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Ohio: Senior Senator Sen. Mike DeWine (R) Last Updated July 14, 2003
Michael DeWine, Ohio's senior senator, is a Republican first elected to the House in 1982 and to the Senate in 1994. DeWine grew up in Yellow Springs, the home of liberal Antioch College, where his family owned a successful seed business. He graduated from Miami of Ohio and Northern Ohio University Law School and settled in Cedarville, in a part of the state with rolling hills, winding creeks and covered bridges, where they now host an annual ice cream social. There DeWine was elected Greene County prosecutor in 1976, at 29, where he resisted plea bargaining; in order to nail a drug dealer, once put up the collateral to get $50,000 cash to stage a buy. In 1980, at 33, he was elected to the Ohio Senate. In 1982, when incumbent Clarence Brown ran for governor, he won a six-candidate Republican primary with 69% and was elected to a U.S. House seat. Elected lieutenant governor in 1990, two years later DeWine ran against Senator John Glenn. It was a hard-hitting campaign: He attacked Glenn for his part in the Keating Five case. In September 1992 Glenn was below 50% in the polls. But Democrats brought up DeWine's 31 overdrafts on the House bank and the time he fell asleep at the Iran-Contra hearings. Glenn won 51%-42%, his closest general election margin ever. In 1994 DeWine decided to run for the Senate again. This time the incumbent, Howard Metzenbaum, was retiring, and hoped to be succeeded by his son-in-law, Joel Hyatt, founder of the storefront Hyatt Legal Services chain. But in the May primary, Hyatt defeated Cuyahoga County Commissioner Mary Boyle by only 47%-43%, while DeWine won by 53%-32% over Bernadine Healy, former director of the National Institutes of Health. From then on, DeWine had solid leads in most polls. He spent much time in the Cleveland area, cutting into the Democrats' base. DeWine's anti-crime planks, his backing of term limits and the line-item veto helped him. The 23% of voters in union households split evenly, while the 29% who were gun owners voted 58%-31% for the almost always plaid-shirt-clad DeWine. DeWine won statewide 53%-39%. The common motif that runs through DeWine's career is a concern for children and the championing of legislation often prompted by tragedy striking a particular child, including his own: his daughter Becky died in an auto accident in 1993, at 22, and he and his wife decided to donate her organs; DeWine spends much effort on organ donor programs and awareness. With Jay Rockefeller, he sponsored a law to change the family preservation emphasis in social work, and helped pass a law requiring the best interest of the child as paramount in custody cases involving abusive or drug-problem parents. In the recesses of the Senate's impeachment trial, he made calls to try to get medical benefits for a Middletown five-year-old with xeroderma pigmentosum, a disease so rare it is not on the Social Security Administration's list of covered treatments. He took over the chairmanship of the District of Columbia Appropriations Subcommittee--generally regarded as a thankless task--with a determination to reform the District's child welfare system, which he described as "wrought with dysfunction, chaos and tragedy." He recalled that 150 complaints of sexual abuse had not been investigated for more than a year and said that he became physically ill after reading about the January 2000 death of Brianna Blackmond, a girl placed in the custody of a violent and negligent mother through the inattention and indifference of foster care workers. DeWine has split from Republicans on several high visibility issues; he voted for the hate crimes bill in 2000 and 2001, he was the one Republican co-sponsor of a bill establishing a ballistic fingerprinting database in 2002 and opposed oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in 2002 and 2003. Even before Democrats got a majority in the Senate in 2001, DeWine often worked on a bipartisan basis. As chairman of the Employment and Training Subcommittee, he assembled bipartisan support for a sweeping rewriting of job training laws, with more flexibility for cities and counties; it passed in 1998. He co-sponsored a bill authorizing FDA regulation of tobacco with Edward Kennedy, a bill providing for health screening of newborns with Christopher Dodd and a bill requiring pharmaceutical companies to test drugs on children with Hillary Rodham Clinton. He and Patrick Leahy sponsored an asbestos bill which would allow loss carrybacks without time limit of asbestos claims and providing for non-taxation of asbestos settlement funds; this would increase the pot of money available for asbestos claimants and trial lawyers but not provide an administrative apparatus to settle and preserve claims. He and Democrat Herb Kohl have run the Antitrust Subcommittee on a bipartisan basis in both the Clinton and Bush years. In 1997 a joint letter to FCC Chairman Reed Hundt prompted him to kill the proposed AT&T-SBC merger; subcommittee hearings in 1998 helped prevent the proposed American Airlines-British Airways merger. In 2001 they helped prevent the USAirways-United Airlines merger. Although he does not serve on Foreign Relations, DeWine has taken an interest in Latin American issues. He has made many trips there--12 to Haiti and four to Colombia and others to Mexico, Panama, Chile and Peru. In the 1980s he supported the Nicaragua contras against the Sandinista government. He has pushed for tougher interdiction of drugs, supports Plan Colombia and praises Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe. He first met with Mexico's President Vicente Fox in 1997, when he was Governor of Guanajuato. He has worked for more money for AIDS treatment in Haiti. DeWine serves on the Intelligence Committee and has called for more central control of intelligence. "You couldn't ever say George Tenet didn't get it. He understood the danger to this country as much as any human being could. And yet he didn't have the troops to go get the job done, and the reason he didn't have the troops was that he didn't really command all the troops, he only commanded part of the troops." He has sponsored a bill to let the FBI obtain search warrants or wiretaps of suspected foreign terrorists if there is "reasonable suspicion" that the person is a threat. DeWine has worked on an assortment of Ohio issues; Ohio's two senators are the only state's who have a joint office handling constituency services. He has used his seat on the Military Construction Appropriations Subcommittee to look after the interests of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton. He has supported more money for Amtrak and said that it was shameful that the state capital of Columbus doesn't have rail passenger service. He sought to get southern Ohio designated as a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area. DeWine came up for reelection in 2000. Democrats thought he might be vulnerable, especially after he was put charge of screening senators' questions for Chief Justice William Rehnquist and was asked to monitor the testimony of Monica Lewinsky. But House members Sherrod Brown, Ted Strickland and Marcy Kaptur, 1998 gubernatorial candidate Lee Fisher, and former Congressman Dennis Eckhart declined to run. DeWine spent much of late 1999 and early 2000 campaigning for John McCain in Ohio and elsewhere; he was one of only four senators who endorsed McCain (the others were Jon Kyl, Chuck Hagel and Fred Thompson). DeWine's Democratic opponent turned out to be Ted Celeste, former Ohio State Board of Trustees chairman, and brother of former Governor Richard Celeste. DeWine spent $5.7 million, much of it on television. Celeste spent $477,000, and put up one ad on the Internet which focused on prescription drug prices. DeWine won 60%-36%, the first Ohio Republican senator to be reelected since John Bricker in 1952, and with the largest margin for a Republican senator here since Theodore Burton in 1928. He won 23% of the votes of blacks and 24% of Democrats and lost union members by only 55%-44%, and non-high school graduates by 52%-43% and carried all other demographic groups. He won 83 of 88 counties, losing only the two Mahoning County steel counties, two eastern Ohio coal counties and usually Republican Madison County, where there was local opposition to his proposal to create a Little Darby Creek National Wildlife Refuge. In November 2002 DeWine announced that he would run for reelection in 2006; some had thought he might run for governor. Interestingly, Senators Don Nickles, Bill Frist and Mitch McConnell, usually not involved in local politics beyond their states, sent contributions in 2004 to his son, Cincinnati Councilman Pat DeWine.
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