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More at OHEA.org The governor avoids a never before seen scenario in appointing a new attorney general.

And a longtime political strategist.

Looks back at Ohio when it was blue.

That's this weekend.

The state of Ohio.

Welcome to the state of Ohio.

I'm Karen Kasler.

In just a few weeks, Ohio will have a new attorney general.

And governor Mike DeWine could have set off a chain reaction among the statewide executive offices, but chose not to.

The news that Republican Attorney General Dave Yost was leaving leaked out the day after the primary, with Yost leaving it unconfirmed until after the peace officers Memorial ceremony two days later.

On Monday, DeWine announced he picked his director of the Department of Public Safety, Andy Wilson, to fill out the rest of Yost Sturm.

It was very important for me to make this decision quickly.

The new attorney general, frankly, has to start conversations today with the men and women in the attorney general's office and certainly with with the attorney general.

There's a lot goes on in that office.

And you no time time was moving forward.

So it was just as very important.

So I made the decision.

I made the final decision late yesterday afternoon, and we wanted to share that with you as soon as we could.

Wilson manages the agency overseeing the state Highway Patrol, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, Emergency Management and other areas.

When he starts.

As Yost leaves on June 7th, he'll be in charge of law enforcement agencies and the state's lawyer on criminal and civil matters.

So I'm coming to the Attorney General's office, and we're going to go for the seven months that I'm there.

We're going to go 100 miles an hour, and we're going to lead with energy and passion, and we're going to serve each other.

That is really the premier investigative agency and law, really law firm in the state.

Wilson says he plans to review all the cases the AG's office is involved in, such as the retrial of two First Energy executives scheduled for September.

My plan is to sit down with the staff that is over there.

I've learned through my career that trial prosecutors know the best about each and every case.

I'm going to go through each and every case that they have, and I'm going to evaluate each and every case on its merits.

DeWine said he did consider appointing auditor Keith Faber, who is running for AG, but that would have opened up the auditor's office, which Secretary of State Frank Larose is running for.

And Treasurer Robert Sprague won the primary for secretary of State.

To set off that cascading effect by appointing Faber would have been a historic and dramatic move.

But frankly, when I thought about that, it just seemed not the not not the right thing to do.

You know, I have great confidence that Keith Faber will be a very, very, very good attorney general, and I support him for that.

And it you know, his election I think is is essential.

But the idea of appointing one or maybe all of the statewide office holders, which was certainly a distinct possibility and certainly was an option, just didn't seem right to me.

We have election coming.

We're only six, six months away from the election for me to step in as governor and appoint literally every single statewide office holder.

I just didn't look right to me, didn't seem right to me, didn't seem like something that I should do.

But DeWine said he supports Faber for AG, as does Wilson.

He said he plans to position the office for whoever will be coming into it in January.

The Democratic nominee will be running against Faber.

John Callouts said in a statement that he hopes Wilson will focus on the fundamentals of the office.

Quoting here.

Ohio is up against it right now and needs it.

AG who is going to stand up for the people of Ohio?

That means taking on the corruption in Columbus.

That is, raising the price on everything on which we depend, from Brandt to electricity to fertilizer, end quote.

The Trump administration is temporarily stopping new home health and hospital providers from enrolling in Medicare because of concerns about fraud in the system.

This comes after the conservative outlet The Daily Wire, reported dozens of home health care businesses in Columbus allegedly build the other government insurance program, Medicaid, for millions of dollars worth of services that were never provided.

House Speaker Matt Huffman said this week he believes the report and lays a lot of the blame at the feet of governor Mike DeWine, who he says has twice vetoed a provision in the state budget that would require the state auditor to put Medicaid through a performance audit.

think that, as the governor has said on other issues within his administration, the buck stops here.

And I want you to know, by the way, I had a conversation with governor DeWine that I'm going to be talking about this publicly today.

So he I didn't want to catch him off guard or anything like that.

And I ran through exactly what I just mentioned in my response.

You know this, I think many of us let me let me say this.

There is fraud.

There's actually theft, which I think is all the things that were true in the Daily Wire report, which I think they are.

That's theft.

And there's a whole gamut, if you will, of other things.

There's recklessness, there's negligence, there's simply ineffective spending that we do over and over.

Because last year it was $2 million and we went 2.2 million.

And it's to help kids or it's helped people stop smoking.

Oh well, okay.

We won't cut that.

We send it along and the legislature approves that stuff.

And a lot of it is because information we get from administration urging from the public, whoever it may be, I think that I don't know how far this is going to go, but we've been trying to stop this from happening.

Since 2019.

That was before I was Senate president.

That's when.

And so these are the same questions we've asked over and over.

