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Last Updated June 22, 2005
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 he and his wife have long hosted 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, DeWine 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. 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 was 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 continued to monitor D.C. childcare and in April 2004 he called on the District to shut down the Oak Hill Youth Center. He has looked after unborn children as well: he was chief sponsor of the bill, approved by the Senate 61-38 in March 2004, to make it a crime to injure or kill a fetus in the course of a violent federal crime. With Republican Gordon Smith and Democrats Christopher Dodd and Jack Reed, he sponsored a bill to provide $82 million over three years for prevention of teen suicides, with funding for screening and mental health treatment; it became law in 2004. DeWine has often worked with Democrats on a bipartisan basis. "I've done it deliberately. Not to be too philosophical about it, but when you go to the Senate, you don't know how long you'll be there. So you want to use your time wisely." He co-sponsored a bill authorizing FDA regulation of tobacco with Edward Kennedy (it was dropped from the corporate tax bill in conference in fall 2004), 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 Democrat Herb Kohl have run the Antitrust Subcommittee on a bipartisan basis in both the Clinton and Bush years. In June 2003 they held hearings on media concentration that led to the congressional overturning of the FCC ruling increasing the percentage of an area's broadcast stations a single company could own. In June 2003 DeWine and Kohl called for FCC scrutiny of News Corporation's proposed takeover of DirecTV, and in September they asked for concessions before it was approved. In February 2004 they said Comcast's proposed takeover of Disney "may well pose a risk to competition in the marketplace of ideas and the diversity of news, information and entertainment available to the American public." In April 2004 the Senate passed their bill increasing the penalties for antitrust crimes, encouraging criminal prosecutions, authorizing the courts to engage in substantive review of Justice Department settlements, limiting the liability of corporations that take part in corporate leniency programs and abolishing treble damages for standard development organizations that set industry product and safety standards. In February 2003 they held hearings on gasoline prices and sponsored a bill to make oil-producing and -exporting cartels illegal. In October 2004 they sponsored a bill to authorize regulation of the sale of medical products to hospitals. In February 2005 they sponsored a bill authorizing Justice Department wiretaps of antitrust law violators. DeWine has split from Republicans on several high visibility issues; he voted for the hate crimes bill in 2000 and 2001 and opposed oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in 2002 and 2003. Although he does not serve on Foreign Relations, DeWine has taken an interest in Latin American issues. He has made many trips there--15 to Haiti and 6 to Colombia and others to Mexico, Panama, Chile and Peru. He has pushed for tougher interdiction of drugs, supports Plan Colombia and praises Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe. 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. 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. DeWine came up for reelection in 2000. Democrats thought he might be vulnerable, but well-known Democrats declined to run, and 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. 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 Valley 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, and in December 2004, in a speech in Cleveland, he sounded as if he might. "Are we heading in the wrong direction? The answer is clearly yes. … We need to accept the fact that our economic base has eroded and that we need to pivot to a new economy and educate our work force for new jobs." But he made no move to run for governor and in mid-2005 seemed committed to the Senate race. Most well-known Ohio Democrats seemed to be concentrating on the open-seat race for governor. In the meantime, DeWine was supporting his son, Hamilton County Commissioner Pat DeWine, in his race for the 2d District House seat vacated by Trade Representative Rob Portman. In May, Mike DeWine's role in brokering a Senate compromise over judicial nominees was thought to have seriously hurt his son's campaign; Pat DeWine, once the frontrunner for the seat, finished a distant fourth.
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