THE PLAIN DEALER
April 27, 1997

Knight of the Roundtable
By Benjamin Marrison
Plain Dealer Reporter

David Zanotti walks up behind the ball and studies the shot. He checks to see if he has the right equipment and takes aim. His head never moves, his eyes focused on the ball.

Zanotti approaches life the same way he does his golf game. Disciplined, prepared and focused.

And while most Ohioans have never heard of Zanotti, the 42-year-old Strongsville man and his Solon-based Ohio Roundtable have quietly made a profound impact on the state’s political structure.

Term limits. Campaign finance reform. Riverboat casinos. All three were victories for Zanotti and his nonpartisan group dedicated to "restoring traditional principles to public policy."

And when word got out that Zanotti was targeting the recent Ohio Supreme Court ruling overturning the state's system of funding schools, many people at the Statehouse and around Ohio asked the same question: "Who is this guy?"

"I’m a nobody from nowhere who cares about this country" is Zanotti’s self-characterization.

The truth is, he’s well educated, but doesn’t have a college degree. He is devoutly religious, but doesn’t wear it on  his sleeve. And he’s a workaholic, but a dedicated father of three.

"He’s tireless, but I think he’s balanced," said Rep. Mike Wise, a Mayfield Republican who belongs to the Ohio Roundtable. "He’s good about spending time with his family, and he’ll get out on the golf course to unwind. But when he’s focused on something, nothing gets in the way of achieving his objective."

The objective varies with the issues of the day, but the battles are almost always for high stakes.

"We go against Democrats and Republicans," Zanotti said. "We’re not driven by politics; we’re driven by the issues, and what is right and wrong."

John Jazwa, a West Side Cleveland businessman who is a major contributor to the Roundtable, said people have to see Zanotti at work to appreciate him truly.

"He is probably one of the most talented people I’ve ever met," Jazwa said. "He can energize. He can organize. He can roll up his sleeves and do the grunt work. But he can also sit at the top and do the things an executive can."

Last summer, Zanotti worked with grass-roots organizers and some of Ohio’s most prominent businessmen to defeat Alan Spitzer’s riverboat casino proposal - despite being outspent 10-l. Church groups pitched in with yard signs. Business leaders pitched in with money. And Zanotti pitched in with his unbridled enthusiasm to defeat the proposal.

A winding path to post

Last week, as he rewound one of the commercials produced last fall to help sink Spitzer’s riverboats, Zanotti reflected on his path to the Roundtable.

"I prayed I’d be doing this," he said. "It was beyond my wildest dreams."

When Zanotti graduated from Valley Forge High School in 1973, he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do. He first went to Mount Vernon Bible College and studied theology and communications. Then he bounced around to other schools, including Cuyahoga Community College.

"I went to college the way I wanted to go to college," Zanotti explained. If there was a course he was interested in, he took it, even if it didn’t fit a degree program. He enrolled in graduate courses at Ashland College without an undergraduate degree. And although he never enrolled, he was accepted to law school without a bachelor’s degree.

He married a woman he met in high school. He and Debbie Zanotti struggled to make ends meet.

She worked at the Salvation Army, while he was being rejected at fast-food restaurants for being "too old and overqualified," Debbie recalled, laughing.

Finally, Zanotti went to work at a company his father owned.

He was making good money and was in the ideal position of "having the right last name in a small, family-owned business."

One day, he heard about a fledgling organization calling itself the Northeast Ohio Roundtable and Freedom Forum. The group was about citizen activism, and Zanotti was curious.

"They were taking a business approach to this idea of public policy," he said. "There was an unsettled sense about where our country was going."

As his involvement grew, he began to question where his life was headed. The founder of the organization, Jay Menefee, retired cofounder of the Bicron Corp., asked him to think about taking over.

Debbie Zanotti said her husband had three options: the Roundtable, a lucrative job in the insurance industry, and going to law school.

"My wife and I prayed over it and prayed over it, and finally we said, ‘Let’s do it,’" Zanotti said. The decision was difficult not only because it was a major career change and a pay cut, but also because it involved leaving a business that his father worked day and night to buy.

But once he made the move, "there’s been no looking back," Zanotti said.