And there were some some other items that we did have in the 25 budget that the government regarding Medicaid, that the governor did veto.

So I don't you know, I think governor DeWine is is a truth teller.

And I think that when he and I would also say that he doesn't know everything about everything that's going on among his directors, among he can't possibly know that I don't know how many employees there are in the state of Ohio, tens of thousands, probably.

He doesn't know all of that.

But the buck stops with him.

So we're going to see what happens here in the next couple of months.

DeWine did reject performance audits of Medicaid and job and family services by the state auditor in budgets in 2021 and 2023, saying in his veto message that the expansive reach of the provision would create duplicative bureaucracy and would be disruptive to the work of those agencies.

A few hours after Huffman's comments, DeWine issued a list of new anti-fraud initiatives, including asking the Trump administration to put in place a six month moratorium on enrolling new home health care and hospice businesses as Medicaid providers, suspending payments to high risk providers, and new rules on electronic visit verification.

Any detailed what Medicaid has already been doing to fight fraud, such as using AI and data analytics tools, and routine and targeted audits by staff.

Dwyane also shared this on X, quoting here.

Ohio takes all Medicaid fraud allegations seriously, and will continue to work with the Trump administration to proceed with several new fraud, waste and abuse reforms immediately.

Ohio has been a national leader in catching and prosecuting Medicaid fraud, thanks to a strong partnership between Ohio Medicaid and the Ohio Attorney General's office and its Medicaid fraud control unit, end quote.

DeWine also shared some of these remarks from Vice President and former Ohio U.S.

Senator JD Vance, who spoke about fraud on Wednesday.

You may think that this is purely a red state or blue state issue.

That's actually not true.

We see Medicaid fraud issues in Ohio, the state that I used to represent in the Ohio, in the United States Senate.

We also see Medicaid issues, fraud issues in a state like Maryland, which is obviously a very blue state.

But both Ohio and Maryland have worked with us to take this issue seriously.

They've worked with the guys behind me.

They've worked with our entire team to make sure that they take fraud seriously.

And this does not have to be a red state or a blue state issue.

This is just basic good government.

However, states like California, states like Hawaii.

States like New York have completely not taken the fraud issue seriously in the Medicaid program.

And so for those states that refuse to get serious about fraud, we are going to turn off that anti-fraud money.

And if we continue to find problems, we can turn off other resources within their state Medicaid programs as well Vance was asked at that event about the alleged home health care fraud in his home state.

but on the Ohio issue in particular.

Look, this happens everywhere.

We're a big country.

Hundreds of billions of dollars goes out the door every single month from the federal government.

And inevitably, you're going to have people who try to take advantage of it.

What bothers me is not that you have a few fraudsters out there, it's that the government hasn't taken seriously pushing it back.

You're always going to have bad people.

You're always going to have have a few bad apples, try to take advantage of the system.

What's so unique about this country until recently is that we didn't take that seriously.

We didn't try to push back against the fraud.

And that's what's changed when I talk about cooperating with these various states.

And again, we've had some good cooperation with both red states and blue states.

It's very context specific.

But for example, let's say that we know we have a number of fraudulent Medicare or Medicaid providers working with the federal government to identify who those are.

To kick them off the rolls so that when those companies, those fraudulent companies submitted reimbursement, they don't actually get any money in return.

Now, sometimes the federal government has a better perspective on that.

Sometimes the states do.

But that's that's one example of ensuring that local providers that are fraudulent are not able to get reimbursed or not able to get access to the resources.

That's just one example, DeWine also said on social media that since the start of his second term in 2023, Ohio has secured 444 Medicaid fraud indictments, 481 convictions and 146 civil settlements and judgments, resulting in $78.4 million in recovered taxpayer funds.

Ohio has been a red state for most of the last three decades.

Republicans have won 82% of statewide candidate races since 1994, including the three largest landslides for governor in Ohio history.

George Voinovich in 1994, Mike DeWine in 2022, and John Kasich in 2014.

Political analysts throughout the nation are predicting a blue wave is coming this fall, because the party out of power tends to do better in the midterms than the party in power.

And President Trump's approval ratings are at a new low for his second term.

But it would be quite a turnaround for Ohio to turn blue this year.

When Ohio was blue is a memory for Democratic strategist Dale Butlin, best known for his work with astronaut turned senator John Glenn.

And that's also the title of his new book.

My state House News Bureau colleague Joe Engel sat down with Dale Butland to talk about the book.

it.

And one of the things you said in the book is that Ohio was not a swing state.

It was Mississippi North.

What do you mean by that?

Well, I mean that in the present moment, it is because Republicans control every office in the state except for one seat on the Supreme Court.

