Dewine as we knew him has left the building
Remember those early days of the pandemic, when everything was uncertain but Gov. Mike Dewine stood before us, brushing aside politics to make decisions that – right or wrong – were rooted in a sincere effort to do what was best for our state?
Yeah, I’m starting to forget them, too.
Dewine stormed out of the gate at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, declaring a state of emergency on March 9, 2020, with just three known infections in the state. He closed schools early and locked much of the state down while other governors were still Googling, “What is a coronavirus?” and “When am I up for reelection?”
Dewine made these tough calls based on the advice of the experts he had around him, notably then-health director Dr. Amy Acton, who also drew high marks as the pandemic dropped on top of us.
“This is certainly no ordinary time,” Dewine said on March 9, 2020. “It's important for us to take aggressive action to protect Ohioans, and the actions that we take now will, in fact, save lives.”
There were some complainers even then, of course, but polling as the pandemic progressed showed that as high as 85% of Ohioans approved of Dewine's overall performance when it came to the coronavirus crisis.
While a growing number of his own party branded him a Republican In Name Only, in vogue among certain subsets of the GOP these days, it was not uncommon to see figures on the political left praise his performance, people who likely shared with Dewine almost nothing in terms of non-pandemic policy.
And there was the rub.
It's not a winning strategy for any politician to lose members of your own party while winning the grudging and conditional admiration of voters who still will not vote for you when the time comes because your positions on pretty much everything besides the pandemic run counter to theirs.
Dewine loyalists insist that's not how he rolls, though, that he doesn't pander or reposition to suit his own political future.
For the first six or so months of the pandemic, it sure looked like that was the truth.
Then Acton, badgered by a small but persistent gaggle of kooks and worse, resigned in August 2020.
And that marked the beginning of the end of the Dewine we knew, he of the thick skin, daily coronavirus briefings and many collegiate ties.
“It was a remarkable act of transparency,” Amy Fairchild, dean of Ohio State University's College of Public Health, said of those briefings. “Any political leader who puts themselves in that position on a daily basis – to have to answer hard questions in the face of great uncertainty is a tremendous public service.”
The briefings ended earlier this summer, when daily viewers had dropped to about 10,000 from a March 2020 peak of roughly 1.2 million. With them gone, the governor quietly stepped back from the forefront of Ohio's COVID-19 fight.
Some of this isn't on him. We shouldn't forget that Ohio lawmakers passed Senate Bill 22, which allowed them to rescind Ohio Department of Health orders, including mask mandates. Dewine vetoed the bill, but legislators voted to override him. So if Dewine tried again to impose a mask mandate in schools, a legislature controlled by his own party could undo it immediately.
Facing muzzles like this and being up for reelection in 2022, Dewine must have seen the threats of schoolyard bullies scrawled on the wall.
He began to back down. The same issues that once would have yielded his unflinching assessment now yield only generalities that foist responsibility onto his constituents.
“These decisions today rest with each parent,” he said before school started, discussing mask mandates as the delta variant surged. “It rests with the parent and with each school official.”
That's what's known as passing the buck.
This change in style, or intestinal fortitude, may be cast by Dewine's people as practical, but Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley, a Democrat hoping to oust Dewine next fall, is right to suspect it is political.
As COVID-19 infections among children soar and hospital systems have undertaken an advertising campaign that begs Ohioans to get vaccinated, we are left with tepid sentiments from the governor, like this one about the recent trend of taking a horse dewormer unapproved for treatment of COVID-19.
“I think we should listen to the medical community,” Dewine said.
You can almost see him eyeing the exits.
In our ongoing time of need, we are left with our governor, once fearless in the face of an uncertain and unsettling future, now increasingly concerned with his own.
tdecker@dispatch.com