If you’ve followed the recent head-butting between Governor Kasich and Ohio Republican Party (ORP) Chairman Kevin DeWine, you know Tuesday was not DeWine’s day. If you’re a Third Base Politics regular, you also know where I stand on the subject: Kevin DeWine has squandered the trust of conservative activists whose support ORP desperately needs this year, and should step down.

Following a couple of posts in January, I’ve been happy to defer to more knowledgeable observers for ORP State Central Committee coverage. The inside baseball of this dispute doesn’t interest me much, but Kevin DeWine’s actions over the past two months validate the concerns I shared in December.

Yesterday Bytor posted a list of Central Committee winners, highlighting known losses for DeWine. Today ONN’s Jim Heath tweeted a series of updates & questions about the post-election Central Committee meeting DeWine has scheduled:

Actually, the meeting will determine who leads ORP only if a vote is called. Will Kevin DeWine (who has convinced at least 1 person of his success Tuesday) include an up-or-down vote on his continued chairmanship in the agenda?

My impression is that Team Kasich sought candidates who shared the governor’s belief DeWine should be replaced, as opposed to candidates who would support a specific replacement. I would be surprised if Governor Kasich endorsed anyone between now and April 13th.

This gets back to inside baseball: I don’t know enough to comment on the good, bad, or ugly attributes of any potential candidates. I do know that instead of discreetly resolving his issues with Kasich and Speaker Batchelder, Kevin DeWine turned a dispute into a debacle – after pouring big bucks into electing his cousin Mike DeWine and his pal Jon Husted, dishonestly appropriating the Tea Party brand in the process.

The fact that DeWine is calling a meeting does indeed suggest he’s confident of his position. The fact that the meeting is the same day as the post-primary campaign finance filing deadline tells a different story! Given recent history, Committee members will want to know: how much donor money did DeWine spend defending himself, and how much of that went to disgraced consultant Brett Buerck?

Smoldering in the background is DeWine’s implausible claim to have disqualified several Kasich-backed Central Committee candidates with a last-minute rule change. If DeWine attempts to block elected Committee members from being placed, this whole mess could get a whole lot messier.

Regardless of whether you think DeWine should stay or go, a vote of the new ORP State Central Committee is the only way for this fight to end. Friday the 13th can’t come soon enough.

Cross-posted at Third Base Politics.

During the flood of uniformly annoying December 31 fundraising mailers, Kevin DeWine and the Ohio Republican Party (ORP) sent an email titled, “Every Dollar Raised in Ohio, Stays in Ohio.” Does this mean ORP has severed ties with Brett Buerck and his Florida consulting firm, Majority Strategies?

As recently as November 2, 2011, The Columbus Dispatch covered ORP’s Buerck connection:

Ohio GOP Chairman Kevin DeWine wouldn’t address whether the comeback of Buerck and Sisk was controversial for the party. But he and a spokesman for the Romney campaign separately vouched for the work of Buerck’s firm.

During the 2010 statewide campaign, the state party paid Majority Strategies about $1.8 million. It also paid $3.3 million for direct-mail services to King Strategic Communications, a firm owned by Joe King, a former Ohio GOP official who also did campaign work for Gov. John Kasich — who tried to depose DeWine.

“We were quite pleased with the performance of both vendors,” DeWine said of the Buerck and King firms.

Emphasis mine. Is Majority Strategies of Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida still an ORP vendor? If so, it’s awfully misleading to say “every dollar raised in Ohio, stays in Ohio” when what you mean is that every dollar is spent on Ohio campaigns.

A screencap of the complete message follows; there are several references to donations remaining in-state, starting with the subject line. In the first paragraph:

Every generous dollar you donate to the Ohio Republican Party stays right here in Ohio.

In the fourth paragraph:

Every dollar goes toward ensuring we work together to advance conservative policy and support Republican candidates right here in the Buckeye State.

In the closing:

Remember, every dime you give to the Ohio Republican Party, stays in Ohio!

Out of four references to donations staying in-state, one asserts only that money will be spent on Ohio races and three suggest money will not leave the state.

I ask again: is Majority Strategies still an ORP vendor? If DeWine is still sending big bucks to a Florida consultant, this email represents unacceptable dishonesty to donors.

I do not like writing about ORP infighting; if you’re wondering why I’m bothering to follow this Democrat-fodder story, allow me to defer to Tom Blumer of BizzyBlog. During the 2010 primary I foolishly assumed I could trust the Ohio Republican Party, but Kevin DeWine taught me the error of my ways.

