Sunday, January 03, 1999
1999 looks as if it will be lots of fun
BY HOWARD WILKINSON
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Just 362 days to work out those Y2K bugs, folks, before the planet spins out of orbit and The End Times are near.
Personally, we're not worried; we're hoping for a sort of limited Y2K crisis where the damage will be isolated to certain noncrucial business concerns — say, direct-mail operations for politicians, for example.
But with our luck, it will only mean a mailbox full of campaign literature for William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan when the computers start misreading the “00” symbols.
All sorts of interesting things will be coming down the pipeline in politics in this new year. Here are but a few:
• Presidential trial: By the middle of next week, the U.S. Senate may well have launched the first trial of a U.S. president on impeachment charges in 131 years.
One of Ohio's senators, Republican Mike DeWine, has already made it clear he will not vote for a censure substitute under any circumstances and wants the Senate trial to go forward.
Three days from now, former Ohio Gov. George Voinovich will be sworn in as Ohio's junior senator, and he has quite a welcome awaiting him. He'll start his term with a decision on whether Bill Clinton should be removed from office.
Under the rules of an impeachment trial, senators are to sit silently and listen to the evidence. Speaking is verboten.
For the ordinarily loquacious Mr. Voinovich, this may prove to be too great a burden to bear.
• Build Cincinnati: The young Democratic and Republican activists who go by this name are still trying to put their charter reform plan on the May primary ballot and have it passed and in place for the 2001 council elections.
As things stand now, they would scrap the council-manager form of government Cincinnati has had since the 1920s and replace it with one that includes a directly elected “strong” mayor and a city council elected from districts.
If they succeed in getting a plan on the ballot, their biggest obstacle to getting it passed by voters may end up being that large blocs of voters support some pieces of the plan and not others. Somehow, they will have to persuade voters to swallow the plan whole.
The other problem lurking for the Build Cincinnati crowd is that it will have to convince Cincinnatians who see their trash being picked up every week and their neighborhood streets patrolled by cops that City Hall is broken and the political system is at fault.
Voters might decide that the problem might have more to do with the people who are elected than it does the system that elected them.
• Council election: This year's version of the biennial sweepstakes began in earnest a few weeks ago, when five council members — Charlie Winburn, Phil Heimlich, Jeanette Cissell, Minette Cooper and Paul Booth — voted to do away with the campaign contribution limits law that so hindered their campaign fund raising.
This campaign will not be like some in the recent past, where candidates spent money by the boatload and voters marched off to the polls to re-elect all the incumbents.
This time, there will be some change — Mayor Roxanne Qualls and Tyrone Yates are being term-limited out. Unless they leave early and replacements are appointed, two nonincumbents will win.
Imagine that.
But the subject that will get the most discussion and attract the most money will be the question of who will end up as the top vote-getter and, thus, hold the largely ceremonial job of mayor for the next two years.
To that question, most political observers at this early stage have but two possible answers:
1. Who knows?
2. Who cares?
Howard Wilkinson covers politics for The Enquirer. His column runs Sundays. He can be reached at 768-8388 or e-mailed at hwilkinson@enquirer.com
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TRISTATE DIGEST
Some politicians to watch for