Turnaround and growth

"Since his arrival 12 years ago, the organization’s two groups have grown into four: the Roundtable, which does educational research and communications; the Freedom Forum, which focuses on legislative action; the Liberty Committee, a political action committee; and TPS Productions, which does television and radio productions in the group’s own studio.

The four have erased at least $50,000 in debt and now generate between $500,000 and $1 million a year. From about a dozen "real" contributors, they now have thousands. Among those contributors is billionaire Fred Lennon, the founder of Crawford Fitting Co.

The handful of believers has swelled to a mailing list of 70,000 households. About a dozen people work for the group, full time and part time, with an annual payroll of about $270,000.

Every day, about two dozen religious radio stations play two-minute, taped Zanotti speeches. On weekends, another five stations play five-minute speeches. All give him the time free.

Zanotti is careful not to take credit for his organization’s success, but most agree that the Roundtable’s growth - physically and politically - is a result of his leadership.

"Dave is so strong for us, that if he were suddenly not available, I wonder how strong we’d be," Jazwa said.

Not to worry, Zanotti says. He plans to stay with the Roundtable for a long time. "I think this is a calling."

No plan to seek office

While some speculate Zanotti may be positioning for a run at public office, the former Sunday school teacher says that is not on his agenda - although he wouldn’t rule it out.

Janet Lewis, the former president of Common Cause-Ohio worked with and against Zanotti during the 1990s. She said she would not be surprised to see his name on the ballot.

"I think that would be a likely possibility," Lewis said. "I think Dave enjoys being in the public eye. I sense that it may be a personal thing for him, that he gets personal gratification from being in the limelight."

Debbie Zanotti disagreed: "He doesn’t grab the limelight. If he wanted to do that there would be other opportunities to do that. He’s got a deeper compassion to see voters and the guy on the street see just how important they are to this process."

Jazwa agreed that Zanotti’s drive was not based in self-promotion.

"This isn’t about him. He really cares," he said. He added that Zanotti could have more impact running the Roundtable than being one of 99 members of the Ohio House.

And if Zanotti’s interest was money, Jazwa said, he could easily earn much more than his $75,000 salary. "I'd pay him three times what he's making to come work for me," Jazwa said.

Lewis said: "One of Dave’s strengths is that he can combine the ideas of people with money for results. The down side to that is that often the opposite [side] doesn’ t have the money to represent its idea in as bold a fashion."

Lewis also learned that "first and foremost, he is a goal-oriented person, and if that means he can be a team player in the course of it, fine. But if he’s got to walk off the field in order to score, that’s what he’ll do."

Despite his success, Zanotti grows uncomfortable when the word "power" is associated with his organization.

"We don’t have any power. The power rests with the.people. The only power we have is through the power of our ideas and the number of people who agree with them," Zanotti said. "We try to give people all the information we can and then encourage them to do the right thing."

Drawing a game plan

Now he wants them to overturn the Supreme Court’s school funding decision. One morning, he took the decision to a fast-food restaurant, sat down and started reading. As he read, he jotted notes on the back of an overnight mail envelope.

When he was done, he realized he had just laid out the strategy to fight the court’s decision to "usurp the authority of the legislature."

He figured out who should be in the coalition, how many constitutional amendments there should  be and what the fallback plan should include. He then ran his thoughts by members of the organization’s executive committee, who said he was on the right track.

Here is his strategy: Spend about $300,000 to prepare information to persuade the legislature to place one to three constitutional amendments on the ballot. One would deal with reforming education, another with changing the funding system. The third would clarify that only the legislature and the voters have the power to determine how schools should be funded.

If the General Assembly placed the proposal on the ballot, which could happen as early as November, Zanotti estimated it would cost $4 million to persuade voters to pass the amendments. If the legislature balked, Zanotti and his group would try to oust unwilling legislators from office.

"David is a perfect example of what democracy is all about," said Gene Pierce, a political consultant who worked with Zanotti to defeat the casino proposal. "When he cares about an issue, he cares about it deeply. And he is committed to seeing his views come to fruit.

"He’s not a gadfly. He picks issues to win. He has a good sense of what the people want - not what labor wants or business wants. He has a good sense of the public’s moral compass and how it guides their political interests."

But Debbie Zanotti said her husband was no crusader. "I see him more like a nuclear submarine," she said. "He’s going to surface every now and then, and he’ll hit his target. And you don’t know he’s in the water."