A Taft too far: the Ohio GOP is in shambles--can Blackwell save it?

OBSESSIVE concern for tennis schedules isn't usually regarded as one of Jimmy Carter's virtues, but a similar attention to detail might have saved the Ohio GOP a lot of grief: On August 18, Republican governor Bob Taft pleaded no contest to four misdemeanor counts of failing to report golf outings and a variety of other gifts on his financial-disclosure forms. He became Ohio's first sitting governor to be convicted of a criminal charge. There's now a chance he'll be stripped of his law license, just as Bill Clinton was following his admission of false testimony. Democrats in Columbus even began to mention that other word associated with Slick Willie--impeachment--but then realized that a scandal-plagued Taft is more useful to them than no Taft at all.

That's because Democrats finally stand a good chance of breaking the Republicans' lock on this swing state. Taft's indiscretions are a key reason for the Democrats' improved odds, but hardly the only one. More important is the Ohio GOP's bizarre determination to refashion itself as a party of higher taxes and bigger government. Since the Republican sweep of 1994, no Democrat has held any of Ohio's statewide offices. The GOP also dominates the legislature. Democrats have been so desperate to find candidates that they've even flirted with the idea of drafting talk-show buffoon Jerry Springer. Republicans, however, have used their period of uninterrupted rule to govern as anything but the fiscal conservatives most voters expect them to be. When they came to power, Ohio's tax burden ranked 24th among the states. Today, it has risen to 7th. At the same time, spending has grown faster in Ohio than in any other state.

In next year's race for governor, it will be difficult for Republicans to stick to the formula that has worked so well for them in recent years: slapping the label of tax-and-spend liberalism on Democrats. That will be especially true if they nominate yet another wobbly moderate for the state's top job. "The environment out here is not very good for Republicans," says David Hansen of the Buckeye Institute, a conservative think tank in Columbus. In next year's primary, however, there's a real possibility that GOP voters will chart a new course. Will their second thoughts come too late to make a difference?

THE NEW FLORIDA

Ohio is the new Florida. It was the site of intense politicking before last year's presidential election, as well as a phony voting controversy afterward. No state will have more political attention heaped upon it between now and 2008. Yet if the 2006 races go well for Democrats, Republicans could find themselves battling for Ohio in 2008 without the home-field advantage they've come to enjoy in recent years. A shift from red to blue in Ohio could prove deadly--it would have been enough to secure an Electoral College majority for John Kerry last November, and might provide the margin of victory next time as well.

An early sign of GOP trouble arrived on August 2, when Republican Jean Schmidt narrowly defeated Democrat Paul Hackett in a special election to replace Rep. Rob Portman, who joined the Bush administration as trade representative earlier this year. The Cincinnati-area district is solidly Republican, but Schmidt drew only 52 percent of the vote. Democrats in Washington celebrated Hackett's losing performance as a stunning rebuke of the president and a sign of greater things to come.

But this analysis is at best only half right. Greater things may yet come for Democrats, but Schmidt's narrow margin of victory was more about Taft than about Bush. A week before the election, one GOP-sponsored poll showed the president holding a 62 percent approval rating in the district. Hackett, a member of the Marine Reserves who saw combat in Iraq, criticized Bush but also ran ads of the president praising military veterans. If Hackett campaigned against anybody, it was Governor Taft. "We just tied everything to Taft," says Gabrielle Williamson, communications director of Ohio's Democratic party.

Expect to see much more of this next year. Taft may be America's least popular governor. His approval rating took a nosedive following his reelection in 2002 and his subsequent willingness to close a budget gap by hiking taxes. By last April, only 34 percent of Ohioans gave him a thumbs-up in a University of Cincinnati poll--the lowest figure for a sitting governor in more than two decades. And this was before the ethics violations became public. Since then, Taft's favorability rating has dropped to 15 percent, according to a recent Cleveland Plain Dealer survey. One in three people thinks he should resign--and that's just among Republicans.

