Sen. George Voinovich (R) Elected 1998, 1st term up 2004
Born:	July 15, 1936, Cleveland
Home:	Cleveland
Education:	Ohio U., B.A. 1958, Ohio St. U., J.D. 1961
Religion:	Catholic
Marital Status:	married (Janet)
Elected  Office:	OH House of Reps., 1966-71; Cuyahoga Cnty. Auditor, 1971-76; Cuyahoga Cnty. Commissioner, 1977-78; OH Lt. Gov., 1979; Cleveland Mayor, 1979-89; OH Gov., 1990-98.
Professional Career:	OH Asst. Atty. Gen., 1963-64.
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George Voinovich, a Republican, was elected to the Senate in 1998 after a long career in public life. He is of Serbian and Slovenian descent and grew up in heavily ethnic Cleveland. He graduated from Ohio State and its law school, then practiced law in Cleveland. He was elected to the state House in 1966, at 30. He was elected Cuyahoga County auditor in 1971 and county commissioner in 1977. In 1978 he was selected by 69-year-old Governor James Rhodes to be lieutenant governor. In 1979, after Mayor Dennis Kucinich bankrupted Cleveland, Voinovich ran for mayor. It was a strenuous campaign, running as a Republican in a heavily Democratic city, and one touched by tragedy: his daughter was killed in an auto accident at the time. In 10 years in office, he fixed the budget and sparked the city's renaissance. His one defeat came in 1988, when he lost 57%-43% to Senator Howard Metzenbaum.

In 1990 Voinovich ran for governor and beat Attorney General Anthony Celebrezze Jr., 56%-44%; in 1994 he was re-elected by the spectacular margin of 72%-25%. Voinovich got the state government's fiscal house in order, with the help of a tax increase in 1992. He is opposed to abortion but recognizes Roe v. Wade as the law and says, "Let's deal in the real world." He was the first governor to endorse Bob Dole for president; he was mentioned for the vice presidential nomination but took himself out of the running.

In February 1997 Senator John Glenn announced he would retire in 1998, and Voinovich, not eligible to run for reelection as governor, was the obvious favorite; he led in polls for nearly two years. His Democratic opponent was another Clevelander (as a boy Voinovich delivered newspapers to her family's house), Cuyahoga County Commissioner Mary Boyle, who lost the 1994 Senate primary but this time had no competition for the nomination. Boyle campaigned on education, blaming Voinovich for allowing Ohio schools to decline; she called for HMO regulation and a minimum wage increase. She also attacked him for supporting the tax increase that voters rejected in the May primary. Voinovich mostly ignored her attacks and outspent her by almost 3-1, running ads that highlighted his record as governor. The results showed Voinovich a bit weaker than he had seemed when Glenn announced his retirement. An unknown won 28% against him in the May primary, and in November his margin over Boyle was a decisive but not overwhelming 56%-44%.

Voinovich came to the Senate, after 32 years in public office, as a big government Republican, willing to back tax increases as he did in 1992 but dubious about cutting them, as he was in 1999 and 2000. In his previous positions he had been required to balance budgets, and he seemed viscerally repelled by deficits. In 1999 he voted against the Republicans' $792 billion tax cut, against the smaller Democratic tax cut, and against the bipartisan moderates' compromise tax cut. To arguments that government should return money to taxpayers because there was a surplus, he said, "There's an old saying that most of us learned as children that goes, 'If it sounds too good to be true, then it is.'" He was the only Republican to vote in November 1999 against the Republican minimum wage bill, with its tax cuts for small businessmen. In April 2000 he was one of two Republicans to vote against the Republican budget. In July 2000 he was one of four Republicans to vote against estate tax repeal and the only Republican to vote against marriage penalty relief. He did support the Bush tax cuts in May 2001, when it looked as if the surplus would be permanent. In October 2001 he worked to scale back the tax cuts in House Republicans' stimulus package. In December 2002 he and Russ Feingold sponsored a bill to require CBO to calculate future deficits assuming tax cuts would be made permanent and that spending would keep rising by 8% and he warned that the annual deficit could rise to $866 billion in 10 years. He complained, "Around here nobody wants to make the hard choices. Nobody wants to prioritize. No one wants to say no to anyone." In February 2003 he came out against the $700 billion Bush tax cut and in April he and Olympia Snowe insisted they would back no cut higher than $350 billion. That led Finance Chairman Charles Grassley and Majority Leader Bill Frist to say they would insist on that figure from conference, to the rage of the House Republican leadership. When George W. Bush came to Ohio in April 2003, Voinovich was cordial but refused to budge.

Voinovich is interested not only in maintaining government's revenue flow, but in how government works. As chairman of the Government Reform subcommittee on Government Management, Restructuring and the District of Columbia, he found that agencies could not say how much they spend on training. He was concerned about the brain drain at agencies as many employees neared retirement age and at the rigidity of government hiring practices. In October 2001 he introduced a bill that he hoped would lead to the first major change in civil service laws since 1978. It provided for chief human capital officers at each agency; hiring from a wider pool of applicants rated either basically qualified, highly qualified or superior (current practice is to choose among those rated, often arbitrarily, the top three); greater leeway for demonstration projects; allowing agencies to buy out workers for $25,000 to reshape their work forces. In June 2002 Voinovich made some changes, pursuant to comments by government employee unions and others, and got the support of subcommittee Chairman Daniel Akaka. In July 2002 Voinovich and Akaka got a version of this bill inserted as the personnel section in the homeland security bill. There it became law in December 2002. This was a major achievement: the new department has 173,000 employees and, together with Defense, which has been seeking its own civil service changes, accounts for most federal government employees. Voinovich, now subcommittee chairman again, submitted another version of his bill to cover the rest in January 2003.

