Like a State Job

One week ago, the Tribune-Chronicle reported a third and fourth appointee to the office of the Ohio Attorney General whose acquaintance with state counsel Marc Dann appeared more personal than professional. Advice to demur in a letter to the editor would not have been apt for the message Dann twice delivered to the filing reporter a day later, inasmuch as it is unprintable.

Appointment One was of a Youngstown detective sergeant, dismissed over a remunerative impropriety; Appointment Two, the editor of a small newspaper once employing Dann's wife, as yet sustained. Appointment Three is of the wife-to-be of a political contributor, and Appointment Four is the one whose journalistic mention prompted Dann's cursing and, according to a press secretary, resolution on having rightly paid in kind by "responding as a father."

The attorney general's relationship with Mavilya Chubarova is reportedly one of guardianship; Chubarova recently graduated with a bachelor's of fine arts and occupied both a creative and associative position in Dann's campaign last year. Working for the state, under Dann, she will earn the salary of a beginning schoolteacher.

There is nepotism and there is jobbery, and then there is employing relations because, when an elected official chooses on a basis of qualifications and character, they are the first to come to mind. Can Chubarova manage an executive role in the communications department? The present author, as one who holds a B.F.A. and went to work six years ago for someone he knew quite well, would commit that deliberation to the province of enterprise.

It's Attorney General Dann who can confirm that "constituent coordination" is not a sinecure. He could also explain the ferocious anger in having to clarify what, we are to assume he believes, was a commensurate hire.

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