Taft's position could erode further still. His conviction in August was part of a larger probe into the alleged mishandling of a workers' compensation fund. The state appears to have lost millions by making a curious investment in rare coins at the behest of a Taft golf partner and fundraiser, Thomas Noe, who also happens to be a rare-coin dealer. As the investigation grinds on, new revelations may lend credibility to what every message-disciplined Democrat in Ohio is now calling the GOP's "culture of corruption." In all likelihood, Democrats will nominate their strongest candidate for governor in years, either Columbus mayor Michael Coleman or Rep. Ted Strickland.

These developments have dispirited no group of voters more than Ohio's conservatives. Their frustration is exacerbated by Ohio's two GOP senators, Mike DeWine and George Voinovich, who have voted like liberals on Arctic oil drilling (opposed by DeWine) and gun control (favored by both). Democratic congressman Tim Ryan recently said he won't challenge DeWine next year, even though an endorsement from the National Rifle Association may have been in the offing. "Ryan's record is perfect and DeWine's is perfectly awful," says one NRA source. Hackett, another possible contender against DeWine, lacks Ryan's voting record but took pro-gun positions during the recent special election. DeWine certainly looks vulnerable: In a SurveyUSA poll taken in August, 42 percent of Ohio voters approved of his job performance and 43 percent disapproved.

Voinovich was one of only three senators to have a higher negative rating (44 percent) than DeWine. He has made his mark in the Senate by being a constant headache for the Bush administration, repeatedly fighting tax cuts and last year becoming one of only two Republican senators to vote against a free-trade pact with Australia. More recently, in an act of baffling stubbornness, he almost single-handedly prevented John Bolton from winning Senate confirmation as ambassador to the United Nations, forcing Bush to give his nominee a recess appointment.

It's enough to make a conservative cry--and tears might very well be shed if Ohio Republicans nominate a gubernatorial candidate from their usual uninspiring mold. Two such candidates are state auditor Betty Montgomery and attorney general Jim Petro, both running hard to take over where Taft presumably will leave off. Conservatives should not feel reassured about either one. Montgomery is widely liked and has run well in several statewide contests, but she's also an abortion-rights advocate who wins plaudits from NARAL. Petro once stood in NARAL's good graces as well--the group backed him for election in 1998--but he has since renounced his pro-choice loyalties. He has not experienced an across-the-board conversion to conservatism, however: Last year, he opposed a state constitutional amendment that banned gay marriage. (His opposition was shared by Taft, DeWine, and Voinovich, but not Montgomery, who tepidly supported the measure.)

Sixty-two percent of Ohioans--and nearly three in four Ohio Republicans--supported the amendment, and its presence on the ballot arguably drove up the turnout of Evangelical voters, who helped put Bush over the top in Ohio. It never would have seen the light of day but for the efforts of Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio's secretary of state. He is the GOP's third candidate for governor--and the only genuine conservative in the field.

WISE BEAR

The 57-year-old Blackwell is a big bear of a man, standing six-foot-five and weighing about 250 pounds. "I used to have a lot less body fat," he says. Blackwell looks like he could be a retired football player, which he sort of is: He played for Xavier University and once attended training camp with the Dallas Cowboys. Sports runs deep in his family. His grandfather was in baseball's Negro Leagues, and his great uncle, William DeHart Hubbard, was a track-and-field star who became the first black athlete to win an Olympic gold medal in an individual event (for the long jump, in 1924).

Blackwell, who wears glasses, a mustache, and is prone to bursts of hearty laughter, took up politics in the 1970s. He was elected to the Cincinnati city council and later became mayor. Although he won office as a member of a third party in Cincinnati, Blackwell joined the GOP in the early 1980s. He served as a housing undersecretary in the first Bush administration, lost a race for Congress in 1990, and was appointed Ohio's state treasurer in 1993. He won election to that office the next year, and was persuaded not to challenge Taft for the governorship in 1998. Instead, he ran successfully for secretary of state.

From that perch, however, he has wound up challenging Taft again and again, especially on taxes. Most noteworthy, perhaps, was his opposition to a one-penny sales-tax increase that Taft accepted two years ago. At the time, Taft insisted that it would be a "temporary" increase. In the state's latest budget, however, half the increase was repealed and half was made permanent. Blackwell opposed both halves from the start, and even began a campaign to eliminate the hike by ballot initiative. "Too many Republicans campaign like Ronald Reagan and then govern like Dick Celeste," says Blackwell, referring to Ohio's last Democratic governor. "I couldn't let them get away with the biggest tax increase in the state's history."

