Who Strickland follows

A look at recent Ohio governors:

JAMES A. RHODES

Republican

Served: Four terms, 1963-71, 1975-1983

Born: Sept. 13, 1909, in Coalton, Ohio

Died: March 4, 2001

Background:

A coal miner's son, Rhodes was a college student and restaurant operator in Columbus when he was elected to his first office - ward committeeman in 1934.

Three years later, he was elected to the Columbus Board of Education, and, in 1943, was elected to his first of three terms as Columbus mayor at age 34.

After an unsuccessful run for governor in 1950, Rhodes was elected state auditor two years later. In 1962, he was elected to his first term as governor, defeating Democratic incumbent Michael DiSalle.

The record:

Rhodes' legacy as governor has to be divided into two parts - the first eight years, generally considered to be good; and the second eight years, generally thought of as a failure.

In his first two terms, Rhodes embarked on a massive building program, financed by $1.2 billion in voter-approved bonds, to build highways, airports, parks, hospitals and schools and universities, making good on his promise to put a college education "within 25 miles of every boy and girl in Ohio."

In May 1970 - in the last year of his second term, as Rhodes was running against Robert Taft Jr. in a GOP Senate primary, the governor sent the Ohio National Guard on to the campus of Kent State University; four students were shot and killed.

Rhodes returned to office in January 1975, after defeating incumbent Democrat John Gilligan. Rhodes' last two terms were marked mostly by a stumbling economy, tax increases, and unemployment well above the national average.

After leaving office in January 1983, Rhodes made an unsuccessful attempt for a fifth term, but lost to Gov. Richard Celeste.

JOHN J. GILLIGAN

Democrat

Served: 1971-1975

Born: March 22, 1921, in Cincinnati

Background:

A graduate of St. Xavier High School and Notre Dame, he served in the U.S. Navy and was awarded a Silver Star during World War II. He returned to Cincinnati after the war, joining the family funeral business and teaching literature at Xavier. In 1953, he was elected to Cincinnati City Council. In 1964, he was elected to Congress from Ohio's 1st District, but was defeated by Robert Taft Jr. two years later. He returned to council in 1967, and ran a losing campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1968. In 1970, he was elected governor.

Record:

His four years as governor are remembered mostly for the fact that he supported and pushed through the legislature the first state personal income tax. The tax was challenged in a November 1972 referendum but was approved by the voters. He created the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, split mental health and mental retardation into separate departments, and invoked the wrath of outdoor-lovers by briefly closing the state parks in a budget crunch. In 1974, Gilligan was considered by many a shoo-in for re-election and was touted as a possible presidential or vice presidential candidate in 1976, but he lost his re-election bid to Rhodes by about 11,000 votes. Gilligan left Ohio to teach at Notre Dame, but returned in the 1990s, running for the Cincinnati school board and winning a seat he still holds.

RICHARD F. CELESTE

Democrat

Served: 1983-1991

Born: Nov. 11, 1937, in Lakewood, Ohio

Background:

A Yale graduate and Rhodes Scholar, one of his first government jobs was as an assistant to Chester Bowles, the ambassador to India in the Kennedy administration. In 1970, he was elected to the first of two terms in the Ohio House. In 1974, he ran for lieutenant governor (when that office was still elected separately), and served as lieutenant governor for four years under James Rhodes. In 1979, President Carter made him director of the Peace Corps - a job he held until he returned to Ohio to run for governor in 1982.

Record:

Celeste took office in the middle of a national recession that hit Ohio particularly hard, with a half-billion-dollar budget deficit looming over state government. His solution: push through a 50 percent income tax surcharge that Rhodes had proposed, along with a 40 percent increase - then, the largest tax increase in Ohio history. A series of scandals in his administration tarnished Celeste's record, and he suffered politically in the state's savings and loan crisis of 1985, triggered as it was by the misdeeds of a Celeste political ally, Cincinnati's Marvin Warner. To his credit, his administration pushed hard to prosecute Warner and others involved in the affair. Celeste is now president of Colorado College, a small liberal arts college in Colorado Springs.

