George Voinovich, who retired from the U.S. Senate in January, sat down recently with Inside Business to talk about his 44 years in elected office, including 10 as mayor of Cleveland and eight as governor. Freed from life in Washington, the proud debt hawk sounds as frustrated with his fellow Republicans in the nation’s capital as he is with the Democrats. He received Team NEO’s H. Peter Burg Regional Vision Award on June 30.
» My dad did not want me to go into politics.
» He had to deal with politicians over the years. When I graduated from law school, he said, “Are you sure you don’t want to come into business with me, George?” The next question he said to me was, “Are you sure you’re a Republican?”
» He said, “Kid, with your name and your religion, you’ll never make it as a Republican.”
» I was lieutenant governor. I wanted to be governor. So I basically said to the business community, “I’ll come back to Cleveland. I’ll run for mayor. But there are two things: One is, you take care of my finances [at City Hall], and number two, I expect you to do an operations improvement task force.”
» I got a commitment from Del de Windt, who ran the Eaton Corp. He [asked] the Cleveland and Gund foundations, would they be willing to do this? The day after I was elected, I had him in the office, and I said, “Let’s go to town.”
» That whole story about Kucinich saving Cleveland Public Power, it’s all a bunch of BS.
» They called it Puny Muny. It was in terrible, terrible shape. It was ready to fall under its own weight. We brought in top-notch people to run it. We changed the name. We painted the trucks. We trained our workers. And in 1984 the city of Cleveland was given the Scattergood Award for the most improved public [power] utility in the United States. And then I expanded it.
» Many politicians are willing to get on a soapbox and take positions but are unwilling to do the hard work.
» That’s a bunch of nonsense. I never did that. Now, do I pick up pennies on the street? Of course, because pennies become dollars. But all that stuff about [picking a penny out of] a urinal is all nonsense.
» I don’t borrow money. I pay cash. My wife was probably the only woman in America who made her gown to the inaugural ball on two occasions.
» We live in the same house we bought 40 years ago. I wouldn’t move out of that house for anything.
» I used to tell my colleagues in Washington, “How many of you ever met any real people?”
» We had too many people who were defining what a Republican should be based on their particular philosophy or what was popular in their state. I said to some of the guys, “Some of the stuff you want to do is like manure on the rug in Ohio!”
» The bill on small business [loans], I was the vote that made it happen. They didn’t want to give Obama a victory. I said, “This is about people! It’s not about Obama’s victory! Chambers of commerce in Ohio, the manufacturers — all my friends, all my Republican, conservative friends — are saying, ‘George, we need help!’ And you’re telling them no.” That’s because they don’t talk to people.
» If you go to Columbus today, the Republican Party headquarters is the Janet and George Voinovich Republican Center. I’ll take my record in terms of the Republican Party.
» The wide net of corruption [in Cuyahoga County] was just incredible to me. If we’d had two newspapers in town, it wouldn’t have happened. I compliment The Plain Dealer for all the work that they did, but in the old days, somebody would have dropped a dime.
» I’m excited to see the hole in the ground and what they’re doing over there with the Medical Mart — though I still have qualms about that project and whether it’s going to work out like they say it’s going to work out.
» The casino thing, it’s happening the way I expected. They did it in Detroit: They took old buildings, and they converted them into casinos.
» I’ll bet you that thing stays at the Higbee Building for a long time. There’s going to be one excuse after another, that they can’t do this other building.
» Reducing the debt and balancing budgets — I ran on that in ’98. At that time, people didn’t get it. But now they do. They’re looking at Washington and saying, “What the hell’s going on? We’re cutting back in our own families, we’re being more conservative, and those people in Washington are still doing what they’ve been doing for years!”
» I wanted to see the thing explode. If [the Bush tax cuts] weren’t renewed, all hell would’ve broken loose. It would’ve been an upheaval that would’ve forced Congress to deal with the deficit and tax reform.
» You don’t appreciate something you don’t pay for.
» The president — I think he’s a socialist. He believes that government should play a much greater role in the lives of people than most Americans think government should play.
» Everybody should understand it: If they want government to do more for us, then we should pay for it. There’s no free lunch.
» The greatest frustration I have is that after 12 years, things are a hell of a lot worse in terms of our finances than they were when I came [to Washington]. And I did everything in my power to try to change it. But sometimes talking to those people is like talking to the sidewalk.