From a Baltimore Sun blog:

Hillary Clinton has scored the most coveted Democratic endorsement from arguably the most important swing state in the nation: Gov. Ted Strickland of Ohio.

Three sources with knowledge of the announcement say Strickland, the first-year governor with sky-high approval ratings, will endorse Clinton today. The campaign has scheduled a noon conference call.

Strickland is a pro-gun former Methodist minister who broke a 16-year Republican hold on the governorship last year. He won huge swaths of normally red rural Ohio, which analysts call key for a Democrat seeking the state’s 20 crucial electoral votes.

Strickland’s support could provide a counterpunch to Clinton’s rivals’ claims that she is too polarizing to win a general election. A new Ohio Poll from the University of Cincinnati today pegs the governor’s approval rating at 69 percent, including 65 percent among Republicans and 68 percent among independents.

Strickland and Clinton go way back: They worked together on her ill-fated universal health care plan in the 1990s, when Clinton was First Lady and Strickland was a congressman from southern Ohio. Strickland has long called Clinton a personal friend.

And speaking of healthcare, here is what the MSM should ask of Ted Strickland: During the 2006 elections, you opposed Ken Blackwell’s health care plan (a copy of Mitt Romney’s health care plan) and ran TV ads saying it would cost the average Ohio household roughly $7500 $4800/year because of health insurance mandates. Since HillaryCare 2.0 is esentially a clone of Blackwell/Romneycare applied on a Federal level, do you still oppose health care mandates… and thus, oppose Hillary’s new healthcare plan?

Web versions of the reports of this endorsement in The Dispatch and The Plain Dealer don’t include this question… But it would make a great question to ask for their print editions tomorrow.

Update at 1:30pm- Here are some results from a quick LexisNexis search:

Associated Press, September 17, 2007:

The centerpiece of Clinton’s plan is the so-called “individual mandate,” requiring everyone to have health insurance — just as most states require drivers to purchase auto insurance. Rival John Edwards has also offered a plan that includes an individual mandate, while the proposal outlined by Barack Obama does not.

“It puts the consumer in the driver’s seat by offering more choices and lowering costs,” Neera Tanden, Clinton’s top policy adviser, told The Associated Press. “If you like the plan you have, you keep it. If you’re one of tens of millions of Americans without coverage or don’t like the coverage you have, you will have a choice of plans to pick from and you’ll get tax credits to help pay for it.”

Ad Watch from The Dispatch, Mark Niquette, August 30, 2006:

Strickland for Governor

Producer: MacWilliams, Robinson & Partners, Washington, D.C.

Ad Text: (The spot opens with a shot of Strickland reading papers behind a desk and includes footage of him greeting people as narrators speak.)

(Female voice-over): Ted Strickland has worked to cut taxes for Ohio families.

(Male voice-over): He’s voted to cut taxes for married couples -

(Female): And for parents with children -

(Male): And for tax breaks to help families send their kids to college.

(Female): And while Ted Strickland has a plan to control the cost of health care -

(Male, as an image of Republican gubernatorial nominee J. Kenneth Blackwell comes into view): Ken Blackwell would force everyone to buy health insurance. That could cost an average Ohio family without coverage over $4,800 a year.

(Female): We can’t afford much more of Ken Blackwell.

Analysis: Strickland began airing this 30-second spot statewide in response to Blackwell’s initial ad of the fall campaign that criticizes Strickland’s voting record on taxes.

The ad identifies the specific votes Strickland references, but Republicans say some votes were for final versions of bills that Strickland previously had voted against.

The second half of the ad, which focuses on the two candidates’ health-care plans, already has Blackwell threatening to file a complaint with the Ohio Elections Commission. It centers on Blackwell’s intention to require that all Ohioans carry some form of health insurance. Strickland uses an estimate by eHealthInsurance Services Inc. for the premium cost in 2005 to buy insurance for a family of four, but Blackwell argues that’s not what his plan contemplates.

Blackwell says that not everyone would be required to buy insurance under his plan (some would qualify for subsidized coverage, for example) and that his plan would lower premium costs for all. Strickland’s plan would not mandate coverage.

From From Elizabeth Auster in the Plain Dealer’s editorial page, Sept 3, 2006, “Health care promise must be kept”:

Every now and then, political candidates have fights that are healthy for the rest of us. Ohio’s two leading candidates for governor are having such a fight now.

It began last week when Democrat Ted Strickland released a television commercial claiming that his Republican opponent, Ken Blackwell, wants to force everyone in Ohio to buy health insurance, even though that could cost an average Ohio family without coverage more than $4,800 a year.

The Blackwell camp immediately branded Strickland’s ad false and deceptive, saying the cost estimate Strickland used has nothing to do with Blackwell’s plan. Instead of exaggerating the cost of the proposal, the Blackwell camp suggested, Strickland should have been offering an equally courageous plan to provide all Ohioans with health insurance.

The Strickland camp wasn’t buying that. Instead of saluting Blackwell’s plan, it praised its own proposal to help more uninsured Ohioans get health coverage on a voluntary, rather than mandatory, basis. In an interesting role reversal, the Strickland camp accused Blackwell, a longtime conservative, of trying to burden Ohioans with a costly government “mandate” - something conservatives usually abhor.

For all the arguing, Ohio voters have no way yet of assessing the precise costs and benefits of either man’s health insurance proposal because neither Strickland nor Blackwell has clearly spelled out how the plans would work.

From The Dayton Daily News, August 25, 2006, William Hershey and Anthony Gottschlich, “Blackwell unveils five-point health care plan for Ohio; Overhaul requires all Ohioans to have health insurance; Strickland criticizes proposal as costly for poor.”:

CLEVELAND - Republican gubernatorial candidate J. Kenneth Blackwell on Thursday unveiled a five-point plan for overhauling Ohio’s health care system that would require all Ohioans to have health insurance.

“This is bold, innovative, patient-centered and costeffective,” the Ohio secretary of state told reporters in the InterContinental Hotel, which is connected to the Cleveland Clinic.

The plan ignited a war of words with Blackwell’s Democratic opponent, U.S. Rep. Ted Strickland of Lisbon, who called the insurance requirement “irresponsible” because of the cost to lowincome Ohioans.

The requirement, patterned after a plan adopted this year in Massachusetts, is targeted at the estimated 1.3 million Ohioans now lacking coverage. It would link the uninsured with private health coverage.

Premiums would be paid by individuals, employers, Medicaid contributions or a combination of all three.

Blackwell said the income levels to qualify for Medicaid subsidies have not been set but would be on a sliding scale, with the highest subsidies for those with the lowest incomes.

He said he anticipated that Ohioans who have health care coverage through their employers would continue with that coverage.

Hospitals are not permitted to turn away the uninsured from emergency rooms and these costs are passed on to others in terms of higher premiums, Blackwell said.

Requiring all Ohioans to have health insurance would shift the focus from expensive ER treatment to less expensive preventative health care, he said.

Strickland said the insurance requirement would impose a $7 billion mandate on Ohioans over the next four years, based on the requirement that the more than 1 million uninsured Ohioans pay monthly premiums that Strickland put at $150.

Blackwell’s plan did not include the $150 figure and Strickland did not acknowledge the proposed subsidies in Blackwell’s plan.

Blackwell campaign policy director Tom Norris called Strickland’s numbers “chicken coop economics,” a reference to Strickland living briefly in a chicken coop as a boy when the family house burned down.