Republican congressman tells Ohio GOP chair to end public spat with governor for good of the party

COLUMBUS, Ohio - A long serving Columbus Republican congressman is urging his state party chairman to get back to working for the GOP "instead of tearing it down."

A frustrated Congressman Pat Tiberi confirmed that he sent an email to Ohio Republican Party Chairman Kevin DeWine on Wednesday after the chairman this week took his spat with Republican Gov. John Kasich on television, accusing Kasich of trying to unseat him.

Other key Republicans are also stepping forward after seeing DeWine's interview on Ohio News Network's Capitol Square and are urging him to settle his differences with Kasich or quit.

A spokesman for DeWine said the chairman was traveling on Thursday and would not be available for comment.

"I have never seen a county or state GOP chairman level the kind of attacks you did this past weekend against one of our sitting officeholders," Tiberi wrote to DeWine in an email obtained by The Plain Dealer. "Attacking Republicans is not the job of the chairman of the ORP."

It is no secret that Kasich and DeWine do not get along, a tiff that reaches back well before Kasich took office last January. The problems appear to focus generally on DeWine's party leadership style and how receptive and accessible he is to Republican candidates, though the chairman can boast a highly successful 2010 election cycle.

This much is clear: Republicans are embarrassed by a dispute that has now gone public just as the country heads into a major presidential election year where Ohio again figures to be a key state for the GOP's hopes of beating Democratic President Barack Obama.

"In a year when it is essential that our party is unified so we can win back the White House, your repeated PUBLIC attacks on the leader of our party and other Republican leaders who support his call for a new chairman undermine that," Tiberi wrote. "They must cease immediately."

Kasich, frustrated over the leadership of the party and his perceived lack of party support during his gubernatorial campaign in 2010, met with DeWine in January and asked him to resign. DeWine declined and the battle between the two leaders has boiled beneath the service ever since -- until recently.

DeWine appeared on the Capitol Square television program on Sunday and accused Kasich of mounting a campaign to unseat him. The chairman post is voted on by the party's 66-member state central committee. Those members are up for re-election in March.

Kasich officials have not denied DeWine's claim that they plan to run candidates against some of the central committee members. Since DeWine won't quit, Kasich wants to gain control of the committee and get the two-thirds majority -- 44 votes -- he would need to unseat the chairman in the middle of his term.

"What's troubling is when the governor's allies, agents, lobbyists, political consultants, what have you, are going after incumbent members of the committee," DeWine said on Capitol Square. "They took an unprecedented step to endorse him, his candidacy."

DeWine even suggested that Kasich directed his employees while on state time to collect the signatures needed to help qualify some people for the central committee ballot. If that were true, it would be against the law.

Kasich's staff has vehemently denied that any employees were improperly used to gather signatures.

"What is so troubling is that you have the governor's -- in some of these cases -- employees. . . going after the committee who through no fault of their own simply poured their blood, sweat and tears into helping this guy get elected," DeWine said. "And the thanks they get is (Kasich's) staff working to gin up a contest in their re-election to the committee."

Those comments upset Tiberi and other Republicans according to records obtained by The Plain Dealer.

"It must be the responsibility of the state chairman to find a solution to the party's internal differences, not exacerbate them in public," Debbie Walsh, executive director of the Summit County Republican Party, wrote to DeWine Monday. "No matter what the other circumstances, to publicly criticize a sitting governor and his team is to undermine our own party."

Joyce Houck, a central committee member from Huron County, sent a message to other committee members on Wednesday suggesting that if DeWine can't resolve this dispute quickly, he should step down.

"When Kevin DeWine ran for chairman of the Ohio Republican Party I thought he was the man for the job. I stuck my neck out and endorsed him before the election," Houck wrote. "Obviously I was wrong."

Tiberi was not the first prominent Republican to speak out against DeWine. DeWine met with the central committee on Dec. 2 to complain about Kasich and the likelihood the governor would try to replace many of them.

That prompted Ohio House Speaker Bill Batchelder to issue a letter to his caucus calling DeWine's speech to the committee an "unprovoked attack" and an example of "questionable leadership tactics and poor decision making."

And in October, Hunting Valley businessman and Republican donor Jon Lindseth, who has given $200,000 to GOP candidates since 2001, emailed DeWine: "Enough is enough. You crossed the line. Time for you to resign."

Tiberi declined to comment other than to confirm he sent the email to DeWine. In the email, Tiberi alludes to past problems he had with the chairman, saying he couldn't even get his phone calls returned last year when he was running for re-election.

Tiberi's email also suggests that he and DeWine had just spoken about their agreement to keep the party infighting "out of the press," which he now accuses DeWine of reneging on.

"Please heed the many public and private calls I know you are receiving and return to your work to grow the party instead of tearing it down," Tiberi wrote.

Source: http://www.cleveland.com/open/index.ssf/2011/12/republican_congressman_tells_s.html

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