Ohio Attorney General David Pepper?

Many Hamilton County Democrats are hoping that, when the filing deadline for candidates rolls around next Thursday, former councilman and unsuccessful mayoral candidate David Pepper walks into the Hamilton County Board of Elections to file petitions as a Hamilton County commissioner candidate.

Ohio Democratic Party officials have other plans.

They have been quietly pushing Pepper to jump into the Ohio attorney general's race, even though there are already two announced candidates on the Democratic side.

One is Subodh Chandra, the former Cleveland law director, who has never run for statewide office before and who is a virtual unknown in the rest of Ohio, except among lawyers, who uniformly speak highly of him. But many in the party believe he won't be able to compete with a candidate as well-known and well-funded as Betty Montgomery.

The other announced candidate is State Sen. Marc Dann, the Youngstown Democrat who made a name for himself last year by holding the Taft administration's feet to the fire over Bureau of Workers Compensation mess and the governor's own indiscretions.

Ever since, the leadership of the Ohio Republican Party has been salivating over the possibility of the Democrats nominating Dann.

State GOP chairman Bob Bennett has fired off several salvos in Dann's direction. Bennett argues that a lawyer who has been reprimanded by the Ohio Supreme Court for misconduct and who had to go back and amend his ethics report to report a gift from a lobbyist (after beating Gov. Bob Taft over the head for the same thing) is probably not a good candidate to campaign on a platform of cleaning up state government.

Many Democrats agree, and the state party has apparently landed on Pepper, who lost the Cincinnati mayor's race to Mark Mallory last fall. They see him as a squeaky-clean candidate with a good name who can raise great boatloads of money, thus turning the race against Montgomery into a competitive contest.

Asked if he is considering the possibility of running for attorney general, Pepper offered a response that included neither the word "yes'' nor the word "no.''

"Until I decide if I am going to run for anything at all, I'm not going to say anything about it,'' Pepper said Wednesday afternoon.