From MTV’s ‘True Life’ to the mayor of Cincinnati, the life that led John Cranley to

COLUMBUS, Ohio — In high school, John Cranley got a bit role in a play hoping to meet girls. Instead, it helped launch him on a path that led him to serve as mayor of Cincinnati and eventually seek the Democratic nomination for Ohio governor.

During Cranley’s sophomore year at St. Xavier High School, he took the role of a peasant in a co-ed production about Oscar Romero, an archbishop in El Salvador who was assassinated in 1980 and became a saint in 2018.

On the third day of the show, in November 1989, six Jesuit priests in El Salvador and their housekeeper and her teenage daughter were murdered by armed soldiers.

“I was pretending to be… shot and killed within hours of people who were literally shot and killed,” Cranley said in an interview. “And I felt a sense of mission that I had to do more than play-act on a stage. I had to try to build the kind of world that you know, these folks died for — ideals of treating people with respect and dignity, and you know, voting rights and equal pay and things of that nature.”

He added: “That didn’t go directly to (me) running for office. But that did send me searching for, how do I commit my life to public service?”

Cranley, now 47, has since spent most of his adult life in public service, both in elected office and through efforts such as fighting to free wrongfully convicted Ohioans.

Early years

Cranley grew up in Price Hill, a middle-class neighborhood on Cincinnati’s West Side. His father, an investment planner, fought in the Vietnam War; his mother worked as a librarian.

After high school, Cranley continued his Jesuit Catholic education at John Carroll University, earning a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1996. He also was elected student body president twice. “Going through that experience, I think, really is where I decided I would get into public office and run for office,” he said.

He then went to Harvard Law School, where he became friends with another law student from Cincinnati, Jessie Hill. Hill, now a law professor and associate dean at Case Western Reserve University, recalls having philosophical conversations and debates with Cranley about topics discussed in class.

“The one thing that is consistent with him is that he has always, as long as I’ve known him, cared about and believed that it was the responsibility of government and of politics to take care of the people who are most marginalized,” Hill said.

Hill particularly remembered that Cranley was one of the speakers at his law school graduation ceremony. “It was just a funny and self-deprecating speech,” she said. “He did a really great job with it.”

After law school, Cranley was accepted by — and graduated from — Harvard Divinity School. He was a finalist for a Rhodes scholarship to study theology at the University of Oxford, though he didn’t get the scholarship because he “had already sort of convinced myself that it would be helpful to do at least a year or longer of theological studies.”

Entering politics

While many of his law-school classmates went to work for law firms, Hamilton County Democrats recruited Cranley for a different job — running for Congress against Republican U.S. Rep. Steve Chabot, who was then serving his first term in office. At 26, Cranley was the second-youngest congressional candidate in the country in the 2000 election.

Cranley’s campaign got some national publicity from an unexpected place: MTV’s “True Life” series, which followed him as he worked to introduce himself to voters and get used to cold-calling just about everyone he knew for money. He had a picture of Democrat Robert F. Kennedy on his wall, though he added that, growing up, his favorite character was Alex P. Keaton, the preppy Republican on the sitcom “Family Ties.” He also related the same story he told cleveland.com about becoming inspired to public service by his high-school play – at times, using similar words and phrases.

Cranley told cleveland.com he “felt very, very deep anger” toward Chabot, as he felt “this guy who was being funded by all the wealthiest interests in the country was kicking poor people when they were down.”

That race “was, by far, the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to do,” Cranley said. “And you know, candidly, I thought I was gonna win.”

Chabot ended up winning with 53% of the vote. But Cranley made a good enough impression on local Democratic leaders that he was appointed to an open Cincinnati City Council seat a month after the 2000 general election.

A few months later, on April 7, 2001, 19-year-old Timothy Thomas was shot by a Cincinnati police officer. Two days later, chaos erupted at a City Council’s Law and Public Safety Committee meeting, chaired by Cranley, kicking off four days of rioting. Cranley worked to ease tensions; eventually, the city settled several pending lawsuits with a collaborative policing agreement, which included changes to police use-of-force policies and creating an independent civilian review process, among other things.

Serving on Cincinnati City Council is a part-time job. While Cranley at the time worked for Taft Stettinius & Hollister, Cincinnati’s most prestigious law firm, in 2002, he co-founded the Ohio Innocence Project, which works to help wrongfully convicted inmates get out of prison.

Cranley and Mark Godsey, who co-founded the project with Cranley, traveled to prisons and courtrooms around the state to help inmates and, in some cases, secure their exonerations.

“He was going into the prisons, working the cases, arguing them in court,” Godsey said in an interview. “He just had his sleeves rolled up. He was deep in the muck.”

Godsey, who previously helped prosecute politicians in New York, said he was “really jaded” about politics when he met Cranley.

“It totally, totally changed my perspective,” Godsey said of working with Cranley, “because he’s somebody who actually cared about social justice and was working his ass off and try to correct these injustices.”

Mayor Cranley

In 2009, Cranley left the city council due to term limits. But after four years in the private sector, he ran for and won the 2013 election for mayor, running on a platform that included cutting poverty and opposing Cincinnati’s streetcar system (then under construction).

Four years later, then-city council member Yvette Simpson finished ahead of Cranley in the mayoral primary, though Cranley easily won re-election in the general election.

As mayor, Cranley took action on many initiatives he’s now touting in his gubernatorial campaign — such as establishing a massive solar power farm and encouraging business development.

One study found that Cranley became the city’s most powerful mayor in nearly a century.

Cranley also attracted a lot of criticism. He got a reputation for being abrasive and thin-skinned. He frequently argued with city council members, and his relationship with some members got so bad that they refused his invitations to talk weekly.

Liberals also accused Cranley of being too friendly with business developers. In 2019, readers of CityBeat, a Cincinnati alt-weekly, voted Cranley “best conservative” in the city, and he was elected mayor with the help of Republican donors.

In addition, Cranley has attracted attention for shifting his views on abortion. While on Cincinnati City Council, Cranley voted for a resolution supporting a ban on so-called partial-birth abortions. In 2001 and 2004, he supported council proposals to exclude most abortion coverage from the city’s health insurance plans. An arbitrator ruled in 2004 that the ban violated a labor union contract.

Last year, Cranley told the Associated Press that while he still personally opposes abortion, he doesn’t think the government should restrict it because “it’s just not a good use of scarce resources.”

“I’m pro-choice. I’ve struggled as a matter of faith,” Cranley told the AP.

Hill, a nationally recognized legal advocate for abortion rights, said she believes Cranley’s “evolution of his views” on abortion is genuine.

“I think he is capable of changing his mind, and I think it’s sincere,” she said. “I don’t think it’s a political move or anything like that.”

Running for governor

During a campaign event on Cleveland’s East Side last week with running mate Teresa Fedor, Cranley acknowledged that he can be prickly and grating. But, just as with his Harvard graduation speech, Cranley was self-deprecating in a way the 30 or so attendees — mostly older and Black — seemed to enjoy.

Cranley spent much of his time discussing criminal-justice issues – highlighting his Ohio Innocence Project work, calling for more funding for public defenders and body cameras, and legalizing marijuana. But he also talked about Black business development.

“I won with Republicans all the time,” Cranley said. “If you study my history, I have a long history of getting things done in a bipartisan fashion.”

Jeff Johnson, a…