GEORGE VOINOVICH

Republican

Served: 1991-1998

Born: July 15, 1936, in Cleveland

Background:

Son of a Cleveland architect, Voinovich earned a bachelor's degree in government at Ohio University and graduated from the Ohio State University College of Law. His political career began in 1966, when he won the first of three terms in the Ohio House. Ten years later, he was elected Cuyahoga County commissioner. In 1978, he was elected lieutenant governor with Rhodes, but served in that office only briefly. He returned to Cleveland, was elected mayor, and was credited with bringing that economically battered city off the mat.

Record:

As governor, he was known for pushing tax-increment financing to attract businesses to Ohio, restructuring the workers' compensation program, and struggling to hold down increases in state spending. He received great praise and enormous opposition for ending state welfare payments to single men. His job became somewhat easier after 1994, when his fellow Republicans took control of both houses of the Ohio General Assembly. In 1998, he ran and won a U.S. Senate seat. In December 1998, he left office 11 days early to allow his lieutenant governor, Nancy Hollister of Marietta, to become the state's only woman governor.

NANCY P. HOLLISTER

Republican

Served: Dec. 31, 1998-Jan. 11, 1999

Born: May 22, 1949

Background:

A native of Ohio's oldest city, Marietta, Hollister is a direct descendant of one of the state's founders, Revolutionary War Gen. Rufus Putnam.

After Hollister served as a Marietta councilwoman and mayor, Voinovich tapped her in 1994 as his lieutenant governor running mate, after Mike DeWine left that job to run for the U.S. Senate. Hollister, as lieutenant governor, ran for the U.S. House in 1998, losing to incumbent Democrat Ted Strickland.

Voinovich, term-limited as governor, ran for the U.S. Senate that year and won. He left the governor's mansion early to make Hollister first woman governor of the state, albeit briefly.

Record:

There isn't much of one. She served only 11 days.

She lived out of an overnight bag in the Governor's Mansion and signed one piece of legislation, a farmland preservation bill.

But her portrait hangs in the Ohio Statehouse among her predecessors as governor of the Buckeye State.

BOB TAFT

Republican

Served: 1999-2007

Born: Jan. 8, 1942

Background:

Born in Boston and raised in Cincinnati, Taft came to politics with an impeccable pedigree - great-grandson of a president, grandson and son of two U.S. senators. After his undergraduate days at Yale University, Taft entered the Peace Corps in 1963 and spent two years teaching in the African nation of Tanzania. It wasn't until 1976 that he joined the family's dual businesses of law and politics - earning a law degree from the University of Cincinnati College of Law and winning a seat in the Ohio House of Representatives.

He stayed in the legislature until 1980, when he ran for Hamilton County commissioner and won. Taft was re-elected commissioner twice before running for Ohio secretary of state in 1990, defeating incumbent Democrat Sherrod Brown. Eight years later, he was elected governor, defeating Democrat Lee Fisher - who today becomes Ohio's lieutenant governor. He was easily re-elected in 2002.

Record:

Taft's eight years as governor was a combination of the good, the bad, and the downright ugly. Taft is generally given high marks for the creation of the Rebuilding Ohio's Schools initiative, a 12-year, $10 billion project to replace Ohio's crumbling public school buildings. But conservatives in his own Republican party regularly hammered him for signing a bill passed by the Republican-controlled legislature to raise the state sales tax by a penny.

The fact is that Taft's principal legacy in Ohio history will be that he was the first governor to be convicted of a crime while in office - four misdemeanors in August 2005 for failing to disclose dozens of golf outings and gifts received from lobbyists. Taft paid a $4,000 fine and issued an apology to Ohioans "from the shores of Lake Erie to the banks of the Ohio River."

Sixteen months later, as Taft was preparing to leave office, the Ohio Supreme Court reprimanded him as a lawyer.

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