Cafaro looking forward to fresh changes as minority leader

Last Wednesday, Ohio Senate Democrats convened to vote in a leadership team for Ohio's 128th General Assembly after current state Senate Minority Leader Ray Miller (D-Columbus) announced that he would not seek re-election to his leadership position.

The caucus ended up voting minority whip state Sen. Capri Cafaro (D-Hubbard) as the next leader of Democrats in the Senate. State Sen. Shirley Smith (D-Cleveland) will keep her position as assistant minority leader, while Miller will move into the minority whip position and state Sen. Jason Wilson (D-Columbiana) will take over as assistant minority whip.

Cafaro told PolitickerOH.com that she thinks there was a desire among the caucus to try something completely new and bring in a fresh perspective.

"I think that is reflected in their selection not only for me as leader, but also for Sen. Jason Wilson as Assistant Minority Whip as well," Cafaro said.

As far as that new direction goes, Cafaro said there are two things she thinks the caucus needs to do, concurrently. The first she said was restructuring the internal caucus governance.

"What I mean by that is we want to make sure that the internal policy arm of our caucus is there to support and grow the strength of each of the twelve members of the Senate Democratic caucus - that we are there as a resource for them," Cafaro said. 

Cafaro said one thing the caucus could do was to create bylaws to assure a level of consistency from term to term and leadership team to leadership team with regard to selection processes of leadership and selection processes of appointments.

"Some of that stuff is prescribed in the constitution," Cafaro said. "But I think that by-laws can provide us a good level of consistency from term to term."

Cafaro said the caucus needs to do things to have more participation and responsibility for each ranking member on committees.

"I'd like to see things like caucuses held by each of the delegations of the committee assignments," Cafaro said.

Cafaro said these are the things from a caucus governance standpoint that she would like to see improved.

"Concurrently, we have to rebrand ourselves politically," Cafaro said. "We have not been successful in this last cycle. But I think there's tremendous possibility for the future. There's going to be several open seats that will not have incumbents that I think are trending blue. Seats, for example, in Stark and Summit Counties that I think would be potential pickups."

Cafaro said that in those contests she thinks the caucus needs to provide a turn-key operation for the Democratic candidates.

"We need to have things like candidate training for both those that will be on the ballot and their campaign staff," Cafaro said. "And those are the kind of things that we're trying to bring forward."

Cafaro said she'd like to have a member of the caucus act as political chair, and that she's asked Wilson to do so. Cafaro said that Wilson will give his official decision on that Tuesday.

Cafaro agreed with remarks made by Ohio Democratic Party chair Chris Redfern that pointed to the fact that Democrats were competing for seats along district lines drawn by Republicans.

"I think that we were certainly the victims of that this election cycle," Cafaro said. "Some of the seats that were up this time around were definitely in districts that were not particularly strong for Democratic candidates because of the numbers."

Cafaro pointed to Stark and Summit Counties becoming increasingly blue over the past couple election cycles and again said that these were the areas that would see open seats in 2010.

"I think that we have a tremendous opportunity in areas such as that to go forward, because the political balance as far as the voting trends I think are more equitable than what we've been dealing with in the past couple of election cycles," Cafaro said.

Looking forward to the 128th General Assembly, Cafaro talked about how she would approach two big issues facing the next legislature - education and the state budget. Cafaro will be facing a 21-12 Republican majority in the state Senate, saying that's she's so far had a good relationship with state Senate President Bill Harris (R-Ashland). 

"While we may not always agree on some the ideological choices before us, we've always had very strong lines of communication," Cafaro said. "I certainly hope that that would continue and I anticipate it will as we go into the next General Assembly."

Cafaro said she doesn't necessarily anticipates that Democrats and Republicans will be able to see eye-to-eye on the nuances of the education policy, she thinks a lot of its success or failure will be determinate on how the administration of Gov. Ted Strickland presents the plan. Cafaro said the question is whether the legislation will be included in the operating budget, or will be presented as a stand-alone bill. She said another thing to look for was whether the plan deals with school funding separate and apart from structural choices like vouchers and school choice, or not.