But every executive office, both Senate seats and majority in the congressional delegation, all but one in the Supreme Court.

It mirrors basically what Ohio was back in the 19 late 1970s and all through the 80s when I was active with John Glenn and people like Howard Metzenbaum, we were Blue State.

Now we're as red as we were blue back then.

And, you know, when Mike DeWine completes his last term as governor now, it's hard to believe, but but Republicans will have controlled the governor's office for 32 out of the last 36 years.

That doesn't say swing state to me.

No, it sure doesn't.

You had a relationship with John Glenn long relationship, writing his speeches and working with him, trying to get him elected, reelected.

You said John Glenn was someone with whom you could reason.

This kind of sticks out to me because sometimes reasonable people just don't gravitate toward politics anymore.

But you said that you he would think about things and sometimes change his mind.

And you talked about a situation involving gay rights.

When a woman in New York City asked him, why would I choose to be a woman who is black and also gay?

And it really got him to think and tell me about that.

Yeah.

So I've often said that John Glenn was the most open minded politician that I've ever worked for.

It wasn't that he was wishy washy or easily swayed.

He had a very firm sense of right and wrong.

He had a core set of convictions that he wouldn't compromise, but on issues, he always believed that he had this kind of humility, really, about him, that you don't see much anymore in politicians where he thought he might not always be right and he could actually benefit from here.

In other points of view.

And the story that you mentioned, there is a case in point.

There was back in the early 1980s, there was a bill before Congress that was known as the Gay Civil Rights Bill, and John refused to sign on to that bill as a sponsor, even though he had a 100% voting record on civil rights.

And his reasoning was that, unlike the idea was that you were going to add sexual orientation to the list of a script of characteristics for which you could not discriminate against people.

So John thought, well, unlike your color of your skin or your national origin, sexual preference was a choice, basically.

And he said that's why he was uncomfortable with making it the same as the other things.

And it turns out that back at that time, the he was running for president at the time, and the guy who was running our campaign in New York was the state senator whose district encompassed Grant's village.

So he asked John if he would meet with some of his constituents to see if they could change his mind.

John.

So, sure, I'll go up and talk to anybody.

So we went up and John gave his pitch about why he wasn't signing on.

It was a preference and a choice.

And as you say, finally, a woman.

She was an attorney by trade.

So stood up and said, Senator, I'm black and I'm a woman.

Why in the world would I choose to be gay?

And it broke the room up.

Everybody laughed.

Attention sort of dissipated in the room, but John got thinking about it, and he realized that he couldn't remember a time that he chose to be straight.

It was just something he was born with, and he was no more capable of changing that than he was the color of his skin.

And if that was true for him, he reasoned, it was true for everybody else, too.

And that's how he came to change his mind on same sex marriage, for example.

you know, you kind of referred to this, but he had a sense of humor.

And in his gridiron speech, as you were writing in the book, you pinpointed that he kind of discovered his use of self-deprecating humor in making larger points and bringing people together to see things from his point of view.

Talk about that.

Yeah.

So John always had a delightful sense of humor.

But before I got hired as a speechwriter and later served as his press secretary, I don't think he always let his sense of humor shine through.

And so I always have been a big believer in humor, particularly self deprecating humor.

As you say, if people like nothing better than to see the powerful and the famous make fun of themselves, and if they're willing to do that, I think it goes a long way toward humanizing that person who has otherwise been put on a pedestal.

And, you know, in John's case, he, I think, instinctively understood the value of self-deprecating humor.

And we used it a lot, not just at the Gridiron Dinner, as you mentioned, but after he ran for president and lost.

We were very cognizant of the fact that many other politicians, senators in particular, who had run for the presidency and then lost, got turned out of office the next time they were up for reelection by their home state voters.

So we were determined we were not going to let that happen to John.

So we had the 86 race coming up, the reelection campaign coming up.

So we John accepted virtually every invitation that was offered to him around the state party dinners, Chamber of Commerce meetings, this and that, and every place he went.

He'd start by poking fun at his presidential campaign, because that was the elephant in the room.

Everybody knew that he had run, and it was it was just up a lot of debt, racked up a lot of debt.

And so we'd go in places and he'd say, you know, that presidential campaign did not turn out like I'd hoped, but I want you to know it was all Annie's fault.

That was his wife, Annie, he said, because for years.

And he told me she wanted me to run for president in the worst way possible.

So that's exactly what I did.

So it was that kind of.

He poked fun at the debt.

He said, I'm deeply indebted to everybody for being here tonight.

But then again, because of my presidential campaign, I'm deeply indebted almost everybody and so on.

And that kind of humor, I think, humanizes people.

We were trying to demonstrate to people that while he'd run for president, he it had not gone to his head.

