If it's a lie, then we fight on that lie

Dr. Amy Acton continues to tread water, Josh Williams' DUI story doesn't add up, and pain is in the forecast for the ostensible bedrock of the "new" Republican Party.

Political campaigns, almost above all else, are about timing.

For example, the Ohio Democratic Party was wise to try to recruit Dr. Amy Acton for Senate in 2022.

An unorthodox candidate, even then, Acton had become a household name due to Ohio’s three weeks of leading the nation in COVID response.

And though it wasn’t known at the time, the insidious Dobbs decision, which turned abortion rights back to the states, would come later that summer.

She would have contrasted well against J.D. Vance, who, at that time, was a barely known, off-putting, anti-abortion freak who had carpetbagged back to Ohio to have his Senate campaign seeded by an even more repulsive venture capitalist who might be the Antichrist.

Acton, however, hesitated. Her family had concerns about how she might perform when the (figurative) bullets started flying in a heated statewide campaign. It’s not like her last rodeo in the public arena was a walk through a rose garden.

Alas. I guess we’ll never know how that race against Vance might have transpired.

Would she have done better than former Congressman Tim Ryan? It’s hard to say.

Fast forward three years, and Acton is running for governor, likely against the notorious conman Vivek Ramaswamy. On the face of it—and this isn’t her fault—it would be the most annoying gubernatorial election of all time, between Ramaswamy’s lethal amounts of smarm and the Republican Party dropping $10 million on Dr. Acton’s head to paint her as COVID Hitler.

From Liz Skalka of Politico, who published a piece worthy of the time required to read in full:

Acton would be forced to answer for the many things well-intentioned public health experts got wrong at the very onset of the pandemic. We now know the virus doesn’t transmit well outdoors or via surfaces, which means nobody really needed to be wiping down groceries or disinfecting the mail. There’s also plenty of research now into the harmful impact of lockdowns and school closures on mental health and academics. When I asked Acton about the aspects of pandemic response that didn’t age well, she argued her decision-making then was based on the best available data, while also taking into account the imperative to use stay-at-home orders sparingly.

“You don’t want to do the throttle down unless absolutely your systems are collapsing,” she said. “The best way to save the economy was to get control of the virus and be able to treat it and keep people working. So you should have had very few quarantine orders, [which are] 150-year-old powers to keep people safe.”

In a statement to POLITICO Magazine, Ramaswamy senior campaign strategist Jai Chabria accused Acton, Ohio’s “Chief Lockdown Officer,” of “keeping kids home so long they forgot what a classroom looked like. Some lost a full year of learning — and not just math and reading, but basic childhood stuff like making friends and playing sports.”

I wish I could place a bet on the over-under of how many times the average Ohioan will hear “Chief Lockdown Officer” in 2026 should an Acton-Ramaswamy showdown come to fruition. The number could be 3.5K, and I’d still probably hammer the over.

Because here’s the thing: Nobody wants to reminisce about the height of the pandemic. Sure, Ramaswamy’s camp will operate in bad faith while peddling the notion that somehow Dr. Acton kept a generation of children out of school by gunpoint.

But I don’t believe any potential Acton voters want to relive a time when they were drinking wine on their couches at 3 p.m. on a weekday listening to the dulcet tones of Governor Mike DeWine.

I’m not trying to belittle Dr. Acton, but who is she beyond that moment, especially to anyone who isn’t already a highly partisan Democrat? Browse the pictures on her campaign Twitter’s media tab, and you’ll see crowds that skew heavily old and white.

That includes this tweet, which features a room a little bigger than a prison cell being described as “standing-room only” to see the only Democratic candidate currently seeking the governor’s office in 2026:

Standing-room only? Well.. I’d hope that’d be the expectation.

Multiple sources have informed The Rooster that Dr. Acton was chapped about not being consulted on the opening of the Ohio Democratic Party’s chairmanship.

That vacancy has since been filled by Kathleen Clyde, who was hand-picked by former Senator Sherrod Brown under the threat, which Brown delivered personally in the campaign’s closing days, that he wouldn’t run for any office if he didn’t get his choice.

On one hand, I understand Dr. Acton’s frustrations. Say what you want about her, but she’s the only Democrat currently in the gubernatorial arena. That should count for something.

But on the other hand, that she thought she’d be consulted after being a first-time candidate for six months shows her naivety about how the Ohio Democratic Party’s Executive Committee functions.

And considering that State Senator Bill DeMora nor Clyde courted Dr. Acton’s support for the chairmanship reveals that party leaders think she’s a lightweight.

I make these criticisms of Acton knowing there isn’t some surefire replacement candidate that would set the world on fire.

LeBron James or Cleveland area personal injury lawyer Tim Misny ain’t walking through that door. No Statehouse Democrat has the brand required to win statewide. And every big-city mayor is too much of a loser to undertake that challenge.

That’s depressing, considering that 2026, at least hypothetically on paper, will be the most favorable electoral environment for Democrats in Ohio since 2018. And this time, the Republicans won’t have an institution like DeWine at the top of the ticket.

I was skeptical of Dr. Acton’s candidacy in January when she declared. I haven’t changed that opinion six months later, especially since her stump speech is a snoozefest of a hodge-podge of niceties.

I’d love to be wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time, nor the last.

But as things stand, we’re going to need Brown or Ryan at the top of the ticket. Each man would come with his own baggage, which we can discuss when the time comes, but if we go down this road with Dr. Acton, it almost assuredly ends with Governor Ramaswamy.

And that doomsday scenario could still happen with Brown or Ryan. But at least we’d go down with the best shot we have in the chamber, as damned as that might make us.

Rep. Williams tells some doozies while defending 2022 golf cart DUI arrest on Ohio’s renowned bacchanalian island

Finally, some outlet in the Toledo media ecosystem is awake!

WTOL reported on Friday what The Rooster had on June 18th: That State Rep. Josh Williams, a then-Ohio House first-time candidate, was arrested on suspicion of DUI in 2022 while attending a birthday party on Put-In-Bay.