruled the Taft ad falsely portrayed Democrat Lee Fisher's record as state attorney general and misled voters about Mr. Taft's endorsements from police organizations.
"If Bob Taft can't oversee a staff of 30, how is going to oversee a state of 11 million people?"
Fisher campaign chairman Alan Melamed said after the ruling. "He clearly isn't fit to be governor."
Taft campaign manager Brian Hicks took full responsibility for the election-law violations, noting the commission ruled that Mr. Taft and his running mate, Summit County Prosecutor Maureen O'Connor, were not personally at fault.
Mr. Taft could not be reached for comment, but Mr. Hicks said the reprimand will not be appealed.
The commission's split decision came one week after a Franklin County judge temporarily blocked a separate Taft campaign ad from airing, saying it also misled voters.
Despite persistent controversy over the content and tone of Mr. Taft's ads, he began the day promising to avoid negative TV ads during the final two weeks of the campaign -- if Mr. Fisher agreed to do the same.
"I think we can both agree that each of our campaigns has run television ads that could be fairly considered negative," wrote Mr. Taft, who as secretary of state is Ohio's top elections official.
Mr. Fisher called the proposal a ploy intended to divert attention from Mr. Taft's monthlong blitz of negative ads.
A Taft campaign adviser, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the campaign never expected Mr. Fisher to accept the challenge. "It was a strategic thing," the adviser said, to give Mr. Taft something to criticize Mr. Fisher for rejecting during upcoming debates.
The Taft ads will now be replaced with a "positive" spot that features Mr. Taft speaking directly to the camera for the first time, Mr. Hicks said.
The commission is a seven-member panel appointed by the governor to police campaigns. If the panel finds a violation, it can issue a reprimand or refer the matter to a county prosecutor.
By a 5-2 vote, the panel ruled that Mr. Taft's ad falsely claimed that while Mr. Fisher was state attorney general, he cut the number of crime-fighting employees in his office by 15 percent.
Commissioners also determined on a 4-3 vote that the ad included a misleading statement that "Ohio's police have endorsed Bob Taft for governor and rejected Lee Fisher."
While the state's largest police organization, the Fraternal Order of Police, has endorsed Mr. Taft, five other Ohio police organizations have endorsed Mr. Fisher.
During the daylong hearing, Mr. Hicks testified the employment figures were based in part on a comparison of the total number of employees at the attorney general's law enforcement arm, the Bureau of Criminal Identification & Investigation (BCII).
The comparison relied on figures from October 1990 -- three months before Mr. Fisher took office -- to October 1993 -- more than two years before he left office.
Jennifer Brunner, Mr. Fisher's attorney, said a more valid comparison would examine the number employed the day he took office and the day he left. Such a comparison shows the total number of BCII employees went from 201 in January 1991 to 222 four years later.
Although Mr. Hicks argued that 28 BCII employees shifted to the attorney general's environmental section no longer fit the definition of a "crime-fighting employee," a campaign aide argued otherwise in an internal memorandum.
"The statutes they were assigned to investigate and help prosecute were and are criminal laws," Ben Rose, a Taft campaign researcher, wrote in the March 20 memo to Mr. Hicks.
The commission dismissed two of four allegations made by the Fisher campaign.
