Will Marc Dann live up to Spitzer comparison?

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Dann is pursuing the same insurance brokerage that Spitzer did in New York.

COLUMBUS (AP) — It was more than a year before he was elected that people began comparing Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann to New York's bulldog lawyer of the same title, Eliot Spitzer.

Dann, a Democrat, took his first major step toward making the label stick last week, when he got tough on Marsh & McLennan Companies Inc., the world's largest insurance broker.

But making a Spitzer-style splash as attorney general remains a challenge for Dann, observers say.

"It's a high standard to achieve what Eliot Spitzer achieved," said Columbia University law professor John Coffee. "Even he [Spitzer] couldn't have kept on doing that forever; the office doesn't have the troops or resources." Spitzer was elected New York's governor this fall.

"You have to stand in line to be the next Eliot Spitzer," said Doug Muzzio, a politics professor at the City University of New York's Baruch College. Attorneys general around the country aspire to the designation, including Spitzer's successor in the office, Andrew Cuomo, he said.

Dann rode to victory in November on the tail of Republican scandal. But it was about a year earlier when state Sen. Teresa Fedor, a fellow Democrat, dubbed him "our Eliot Spitzer of Ohio" during a campaign stop in Toledo.

Persistent investigator

A Youngstown lawyer with a small private practice who at the time had served two years in the state Senate, Dann had displayed Spitzer-like persistence in his pursuit of information surrounding an investment scandal at the Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensation. He took a suit to the Ohio Supreme Court that sought to force then-Gov. Bob Taft to turn over internal records Dann believed would shed light on the scandal.

The day after he was inaugurated as attorney general, Dann waded into another high-profile feud: He provided a legal opinion that Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland needed to justify the controversial veto of a Republican-passed bill that Taft had opted not to sign.

Since Dann was a Democrat and Taft and those most closely tied to the investment scandal were Republicans, both cases carried a partisan tinge. On Friday, Dann declined to escalate partisan bickering in the case, however, by refusing fellow Democrats in the Ohio Senate a legal opinion on another bill whose handling they believe may be pertinent.

Spitzer's success was built on keeping his legal battles clear of politics, Muzzio said.

"If it is in some way political in the narrow partisan sense of the word, you don't get as many kudos because in some way it is tainted," he said. "Clearly, even if that is not objectively the case, it can be criticized on that ground."

For that reason, the Marsh case marks an important departure for Dann.

Taking on same company

When Dann asked Marsh to turn over more than 600 boxes of documents, he was acting not figuratively but literally in Spitzer's footsteps. It was Spitzer who first took on Marsh in 2004, accusing the company of rigging bids of insurance sales, and Ohio is one of several states to investigate the company since.

Dann said in his statement on that case that Marsh "has used every tactic imaginable to undermine our investigation of their activities. They have failed to produce documents we requested, supplied us with incomplete files, and used settlement negotiations as an excuse to stop producing documents altogether."

Marsh wants to put Spitzer's allegations behind it as it tries to recoup the rest of the $11.7 billion in market value erased by his investigation. The company has been cooperating with the Ohio attorney general's office and will continue to do so, officials said.

It was just this kind of case that fueled Spitzer's rise to national stature as a state attorney general, however, Coffee said. His cases took on major industries over things everyone could understand: insurance fees, computer chips, inflated stock prices or music royalties, to name a few.

And the settlements he achieved were broad.

"He didn't catch just one person in a gotcha-style raid," Coffee said. "He was able to make systemic change in the industries he took on."

Spitzer, a millionaire not reliant on any of New York's most powerful industries for campaign money, was also willing to take on sacred cows, Coffee said.

"Eliot Spitzer was taking on the leading industry in this state, which was the securities industry. For other attorneys general, that was the source of all their funding," he said.

Muzzio said Spitzer was uniquely positioned, as "the sheriff of Wall Street," to make settlements with national ramifications. But it's not impossible for big things to happen in a Midwest state.

"If the legislation's there, if the problem's there, why not in Ohio?" he said. "I can't tell you what the issue would necessarily be, but it's certainly possible."

Tuesday, March 6, 2007