Should Ohio blame Ted Strickland for jobs lost while he was governor?

When NCR Corporation left Dayton in 2009 after 125 years there, the business took more than just its 1,000-plus jobs and the city's sole Fortune 500 company.

It took confidence in Ohio's recovery and then-Gov. Ted Strickland's administration.

The business, formerly known as National Cash Register, left for Atlanta following a series of failed meetings and miscommunication between government officials and the business's leaders. NCR's chief executive, Bill Nuti, told the New York Times he felt slighted when Ohio officials were late to a meeting and when Strickland didn't introduce himself at a conference in New York. Meanwhile, Ohio leaders were convinced Nuti had one foot out the door.

"He literally refused to speak to the governor or lieutenant governor," then-Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher said in a recent interview. "He had already made up his mind."

Strickland's return to politics, challenging U.S. Sen. Rob Portman, a Terrace Park Republican, has been marred by the same accusations that helped push him out of office in 2010.

But Strickland did not cause a national recession. No governor has that power. And he did work with Fisher and local leaders to keep jobs in the state. Whether they were successful often depended on the business.

“It was a national collapse. Every state lost jobs,”Strickland told the Enquirer editorial board this month.

A rough four years

By most economic measures, Ohio was in a worse place when Strickland left office than when he started. The unemployment rate had doubled at one point. The state lost nearly 368,000 jobs. Only two states lost more jobs over the four year period.

Ohioans were hurting financially and looking for someone to blame. Nearly six in 10 didn't approve of the way Strickland was handling the economy, and 51 percent thought a Republican would do a better job, according to a Quinnipiac University poll taken just before the 2010 election, when John Kasich defeated Strickland.

Around the country, it was a terrible year to be a Democrat. Fueled by frustration with the economic crisis and an enthusiastic Tea Party movement, Republicans took 11 Democrat-held governor seats, 69 seats in Congress and control of the U.S. House of Representatives that midterm election.

It's no surprise that Republicans would attack Strickland on the economy again. A pro-Portman political action committee called Strickland's economic record "mixed and spotty," using an out-of-context quote from the former governor. A super PAC affiliated with the conservative Koch brothers spent $1.4 million on an ad saying Strickland made lives harder while governor.

Ad Watch: Did Strickland make lives harder?

"Other than his family and paid staff, there is not one person in the state of Ohio who believes that Ted Strickland's incompetence did not cause thousands of Ohio jobs to be sent to other states and countries," Portman spokeswoman Michawn Rich said. "By Election Day, every Ohioan with a television, radio, phone, computer, or tablet will be able to recite the two most important facts in this election: Under Ted Strickland, Ohio ranked 48th in job creation and lost more than 350,000 jobs."

Strickland spokesman David Bergstein pointed the finger back at Portman. "Senator Portman and his allies are throwing out false attacks to try and distract from Portman’s own record of championing policies that contributed to the global recession and devastated Ohio’s economy," he said.

Is Strickland to blame?

Blaming Strickland for a worldwide economic crisis is simply not fair, economists told The Enquirer. Strickland did not burst the housing bubble, encourage risky investments on Wall Street or hike fuel costs to cripple the automotive industry. Governors largely receive too much blame – and conversely, too much credit – for the economic state of their states.

Ohio, with its reliance on manufacturing, felt the recession earlier than other states and was hit harder by losses in the automotive industry. Northeast Ohio was is still recovering and trying to diversify its manufacturing businesses to avoid another crisis, said Tom Jackson, an economist with IHS Market Economics in Philadelphia.

"The national forces just completely overwhelmed the Strickland administration," agreed Ned Hill, a professor of economic development at the Ohio State University.

Faced with this economic crisis, Strickland added fees on services like license plates and trash pickup, he delayed an income-tax reduction and drained the rainy day fund to 89 cents to balance the state's budget – a requirement under the Ohio constitution. Kasich used that 89-cents figure repeatedly as a talking point during his failed GOP presidential bid. But Cleveland economist George Zeller said the point of having savings is to use them during a financial crisis.

"It was not just raining. It was a hurricane, a major storm, a catastrophe," Zeller said.

Job creator or job loser?

Strickland didn't cause the financial crisis. But did he do enough to keep jobs in Ohio?

Unable to compete with FedEx and UPS, in 2008 package-delivery company DHL moved its Wilmington hub to the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky International Airport, which is located 60 miles to the south in Kentucky. That decision led to layoffs for about 8,000 employees in a city of just 13,000. Strickland told a Dayton television station at the time that he was helpless to stop the job loss.

The decision to leave, for many companies, is more practical than political, Hill said. In the case of NCR, airfare was costly from Dayton, especially when compared with Atlanta. More employees lived in Georgia than Ohio.

"Businesses don’t move for a whim or a small incentive," Hill said. "They only move for a major strategic reasons, and they will never tell you what that reason is."

And other companies stayed. In 2007, former Akron Mayor Don Plusquellic, a Democrat, had a difficult call to make. He had just been tipped off that Akron was losing a bidding war for Bridgestone's new headquarters. Murfreesboro, Tennessee – a city of fewer than 100,000 people just outside of Nashville – was offering better incentives. The mayor feared Bridgestone would move its remaining employees to Tennessee – taking hundreds of jobs and a piece of Akron's industrial identity with it.

Plusquellic walked over to his assistant, frustrated with weeks of seemingly fruitless talks: "We're not going to be able to save them. This is so outrageous what Murfreesboro is going to put on the table."

Around the same time, Goodyear, which was founded in Akron in 1898, was being courted by southern states hoping to move the company's headquarters elsewhere. Akron, known as the "Rubber City," was in danger of losing two major tire manufacturers.

Plusquellic was just getting up the courage to break the news about Bridgestone to Fisher when the phone rang. It was Fisher.

"Don, we’re not going to lose this," Fisher said. Through a series of appeals, tax breaks and loans, both companies decided to stay in Akron.

Goodyear would not confirm that other states were interested in the company's headquarters, but a spokesman credited public and private partnerships with the success of the company's new headquarters and renovated "innovation center," which staff about 3,000 employees.

Fisher was the deal maker, but he insisted Strickland was very involved.

"There wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t discuss economic development with him," said Fisher, who ran unsuccessfully against Portman for the U.S. Senate in 2010. "If I asked him to intervene, he would put down anything to make the phone call or make the visit."