Kearney Steps Down as Lt. Governor Candidate

Cuyahoga County Executive Ed FitzGerald is looking for a new running mate, a choice he says won’t be announced until 2014.

Embattled state Sen. Eric Kearney stepped aside Tuesday as candidate for lieutenant governor following three weeks of scrutiny over his finances.

The FitzGerald campaign announced Kearney’s withdrawal in an e-mail Tuesday afternoon. FitzGerald later said the decision was made jointly.

“He and I decided that we would make this decision jointly; that if the controversy surrounding his business’ tax situation was creating so much noise that it was drowning out the conversation we needed to have with voters then we were going to have to make a change,” FitzGerald said in an interview.

“He agreed to that and I agreed to that, especially in recent days when there was a jobs report that showed that the Ohio’s economy was doing significantly worse than the rest of the country,” FitzGerald said. The campaign, he said, was unable to get people to focus on that economic message.

Who will take Kearney’s place is an unanswered question, but two political scientists said Tuesday that with the right choice, there still is time to re-energize the FitzGerald campaign and make a run against Republican Gov. John Kasich in 2014.

“This is certainly not a good thing for the FitzGerald campaign, but I think it’s something they can still overcome,” said John Green, director of the Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron. “The other interesting thing to remember is there’s still a lot of time now. It’s many months until the primary and even longer until the general election.”

FitzGerald had cast his choice of Kearney as his first major decision as a candidate to unseat Kasich. In many ways the lawyer and former Democratic leader in the Ohio Senate made sense. As a black legislator with strong Statehouse relationships, he brought balance to a ticket topped by the white FitzGerald, who is making his first run for statewide office. With his Cincinnati base, Kearney added name-recognition in the politically important opposite corner of the state.

But Kearney’s background as a small-business owner – initially portrayed by FitzGerald as a strength – contributed to his quick flameout as a candidate for lieutenant governor.

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