As an Environment and Public Works subcommittee chairman, he steered to passage in September 2000 a giant energy and water authorization, which included the $1.1 billion Everglades restoration project estimated to eventually cost $7.8 billion. But a month later he voted against a water and power appropriation, which included many Ohio projects, arguing that it spent too much money: authorizing committee members like to keep appropriators on a short leash. In November 2001 Voinovich offered up his own energy package, and in May 2002 he offered many amendments in committee to the Clean Water Act reauthorization. In January 2003 Energy Committee Chairman Jim Inhofe asked him to manage George W. Bush's Clear Skies Iniative, and he said he would have to amend it to do more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. He also put on the omnibus appropriation an extension on the ban on oil and gas drilling in the Great Lakes.

Voinovich is the only Serbian-American in the Senate, and as a college freshman wrote a paper on how the United States sold out Yugoslavia at the February 1945 Yalta conference; in 1991 his Serbian relatives were forced out of their homes in the newly independent Croatia. In March and April 1999 he strongly opposed the bombing of Serbia, but he has called Slobodan Milosevic a "war criminal" and tried to convince the State Department to support forces to depose him.

Voinovich comes up for reelection in 2004. In early 2003 he had $2.5 million in his campaign treasury and was getting high job ratings. In January 2003 state Senator Bob Hagan of Youngstown, brother of 2002 governor candidate Tim Hagan, said that he was thinking about running. In March 2003 state Senator Eric Fingerhut, who was elected to one term in the House in 1992 and defeated in 1994, announced he was running. But the Democrat getting the most attention was Jerry Springer, the successful host of a talk show aimed at unsuccessful people. Springer's show is based in Chicago, but he is registered to vote in Ohio. He had a successful political career in the 1970s and 1980s as councilman and mayor in Cincinnati; at one point he resigned after it was revealed he had paid for a prostitute with a credit card, but he was later returned to office. In January 2003 he said he was thinking about running and figured it would take $20 million, with $5 million in the primary. When asked about his chances, he said, "There are pluses and minuses. The plus is that I'm known by everybody. The minus is that I'm known by everybody." A poll showed Springer with 71% unfavorable ratings, and he said, "I can't imagine anyone voting for me at this point." But he is articulate and knowledgeable about public policy and might be able to convince voters he is a serious candidate. Voinovich's comment: "Jerry Springer is the Democratic party's problem."

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DC Office
317 HSOB 20510, 202-224-3353; Fax: 202-228-0501; Web site: voinovich.senate.gov

State Offices
Cincinnati, 513-684-3265; Cleveland,216-522-7095; Columbus,614-469-6697; Toledo,419-259-3895.

Committees

• Environment & Public Works: Clean Air, Climate Change & Nuclear Safety (Chmn.); Transportation & Infrastructure.
• Ethics (Select) (Chmn.).
• Foreign Relations: East Asian & Pacific Affairs; European Affairs; International Operations & Terrorism; Near Eastern & South Asian Affairs.
• Governmental Affairs: Financial Management, Budget & International Security; Government Management, Federal Workforce & the District of Columbia (Chmn.); Investigations (Permanent).

Group Ratings (More Info)
	ADA	ACLU	AFS	LCV	CON	ITIC	NTU	COC	ACU	NTLC	CHC
2002	5	40	14	0	69	62	69	95	90	88	--
2001	15	--	0	0	--	--	87	93	83	--	80

National Journal Ratings (More Info)
	2001 LIB	--	2001 CONS		2002 LIB	--	2002 CONS
Economic	30%	--	66%		38%	--	61%
Social	43%	--	55%		40%	--	58%
Foreign	48%	--	51%		35%	--	61%
For National Journal's complete 2002 Vote Ratings, as well as previous ratings dating back to 1995, please click here.

Key Votes Of The 107th Congress (More Info)
1. Approve Bush Tax Cuts Y 2. Expand Patients' Rights N 3. Campaign Finance Reform N 4. Permit ANWR Development Y 5. Confirm Ashcroft as AG Y 6. Bar Gays in the Boy Scouts N		7. $ for Hate Crime Prosecution N  8. Overseas Military Abortions N  9. Bar Coop. with Intl. Court N 10. Trade Promotion Authority Y 11. Authorize Force in Iraq Y 12. Homeland Sec. Dept. Union N

Election Results (More Info)
	Candidate	Total Votes	Percent	Expenditures
1998 general	George Voinovich (R)	1,922,087	56%	$6,756,712
	Mary O. Boyle (D)	1,482,054	44%	$2,236,137
1998 primary	George Voinovich (R)	539,424	72%
	David McCollough (R)	207,135	28%
1992 general	John H. Glenn, Jr. (D)	2,444,419	51%	$4,974,109
	Mike DeWine (R)	2,028,300	42%	$3,053,156
	Martha Kathryn Grevatt (I)	321,670	7%