Ohio: Sen. George V. Voinovich

Jennifer Brunner says that if she's elected to the U.S. Senate next year, one of her priorities will be to toughen the just-passed credit-card bill to limit interest rates consumers can be charged.

Brunner, currently Ohio's secretary of state, is running against Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher for the Democratic nomination.

Brunner lauded the credit-card bill's passage but said last week, "Until this bill becomes law next summer, Americans trying to pay down their credit-card balances will be at risk for being slapped with sudden interest-rate increases, excessive fees, double-cycle billing or charging interest on paid balances, and credit-card companies applying payments to low-interest balances before the higher-interest ones."

Brunner said Congress should quickly cap the amount of interest a company can charge, "so that the bill has some teeth and actually protects everyday Americans when it finally becomes law.

President Obama's job approval has taken a dive in Ohio, a new poll released this morning shows.

"Not surprisingly, the honeymoon is over," said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.

"But the era of good feeling is still alive."

What that means is that the survey's new numbers for Obama 57 percent approval, 33 percent disapproval are still healthy, especially in a state Obama won by only 4 percentage points last fall, Brown said.

But it's quite a fall from the stratospheric numbers 67 percent approval, 16 percent disapproval in Quinnipiac's poll a couple of weeks after the president's inauguration.

"The huge numbers he had immediately after the inaugural are coming down to earth," Brown said.

While partisan accusations and lawsuits eroded public confidence in elections, including last November's, voting management actually improved in Ohio and many other states. But the perception of partisan bias means that every decision by elections administrators is subject to intense scrutiny and suspicion.

For that reason, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, would be wise to hand off her election-oversight duties to an assistant while she is running for U.S. senator, seeking to replace Republican Sen. George V. Voinovich.

The race will be watched nationally and will be a close second to the governor's race as Ohio's most-important contest. If Brunner is nominated in the May 2010 primary, she can anticipate a tough battle from Republicans for a seat they now hold.

Some other features of Ohio's political landscape beckon, too. First, while everyone else goes broke, Akron-based FirstEnergy Corp. (the Illuminating, Ohio Edison and Toledo Edison companies) is rolling in money. Last week FirstEnergy said its "basic earnings" in 2008 were $4.41 a share; they'd been $4.27 in 2007. If that's state regulation, every other business should demand it.

Second, in the unholiest alliance since the Stalin-Hitler pact, Lakes Entertainment and Penn National, enemies-to-the-death in November, will unite behind a ballot issue for four casinos in Ohio. Result: Big bucks for TV ad-sellers and political "consultants" -- and pie-in-the-sky promises to voters. Note to casino shills: The December unemployment rate in three-casino Detroit was 18.