End of the Affair

The short-lived strange bedfellowship between Ohio liberals and Scott Pullins and the Ohio Taxpayer's Association is officially over. Today OTA announced that it is making 500,000 robo-calls to Republican households to gin up support for the drive-the-state-off-a-cliff TABOR amendment.

It's no secret that OTA loves TABOR, and would continue to do so long after it reduced all of Colorado to a smoking crater. They were, after all, the group that wouldn't play nice when Blackwell postponed the vote by a year -- they blasted him.

On the other hand, one doesn't need to be a professional political operative to know that campaigning almost a year from the election is a dubious expenditure of resources. So why the calls? No clue on Pullins' blog. And he is a professional political operative.

My speculation is to push Blackwell into putting his energy back behind the effort. His support for the amendment since the pullback has been tepid at best. His blog hasn't featured a TABOR story since the election (though to be fair, a Blackwell flak did make with the brave face after the Colorado debacle). Meanwhile he has made noises about getting behind a ballot issue to impose First Class Education's 65% solution, on top of that gubernatorial campaign thingy he has planned.

TABOR supporters have every right to be nervous. First, Coloradans gave the concept a heavy no-confidence vote. Then the RON results suggested that sweeping reforms like TABOR don't go down that well in the voting booth. If the RON implosion is indeed due to the twin factors of people seeing complicated ballot language and not wanting to do that to the state Constitution, TABOR could suffer a similar blow next election.

As I said before, the netroots did a good job with Hackett and could do similar work getting the word our about the TABOR menace. Check out the Coalition for Ohio's Future website for updates, info and links.