From the morning John Kasich announced his candidacy for Governor, the Ohio Democrats have been attacking his association with Lehman Brothers.
Even before the announcement, Governor Strickland would feather his speeches with attacks on Lehman Brothers, foolishly blaming them for Ohio’s economic woes and attempting to set the terms of debate.
The idea was to paint Kasich as somewhat responsible for, or at least, an accomplice of, the fall of Lehman Brothers and the ensuing fallout.
And now, with one 1,300 word article, that argument is completely moot.
Three of the Columbus Dispatch’s senior political reporters conducted in-depth research to determine the truth behind the charges against Kasich, and in doing so, any hope that those allegations would ever catch fire disappeared swiftly into nothingness.
Former Lehman-trader-turned-author McDonald blames Lehman’s fall on mistakes by Fuld and a few other top executives who gambled on risky investments involving complicated bundles of subprime loans and other exotic products. The wheeling and dealing done by Kasich and others in his corner of the Lehman Brothers world wasn’t what brought down the firm, McDonald said.
Lawrence McDonald is the one man major news networks have turned to since the collapse for the true dirt behind what brought down Lehman Brothers. He is the one man who hasn’t held anything back about who is at fault for the collapse of the investment giant.
And what did he say about Kasich? That he had absolutely zero to do with it.
In fact, the rest of the article goes on to paint Kasich as a hard worker who took on a new challenge and ran with it.
And was he overcome with greed while at Lehman? Not so much.
Schiffman said in a phone interview that one of Kasich’s strengths at Lehman was his credibility with CEOs: “Investment bankers sometimes can push clients to do deals. John was very different. He steered clients away from transactions that he felt didn’t make sense.”
Now, this doesn’t mean we won’t continue to hear allegations from Ted Strickland and the Democrats that Kasich’s time at Lehman somehow makes him unqualified to be Governor(you’d think overseeing the doubling of the unemployment rate would see to that, but alas). Most assuredly it’s something you’ll see in commercial after commercial next fall.
But, with the findings as discovered by the Dispatch, it’s clear that the Governor has lost an important vessel for these attacks – the media.
The Ohio media now knows that the attacks are baseless. Any hope Strickland has of using them as a medium for his charges is lost.
So Governor, what’s next?