I’ve covered the reasons Ohio conservatives should be leery of Buerck, whose contracts with ORP appear to have resumed in 2008 before DeWine became party chairman. Unfair as it may be, there’s no statute of limitations on a blotted record – even though criminal charges were never leveled against Buerck following the scandal several years ago.

The Dispatch story quoted above mentions DeWine wouldn’t discuss whether working with Buerck had caused a stir in the Central Committee. I wonder what sort of input Committee members have had since November, whether they are willing to send millions to Buerck’s firm today, and how they feel about this email!

Click for the full size image:

As brutal election results reflected, the Ohio Republican Party (ORP) was a scandal-plagued outfit circa 2006. I don’t relish the current ORP leadership fight, but if we don’t want second terms for President Obama and Senator Sherrod Brown we must avoid repeating our mistakes. Party chairman Kevin DeWine’s old-guard ways – combined with his public betrayal of Governor Kasich – make it hard to believe ORP can be effective with DeWine in charge.

Quick hits: this fall, a consultant with ties to Chairman DeWine produced $179,000 in advertising for one of the Big Labor fronts smearing Kasich’s union reform bill. A glance at last year’s ORP campaign expenditures reveals -

• $753,680 spent in the incredibly close Kasich-Strickland race
• $1.3 million spent in the secretary of state race, for DeWine ally Jon Husted – including $375,245 in the GOP primary
• $1.5 million spent in the attorney general race, for Kevin DeWine’s cousin Mike DeWine

If those figures don’t raise your eyebrows, there’s more. In the early aughts, Brett Buerck was a recognized name in Ohio Republican circles. Then, suddenly, he was known more widely… and not for a good reason.

Brett Buerck (BYOO-rik) is president of Florida-based Majority Strategies. In 2004, he was fired as an aide to former House Speaker Larry Householder after a federal grand jury began subpoenaing records on Householder’s fundraising practices. The U.S. Justice Department later declined to prosecute Buerck.

“Team Householder,” renowned/reviled as brass-knuckle politicos, became synonymous with “corruption” in 2004. Buerck joined Rep. Bob Ney, Governor Bob Taft, and Tom Noe on the list of Ohio GOP persona non grata (or at least persona not-terribly-grata) and by all assumptions that was the end of that.

Though Buerck was never prosecuted, seeing money funneled from ORP to his Florida firm – $1.8 million in 2008, $1.7 million in 2010 – sets off alarm bells. Couldn’t ORP find a vendor with a less clouded history? Maybe the party could even spend its money in Ohio, if DeWine contracted with people not banished from the state!

I volunteered briefly for Ken Blackwell’s 2006 gubernatorial campaign, so there are familiar tones in the current fight with Governor Kasich:

“The speaker talks to me through his lawyers,” said [Secretary of State] Blackwell, the darling of anti-tax conservatives and the state’s highest ranking black elected official.

“We now stand in a Statehouse awash in scandal, a scandal that was born under loose rules and grew under blind eyes,” Blackwell said recently.

Householder calls Blackwell a “Rodney Dangerfield of Ohio politics” trying unsuccessfully to get respect.

It seems clear that Brett Buerck’s ORP money stream would run dry without DeWine & Co. manning the pumps. After all, it’s a simple task to pull the gory Cleveland Plain Dealer and Toledo Blade coverage from Team Householder’s heyday, and the Ohio Democratic Party’s affinity for ORP leadership will last only as long as DeWine is arguing with the governor.

DeWine’s public complaints of victimhood, in addition to feeding the leftist narrative about Mean King Kasich, are downright ironic in light of his relationship with Buerck. Ken Blackwell had the right idea in 2004, per this Washington Post account:

Ohioans have been treated to regular servings of leaked strategy memos and e-mails written by Buerck, Sisk and others in Householder’s camp. With a swaggering tone, the documents suggest an approach to politics that borrows equally from H.R. Haldeman and Barney Fife.

[...]

“People have gotten caught up in having power for power’s sake,” said J. Kenneth Blackwell, the Republican secretary of state, who has clashed bitterly with Householder and is investigating the consultants’ dealings. “When people don’t feel passionate that Republicans can and will make a difference, that makes the president’s job that much more difficult.”

Without a break from the people and practices who helped sink Republicans here in 2006, 2012 could be ugly for conservatives in Ohio and across the nation. The question now is whether Kevin DeWine wants the upcoming election to be about him.

Cross-posted at RedState and Big Government.