For the past month, the major party candidates for the three of the four statewide executive offices besides governor have all appeared on "The State of Ohio" to answer questions. This week our month-long series was to conclude with interviews with the candidates for treasurer of state, Republican incumbent Josh Mandel and Democratic challenger Connie Pillich. But after repeated e-mails and phone calls to Mandel’s campaign team, on September 12 campaign spokesperson Rebecca Wasserstein declined the invitation to appear on the program.
But Democrat Connie Pillich agreed immediately to an interview. Pillich is a three term representative from the Cincinnati area, coming to the Ohio House after eight years in the Air Force, an MBA and a JD, and several years as a lawyer in her own firm.
Next week, an interview with Democratic candidate for governor Ed FitzGerald – our first sit-down with FitzGerald since November of 2010, when he talked about taking office as the first ever Cuyahoga County Executive.
The influence of money in politics has been discussed, studied, analyzed, broken down, blasted, defended, and torn apart and put back together over and over in many forms and forums, including on this show. There’s a new movie that tries to further connect the dots and some might say demonize the influence of money in politics and to propose what the director feels are some solutions to diminish the power that big money has in the political sphere. And the film uses Ohio as a main stage for a lot of its explanations and examples of what happens when money takes a major role in elections and policy, and when people who don’t have lots of money try to fight against it. The movie is called “Pay 2 Play: Democracy’s High Stakes”, and it’s directed by John Wellington Ennis. To talk about the film and what it says about money are Catherine Turcer with the group Common Cause Ohio and Dan Tokaji, a professor of election law at the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University.