He was still the same John Glenn that he'd always been from the Concord, Ohio, and that he still took his job as their senator very, very seriously.

So humor, I think, works really well.

And by the way, one other thing I'll say if you're attacking somebody politically, if it's your opponent, for example, the attack almost always goes down better if it's leavened with humor.

And if you can get people laughing at your opponent, the chances of you're beating them is a whole lot better.

So we used humor all the time.

We used it at the gridiron.

We used it when he after his presidential campaign in 1988, when he spoke to the Democratic National Convention.

We used it there, too, and I think it served him well.

You talk in the book about finding common ground, and it made me think, is that even possible now?

I mean, there's really is there really a place there where common ground exists in a social media driven world where facts are arbitrary?

Yeah.

You know, Joe, that's a that's a very good question.

Today, it seems like the country is split into two warring countries, with Democrats and Republicans no longer sharing common goals, common culture, or even a common reality.

I think there's a number of reasons for that.

We had globalization.

We had deep deindustrialization, which hollowed out the middle class, rob those without a college degree of hope, and widened the wealth gap into a chasm that's greater now than it was even during the Gilded Age in the 19th century.

On top of that, those that's on the economic side, on the political side, as you say, you know, we had these ideologically driven cable net networks now, which allow us to sort of cocoon ourselves into these ideological silos, echo chambers and echo the same with social media and the algorithms that steer us into these echo chambers, where everything we think we know or want to believe is just reinforced.

It's never challenged, and that's a big part of the problem.

So you're right.

I'm not.

I mean, there's no way we can put those genies back in their bottle again, right?

So we're going to have to learn to live with this, and we have to figure out how to get along because.

Because we cannot have, you know, Democrats and Republicans totally alienated from one another.

They're going to have to learn to one of the big differences between now and when John Glenn and Howard Metzenbaum and the others were roaming the halls of the Senate is they both politicians back then all believe in compromise.

They all they all knew that compromise is not dirty word.

It's not selling out.

It's the way democracy is supposed to work.

And in a competitive two party system, it's the only way it can actually survive.

So we're going to have to bring back compromise.

And I, as you point out in the book, I offer a couple of ideas, some reform ideas for how we might get ourselves back on track.

One of the things I found very interesting was when you were working with Jerry Springer.

He was considering a run for Ohio governor and of course, Ohio Senate.

Sorry, Ohio Senate.

He had that TV show that was thought by many to be a disqualified for.

But you made an observation about Springer and the people who might have been attracted to him.

You say that those are the same people that could be attracted by President Trump now.

Yeah, let's talk about that.

Sure.

So most people, probably most people even watching the show today, only knew Jerry Springer as the host of that raucous talk show.

Jerry used to call it my silly show.

And that's and they were they would look away and discussed because they saw him as the ringmaster of a of a depraved circus on TV.

But there's another whole side to Jerry that was a lot more complex, too nuanced.

He was whip smart.

He was highly educated, had a law degree, as a matter of fact, from northwestern, and he cared deeply about the issues.

He was in politics before he got into broadcasting.

He was mayor of Cincinnati, served on council down there in Cincinnati.

He ran unsuccessfully for governor, got beaten in the primary.

That's when he left politics, became a newscaster, which was the NBC affiliate, as I recall, in Cincinnati, he won like seven Emmys or something for all of his commentary and so on.

He took them from last place to first place in the ratings.

That's before he left for Chicago to do his silly show.

So there was that whole other side to Jerry.

And I think of all the politicians I worked for, I don't remember a politician that had a more genuine relationship with low, low income and middle income voters than Jerry, because and this is where he and Donald Trump, they sort of appeal to the same demographic.

But there is a huge difference.

And long before there was Donald Trump, there was Jerry Springer.

Trump stokes hate and fear and division.

Jerry stressed empathy, understanding and, in the words of his famous sign off on television, which Lester Holt of NBC news borrowed decades later.

The need to take care of yourself in each other.

That's where Jerry was, and he had this connection to working class people.

He ultimately decided he would not run in 2004.

And I don't know, as we sit here, Joe, I can't tell you that Hattie run.

He'd have won.

But what I can tell you is that it would have been a hell of a show.

And that is it for this week for my colleagues at the state House News Bureau of Ohio Public Media.

Thanks for watching.

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Support for the Statehouse News Bureau comes from the law offices of Porter, Wright, Morris and Arthur LLP.

Porter Wright is dedicated to bringing inspired legal outcomes to the Ohio business community.

More at Porter Wright.com.

Porter Wright.

inspired every day.

And from the Ohio education Association, representing 120,000 educators who are united in their mission to create the excellent public schools every child deserves.

More at OHEA.org