Dubbed "Ohio's most popular and influential Republican website" by the Cleveland Plain Dealer, RAB, which consistently ranks in the top tier of Ohio political blogger sites claimed in late October that The Dispatch's management was putting the brakes on an article on a story about Coleman's questionable campaign spending.

Although unabashedly and unapologetically biased in favor of Republicans, their candidates, issues and causes, the accusations delivered by RAB's founder and driver, the human IED known as Matthew Naugle, of deferential treatment of Coleman by the paper deserve a full airing before not after the election. The paper's readers, many of whom will vote Tuesday, should be able to walk into the voting booth with the full benefit of information that could affect for which candidate they ultimately decided to vote.

About a fortnight ago, Coleman was graced with his hometown newspaper's endorsement.

After nearly eight years of steady leadership, Columbus Mayor Michael B. Coleman earns the enthusiastic endorsement of The Dispatch for another four-year term.

In a third Coleman term, Columbus can look forward to a blooming of Downtown as a result of his efforts to boost residential development, redevelop City Center, push plans for Scioto riverfront improvement and reinvent landmarks including the former Lazarus building. Coleman's excellent working relationship with the area business community helps to propel these efforts. Dispatch editorial

Laying out the campaign contributions by John F. Wolfe, The Dispatch's owner, and other members of his family that in 2007 alone totaled $8,000, RAB claims that these funds, when combined with previous help on other local deals involving the interests of the Wolfe family by Coleman as mayor and as a former city councilman, provide enough smoke to show that a fire exists.

The conclusion RAB draws from this fire-hose of facts and allegations is that any Dispatch stories containing any real damaging information have either been scuttled or adjusted to politically temper them in a way that enables the paper to show it's doing its investigative job, but not pulling out all the stops as it has in the past to discredit a public official in the run up to Election Day.  

the Coleman archive at RAB provides a far more extensive listing of Coleman's campaign expenditures, which taken as a whole show the extent to which Coleman has wined and dined his way as chief cheerleader for Ohio's capital city.

But while RAB sees them as indisputable evidence of Coleman's misspending of donor funds, the same cannot be said for The Ohio Elections Commission, which said it had no complaints. And considering the room to roam given to political candidates by Ohio campaign finance laws, as Terri Enns, a professor of election law at Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law, stated in the article, Coleman, an attorney, can and has made his case that his spending habits, while clearly lavish, are legitimate, verifiable, ordinary or necessary.

Coleman's campaign spending habits are clearly not to Naugle's liking. But the question is will they strike a similar discordant note with voters, as Coleman's feigned statements of shock that a long-time friend was a drug user and a drug dealer may be?. Adding to this revelation was the very curious, incongruous fact that when Santana was arrested he not only had Coleman's home phone and his cell phone number on him, but that that he chose to call the mayor with the one phone call alloted to him. Who ya gonna call? Mayor Mike.

Aided by friendly fire from a like-minded right-of-center political blogger, Coleman's public and personal problems are certainly fodder for his foes. From his wife's forced resignation from her high-paying state job with the administration of new Democratic Governor Ted Strickland for not showing up for work and for lying about it to the Ohio Inspector General, to her problems of driving while drunk to his bungled run for Ohio governor, Coleman has used his showmanship, affability and numerous city-development projects to inoculate him from any real piercing of the upbeat veil of an administration on whose watch the rise in homicide, unemployment, poverty, Downtown vacancy rates and the closing of two once-thriving retail destinations - Lazarus and City Center Mall - have occurred.

In what seemed to be a less than believable explanation for why the wife of his drug dealer's friend was able to snag a plum city job so quickly, when clearly the path to public employment for others is difficult at best, Coleman said there was "no special treatment" and that "we didn't create a job for her."

For anyone remotely familiar with how city hall politics works, it's generally understood that when a mayor "passes along a resume" to his hiring point person, the implied message is to find this person a job. This appears to be what was done for Santana's wife, who landed a $17-an-hour, unposted and unclassified job. Maybe it was just being lucky at the right time.  

But with only two days before Election Day, unless the Columbus media -- which has shown itself to be a faithful supporter of "Mayor Mike" -- decides to  suddenly scramble the jets and dedicate a lot of attention and manpower to airing the mayor's dirty laundry, it's unlikely it will have much affect on voters, despite wishes to the contrary by RAB, and the campaign of Bill Todd, whose campaign war chest is dwarfed by that of Coleman and whose main campaign theme - that Columbus Public Schools should be run by the mayor - hasn't' caught fire with voters.

About a month ago, Coleman and Todd had their one and only debate.

Todd's comment on The Dispatch article linking Coleman with Santana, is far more muted than the posts at RAB. For Todd, his disappointment was in juxtaposing the ease with which Coleman got Santana's wife a job with the loss of a job and a promotion at Coleman's health department for a returning member of the United States Army Reserves who was deployed in Afghanistan, where he won several medals.

John Michael Spinelli is a former Ohio Statehouse government and political reporter and business columnist. He now serves as the OhioNews Bureau chief for ePluribus Media.org

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