Marc Dann's Affair Proves Me Wrong

Last week I took the Vindicator to task for its coverage of the sexual harassment allegations in the Ohio Attorney General's office. I criticized them for the "Under Fire" banner that hung on the top of their web page and said it was salacious. I also criticized Bertram de Souza's column in which he gave Dann a big old "I told you so" for hiring friends Anthony Gutierrez and Leo Jennings. In this criticism, I was wrong.

With today's admission by Attorney General Marc Dann that he was involved in a romantic relationship with a subordinate in his office, he has demonstrated that it was he, not the Vindicator that made the story salacious. I was too quick to jump to the conclusion that only Gutierrez had acted inappropriately and that Dann, being a Mahoning Valley boy, was worthy of the benefit of the doubt. Bertram de Souza was not inclined to do the same. Today, Marc Dann proved me wrong and showed that the Vindicator and newspapers like the Columbus Dispatch were doing the correct thing in chasing this story even when it seemed like there was nothing of substance to report.

Dann's reputation and his fight to investigate Republican donor Tom Noe gave me hope that the era of bad government was behind the Mahoning Valley. It was good to see the rest of the state vote for a hometown guy and put one of our own in a powerful state office. It was redemption that all the years spent cleaning up the area's unethical government was paying off.

Now we're here, in the middle of a scandal, where we have been so many times before. The feeling is so familiar that it has a sense of inevitability about it. "What did you expect?", people will ask, "Look where he's from."

There was a New York Times article last year that favorably compared Marc Dann to Eliot Spitzer as a fellow crusading state's attorney general. It's eerie how their careers paralleled each other in accomplishments as well as failures. All that is left now is for Dann to resign and he should do so quickly.