As tough as they come.

• Author: Leonard, Lee
• Position: Includes related articles on term limits and Davidson's leadership style - Ohio House Speaker Jo Ann Davidson - Cover Story

Speaker Jo Ann Davidson leads the Ohio House with patience, modesty and strength.

Had you been driving north on I-71 from Columbus toward Cleveland last Feb. 18, you would have been passed by a sleek green Chrysler Sebring convertible piloted by a grandmotherly figure alternately talking on a cell phone and reading (yes, reading) as she drove. This was Ohio House Speaker Jo Ann Davidson, who can do three or four things at once when not behind the wheel. Seventy-one and single, she is wedded to her job, not for the glory but for the satisfaction of doing it right.

Riding with Bob Foster, her trusty sergeant-at-arms, Davidson maneuvers two cell phones and her ever-present stack of reading material. "We don't talk much," said Foster.

But on this day, Davidson was driving herself to a meeting with the board of trustees of Cleveland State University, and she needed to bone up on the university's personnel and current issues. So she read.

"It was just bullet points," she told someone who questioned the safety of such a practice.

Davidson, who had started her day with a 7 a.m. dentist appointment, returned to Columbus and plunged into a round of late afternoon meetings. In the evening, she took a sheaf of papers to her home in suburban Reynoldsburg for a nightcap. Away from dawn until after dark, she's been known to water her lawn at midnight of a summer evening.

FIRST FEMALE SPEAKER

It all goes with the territory of being speaker in a large state, and Davidson is keenly aware of her heritage and her burden. She's the first female speaker in Ohio, which will observe its bicentennial in four years.

Speaker is not a position that was handed to Davidson. "She didn't just happen to be the flavor of the month and somebody said, 'Let's make her speaker,'" said Terry Casey, a political consultant who works closely with Davidson on Republican campaigns.

She was a councilwoman for 10 years and a township clerk whose day job was with the Ohio Chamber of Commerce. She did some lobbying in the legislature and was active in county Republican politics, working her way up to chairwoman of the central committee. She ran presidential campaigns in Ohio for Gerald Ford and her favorite, Bob Dole. Elected to the Ohio House in 1980, she was appointed to the Finance Committee her freshman year, a rarity. She served eight years in lower leadership positions of the Republican caucus before becoming minority leader in 1993.

In the early 1990s, when veteran House Speaker Vern Riffe was struggling to hold his Democratic majority in the face of a Republican-drawn reapportionment, the cagey Rifle told lobbyists to bet their money against Davidson, who was orchestrating campaigns for the GOP candidates.

"That caucus will never elect a woman as its leader," Riffe predicted. He had logic and the odds on his side. Ohio has never been on the cutting edge of the women's movement. And Davidson's Republican caucus was full of good ol' boys and conservatives.

When Riffe's buddy, veteran Republican leader Corwin Nixon, decided to hang it up at the end of 1992, Davidson had to hop over David Johnson, the glib assistant leader, and William G. Batchelder, a constitutional scholar and darling of the conservatives.

RUINING PREDICTIONS

Davidson won. And when she led Republicans into the majority in 1994, she mined the legendary Riffe's second prediction: "I'll never hand that gavel over to a Republican."

Through his peerless fund raising and political power plays, Riffe had kept the Republicans in the minority for 22 years. He was speaker for 20, an Ohio record. Surely, amateur hour was about to begin. This nice suburban lady who worked for the chamber of commerce would be outflanked by the foxy Democrats if indeed she wasn't devoured by her own caucus first. The 56-member Republican caucus was populated with veterans who had chafed under Rifle since the mid-'70s and noisy conservatives who believed they had a "Contract With Ohio."

Now, four years later, Davidson is still very much on her feet. In her own way, she leads the House to accomplishments similar to what Rifle did. In fact, Rifle gave her a grade of "A" before he died in 1997. Along with Republican Senate President Richard H. Finan...