What Ohio’s CD 2 May Portend

05 August 2005 |permalink | email article

“As Maine goes, so goes the country,” was a political cliche in the early third of the last century. The political state of the moment is Ohio, where the cliffhanger outcome of the 2004 presidential election was decided when George Bush beat John Kerry by just 118,000 votes.

This week, in the heavily Republican 2nd Congressional District in southwest Ohio, where no Democrat in decades had won or even managed to get 40 percent of the vote, the Republican candidate, Jean Schmidt, a former state representative, defeated the Democrat, Paul Hackett, a lawyer, a Marine major and veteran of the Iraq war, by just 3,500 votes.

It was the closest election in the conservative district in the Cincinnati area since 1974, which Bush won by 64 percent last year and where the former Representative Rob Portman, the new U.S. trade representative regularly rolled up margins of 70 percent of the vote. Hackett won four of the seven counties, losing Hamilton County, the largest, by just 1,400 votes.

Schmidt saw the outcome as another example of district voters sending another proven conservative to represent them in Congress and Republicans generally refused to see it as a bellwether of Bush’s leadership.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia did not agree, warning the party faithful that the public mood heading into next year’s mid-term elections appears to favor the Democrats. “It should serve as a wake-up call to Republicans.”

Strategists in both campaigns said GOP apathy, dissatisfaction with Bush and congressional Republicans, a GOP scandal in the state and Hackett’s energetic, anti-Iraq campaign rhetoric made a difference with many voters.

Independent political analyst Charlie Cook who specializes in congressional races said that “If I were a Republican in 49 other states, I would be a little concerned that a message of ‘Don’t elect a rubber stamp for President Bush’ seemed to resonate very well” in the district.

What’s fascinating to me is the failure of the mainstream media so far to discern the sudden desire of moderates, liberals and and labor within the Democratic Party to shift the national political dialogue from Washington into the Midwest heartland of Ohio so soon before the 2008 campaign.

Two weeks ago, the Democratic Leadership Council held a national meeting in Columbus, where two red-state governors who are testing the presidential waters - Tom Vilsack of Iowa, and Evan Bayh of Indiana - were well received. Their states gave 18 electoral votes to Bush last year.

Organized labor’s dissident Change to Win Coalition holds a founding national convention Sept. 27 in Cincinnati.

It’s ironic that since last Sunday 20 U.S. marines from Ohio would be killed in western Iraq in less than two days. Most of the dead were from the same reserve battalion of the 26th Marines based in a blue-collar suburb of Cleveland.

The deaths were mostly caused from a massive roadside bomb which destroyed a lightly armored amphibious assault vehicle whose sole function is to land marines on a beach and drive them a mile inland -not to conduct an anti-infiltration operation in the desert nearSyria’s border. Will someone please tell their parents why their sons were so badly equipped?

Hackett served seven months in Iraq and described the war as a mistake “that damaged our credibility throughout the world and squandered our political capital.” His message resonated in Ohio CD 2. Will it in the 2006 elections?

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