December 10, 2013
North Avondale’s Eric Kearney has resigned as Democrat Ed FitzGerald’s running mate in the 2014 gubernatorial race, after news reports by The Enquirer and other Ohio newspapers revealed that he, his wife and his business owe up to $826,000 in unpaid taxes.
“It’s undeniable that this has come to be a distraction from a discussion of the vital issues facing Ohio, and the choice voters must make in this election,” Kearney said Tuesday in a statement. “I have discussed this with Ed FitzGerald, and while I will always be grateful for him selecting me to be his running mate, we agree that the best course of action is for me to step aside from the campaign.”
The campaign has yet to choose a new candidate for lieutenant governor, but plans to do so in January, if not sooner, FitzGerald told The Enquirer.
FitzGerald, the Cuyahoga County executive,announced state Sen. Kearney as his running mate just under three weeks ago. The pick gave the Democratic ticket geographic and racial diversity and added Kearney’s clout as a prominent lawmaker and proven fundraiser.
But starting two days after the announcement, reports about Kearney’s past and present unpaid bills began to roll out from major newspapers across Ohio. The FitzGerald campaign said it knew about the debts, but was unable to say exactly how much Kearney owed. The state senator finally released financial documents on Wednesday, 12 days after the reports began. By then, Democratic operatives had already started whispering that he needed to resign.
Kearney had blamed his debts on financial troubles with the family business. He and his wife, Jan-Michele Lemon Kearney, co-own Avondale’s Sesh Communications, which publishes African-American newspapers such as the Cincinnati Herald. The business has struggled through recessions and the rise of Internet news, for instance.
The FitzGerald campaign had been reticent to change the ticket. It sought to use the issue as an opportunity to talk about Kearney’s empathy with the average Ohio small business owner, emphasizing that Kearney had sacrificed to keep the Cincinnati Herald in operation even when financial times got tough.
Late last week, though, it became clear that the Kearney story was dominating state government news, FitzGerald told The Enquirer.
“That message about how tough it is to raise a family in Ohio really was being drowned out, and that was just a burden that the campaign was not going to be able to bear any more,” FitzGerald said. He and Kearney agreed on Tuesday that Kearney should resign later that day, he said.
“In a state with 11 million people, it was interfering with his introduction to the rest of the state,” FitzGerald said. “They didn’t have the benefit of the City of Cincinnati of knowing what kind of person he is, what kind of person (Kearney’s wife) Jan-Michele is, why the Cincinnati Herald was an important African-American publication that needed to be saved.”
Through the turmoil of the last 18 days, gubernatorial candidate FitzGerald was notably absent. Until Tuesday, campaign staffers declined to grant interviews with him to discuss Kearney’s candidacy and whether the Democratic vetting team had uncovered and approved all of Kearney’s financial problems.
Once Kearney disclosed the financial documents, the story became a national one, with a Washington Post blog labeling his campaign rollout the worst of the year . Kearney was supposed to have helped boost FitzGerald’s fundraising profile nationally, since the Cincinnati state senator served on President Barack Obama’s national finance committee. Instead, FitzGerald’s running mate was bringing the campaign negative attention.
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