The Governor's Sub-rosa Plot to Subvert an Election in Ohio

        Ohio Governor Bob Taft and the highest reaches of his
administration have embarked on a concerted, months-long effort to subvert
the state's electoral process. With overall control of budgets, jobs and
sentencing policy at stake, the Taft administration has organized a
sophisticated, sub-rosa campaign to defeat a drug treatment rather than
incarceration amendment likely to appear on the ballot in November.
Starting last spring, Gov. Taft himself, First Lady Hope Taft, his chief of
staff, Brian Hicks, two of his cabinet members and numerous senior and
support staff have - while on the clock, ostensibly serving the public -
conceived and directed a partisan political campaign.

        A four-month long Institute for Policy Studies investigation by
freelance journalist Daniel Forbes details political malfeasance, the
misuse of public funds and the inappropriate use of government resources in
Ohio. The effort has been aided by federal officials, including President
Bush's publicly announced nominee to be deputy director of the White House
drug czar's office (since confirmed), and a senior U.S. Senate staffer. The
drug czars of Florida and Michigan and a senior Drug Enforcement
Administration agent also participated in the scheme.

        Ohio officials consulted with and enlisted the aid of the wife of
the former finance chair of the Republican National Committee, who herself
has played a key political role for Jeb Bush, as well as several
taxpayer-supported, staunch anti-drug organizations, including the
supposedly apolitical Partnership for a Drug-Free America.

        The Partnership was slated to produce TV ads to sway public opinion
in favor of the Ohio drug-policy status quo. Its four top executives
advised the Taft administration during a day-long strategy session hosted
by that Senate staffer and held in the U.S. Capitol building itself. A
representative of New York-based treatment provider Phoenix House and one
from the federally supported Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America also
attended.

        A mid-October strategy session held at the governor's residence in
Columbus was attended by 19 senior officials and private executives from
Ohio, Michigan and Florida. (A similar referendum will likely be on the
ballot in Michigan; in Florida, proponents have postponed their effort.)
Obtained through Ohio's Freedom of Information process, a five-page memo
summarizing the day's thinking features such overt political exhortations
as: "Beat the Initiative back in the entire country, not just in each state."

        Ohio spent $106 million on "community-based treatment" in FY 2000;
overall control of vast sums of money and vast numbers of jobs underlies
the political struggle. One Ohio official worried that the state will lose
both "its ability to control sentencing policy" and "control of its own
budget."

        The effort has entailed hundreds of staff-hours of state-paid time.
Last fall, Ohio's first lady, cabinet officials and senior staffers in the
governor's office attended weekly strategy sessions on the public's dime.
State funds paid for out of town trips and overnight lodging, and the
administration even proposed to divert U.S. Department of Justice
crime-fighting grants to fund their nascent campaign's eventual polling,
focus groups and advertising.

        Modeled on a similar measure, Proposition 36, that passed
overwhelmingly in California in 2000, the Ohio amendment proposes to offer
treatment rather than prison to defendants charged with a first or second
instance of simple drug possession. Judges may approve a few other types of
nonviolent offender, but typically any crime beyond possession precludes
participation. The measure is backed by the same rich trio - billionaires,
George Soros and Peter Lewis, and multimillionaire John Sperling - who have
successfully financed drug reform initiatives since 1996, including Prop.
36, and several medical marijuana measures.

        Should the Taft effort succeed, it will work to maintain the Ohio
status quo of incarcerating a disproportionate number of racial minorities
for possessing small, personal use amounts of drugs. According to Ohio
State Senator, Robert F. Hagan, though an estimated 13% of Ohio's drug
users are African-American, "77 percent of the people sent to prison for
drug possession last year were black. This brings shame to us all."

        The revelations from Ohio question the probity of the Partnership
for a Drug-Free America, which partners with the White House in a
controversial, nearly $2-billion (total-value) anti-drug advertising and
media content campaign. The media campaign has recently come under attack
from Drug Czar John P. Walters himself as being ineffectual.
Its second, five-year appropriation is currently under consideration in
Congress. As the Drug Czar foists the equation that Drugs = Terrorism upon
the land, will Congress now take another look at a program whose private
strategic partner, the PDFA, was willing to insert itself improperly into
an election in Ohio?

        Inertia, resentment of liberal outsiders trying to force change,
money-and-jobs turf protecting and both state and national political
calculation explain much of the Taft administration effort. Yet, the
administration also seems to think the very citizens who elected it possess
scant faculties to decide for themselves. So it endeavored to keep the
amendment from the ballot. Such contempt towards the electorate serves only
to erode faith in democracy. As previously proven in print and discussed in
the report, the White House has at least indirectly meddled with state
ballot initiatives for years. In fact, the effort in Ohio is just a more
sophisticated - and wildly blatant - manifestation of the sort of public
funding of partisan drug-war politicking that has long befouled the
nation's electoral landscape.