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Social Error. His campaign tactics were unorthodox but effective. On occasion, Lausche traveled around Ohio by bus. Whenever he had an engagement at a strawberry festival or a county fair, he usually managed to slip in through a side entrance, avoid the official greeters and mingle with the crowds, shaking all hands, admiring babies, and earnestly talking politics to individual voters. His common touch made excellent word-of-mouth publicity and swung many a vote. In 1946, when Lausche ran for reelection, he was defeated by 40,000 votes. At least part of his defeat was attributed to the fact that he had stopped attending the marriages, wakes, christenings and other ceremonial gatherings in the immigrant neighborhoods of Cleveland and other large cities. Lausche vowed never again to neglect that social duty. He never has. Nor has he ever lost another election.
As Ohio's governor, Lausche has been competent but unspectacular. Except for two years (1948-50) he has had to deal with a Republican legislature that has choked off a good many Lausche plans for Ohio. But the governor is undeniably conservative, and his relations with the legislature have been generally amicable. The G.O.P. has found Lausche's frugal fiscal policies especially gratifying. Although its revenue has nearly trebled (from $396 million to $1,019,759,404). Ohio has not voted a general tax increase during the Lausche decade. The governor runs the state on a tight annual budget, usually reports a tidy surplus in the treasury each year.
In his personal expenditures, Lausche is just as tender with the taxpayer: he insists on paying his own expenses, above transportation costs, whenever he makes a business trip. (Jane Lausche is equally scrupulous with the housekeeping budget for the governor's mansion. She sometimes splits the cost of a pound of coffee with the state: so many cups for private, personal use, so many for official guests.)
Lausche is justly proud of his conservation program. After a bitter struggle with the mining lobby, he pushed through a law to force the strip miners of eastern Ohio to cover up their eroding handiwork after a mine is depleted. Under his direction 27 million trees have been planted to replenish the state's dwindling forests. His position on civil rights might give pause to his Southern supporters in the showdown. During the Democrats' two-year heyday in Columbus, Lausche nearly won passage of a Fair Employment Practices Act with enforcement features. Said Lausche in his 1955 message to the legislature : "The decision of the United States Supreme Court requiring the schools of our country to provide equality of teaching services for our children . . . meets with my complete approval . . . We simply cannot live as a free people if we . . . chip away from any member of our society the guarantees given to him by the Lord on the day that person was born, and then reaffirmed with pen and ink in our Constitution."