George Voinovich understood the full value of experience in public life. He held seven offices, state representative, Cuyahoga county auditor, county commissioner, lieutenant governor, Cleveland mayor, Ohio governor and U.S. senator. In each position, he learned something that he applied in the next.
So Voinovich brought a grasp of cities, their importance and their challenges, to the governor’s office. He knew how local governments work, and the perspective of the state legislature. All of that knowledge, gained through 44 years in office, served his constituents well. If today many voters appear unimpressed with experience, Voinovich offers the counterargument, much as his pragmatism provides a constructive alternative to the current ideologically driven debate.
It matters that a mayor, county executive, governor, or even a president, knows how things function in the public sector. Many chuckled or cringed when Voinovich talked about getting into the “bowels of government.” Yet, in the main, his purpose was holding agencies to account as part of seeing government as a tool to elevate lives.
Which gets to the more defining aspect of his leadership — that steady pragmatism. With his sudden death over the weekend at age 79, it is worth appreciating.
It was evident in his partnerships, with George Forbes, the president of the Cleveland City Council, or Vern Riffe, the House speaker, and Stanley Aronoff, the state Senate president. A Republican, Voinovich knew how to reach across the aisle. He worked with the business community. He practiced a balanced approach to budgeting, combining tax increases with spending reductions. He criticized the Bush White House for its failure to raise revenue to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
What also appealed about this Voinovich style of leadership was his commitment to becoming better informed. It was evident after the Sept. 11 attacks and the mounting debacle in Iraq as he plunged into the scholarship about Islam. He listened to the experts during the deadly Lucasville prison riot and thus maintained a lower profile as he worked to end the crisis and minimize the toll.
This editorial page had its disagreements with Voinovich, for instance, on climate change and school vouchers. He ran a carelessly negative and losing campaign against Howard Metzenbaum for the U.S. Senate in 1988. He knew the rough and tumble partisan side.
Yet if he didn’t do enough to repair school funding, he routed resources to public education at a level almost Olympian compared to the contingent now at the Statehouse. George Voinovich has many accomplishments in public life. What most deserves recalling — and sustaining — is the way he went about his public work.
As a senator, he occasionally would all but cry out in candor: You’re not doing it right! Public life would benefit from much more of the Voinovich spirit, informed, pragmatic, experienced, mature and devoted to doing the right thing, or what is required to govern effectively.