For a variety of reasons, his initiative to repeal the sales-tax hike didn't make the ballot--but an even more ambitious proposal, a constitutional amendment to limit the growth of state government, will almost certainly go before voters next year. "This issue is going to be the centerpiece of my gubernatorial campaign," says Blackwell. If approved, the Tax Expenditure Limitation would prevent Ohio's government from growing faster than 3.5 percent, or the combined rate of inflation and population growth, in any single year. Blackwell is not only the idea's prime mover, but also the only major officeholder in the state to support it. "Jim Petro is Taft-like and Betty Montgomery is Taft-lite," says Blackwell. "Neither one of them has seen a tax cut they could support or a tax increase they could reject."

Because of his stance on taxes and other issues, Blackwell currently leads his opponents for the GOP nomination. A Fred Steeper poll of Republican primary voters, paid for by Blackwell, showed 36 percent of those polled supporting the secretary of state, compared with 21 percent for Montgomery and 20 percent for Petro. The other candidates have seen similar numbers in their own research, but counter that Blackwell wouldn't perform well in a general election. "He's far too conservative for Ohio's moderates," says a campaign aide for one of Blackwell's GOP rivals. There has been concern that Blackwell can't raise enough funds, especially among business leaders who traditionally support Republicans but fought last year's marriage amendment on the grounds that it might dissuade gays from taking jobs in the state. Although Blackwell trails both Montgomery and Petro in overall fundraising, he has raised more money than either of them so far this year.

He also promises to become a national spokesman for the conservative movement. The Chicago Tribune has called Blackwell "the anti-Obama," in reference to Democratic senator Barack Obama of Illinois, who is sensationally popular among liberals. Steve Forbes, Jack Kemp, and Phyllis Schlafly already support Blackwell. The Club for Growth, which has played a crucial role in several federal elections, may also weigh in for him. "Because Ohio is politically dysfunctional, and Ken Blackwell is such a compelling candidate, we are seriously considering making an exception to our policy of not getting involved in state races," says Club for Growth president Pat Toomey. Some of the Club's favorite politicians have also endorsed Blackwell, including former Democratic senator Zell Miller of Georgia and Republican governors Rick Perry of Texas and Mark Sanford of South Carolina.

Blackwell is clearly the nominee the Democrats fear most. If he weren't, the Ohio Democratic party would not recently have draped a "Stop Ken Blackwell!" banner across the top of its website. In the wake of George W. Bush's reelection, Democrats tried to demonize Blackwell for a supposed election scandal just as other Democrats had lambasted Florida's Katherine Harris four years earlier. But the attempt went nowhere--in part because the vote in Ohio wasn't nearly as close as it had been in Florida, but also because Blackwell couldn't plausibly be caricatured as an establishment yes man. Not only is he out of favor with the Taft crowd in Columbus, he also managed to irritate the Bush-Cheney campaign by refusing to certify Ralph Nader for the Ohio ballot-an act that almost certainly bolstered Kerry's chances on Election Day. "Nader wasn't on the ballot because he didn't deserve to be on the ballot," says Blackwell. "I wasn't going to bend the rules for anybody."

Although some liberals still cling to the fantasy that Ohio Republicans stole the election for Bush--New York University professor Mark Crispin Miller tries to make that case in his forthcoming book Fooled Again--they are concerned about Blackwell not because of what he did as secretary of state but because of what he might do if he captures the GOP nomination for governor. For one thing, he promises to fire up Ohio conservatives like no other candidate can. He also threatens the Democrats' own base. Among black voters, Blackwell consistently outperforms other Republicans. What's more, his presence on the GOP ticket may help explain, at least in part, why Bush did better among Ohio blacks than he did among blacks in other states last year. Blackwell probably won't win a majority of them next year, but he could bite deeply into a bloc the Democrats must carry overwhelmingly in order to win.

If Blackwell prevails, it will be one of the GOP's brightest accomplishments in 2006, no matter what else happens. The state party will rise from its sickbed, and the national party may begin to wonder whether it should call him Mr. Governor--or think of him, possibly, as Mr. Vice President.