NATIONAL AFFAIRS: OHIO BURNING

Outside of Southern Ohio, Jean Schmidt is a national joke. A serial makeup abuser with Liberace eyes and a wrench-tightened bun of wire-black hair, the first-term Republican congresswoman unwittingly triggered her party's electoral death spiral when she stood up on the floor of the House of Representatives last year and called Democratic congressman and decorated war veteran John Murtha a "coward." H It was an incident that propelled "Mean Jean" to the title of reigning arch-dipshit of the American polity, the favored punching bag of the Washington press hyenas and the best thing that happened to late night since Bill Clinton's cigar. This is a woman, after all, who once angrily protested the cutting of a cake featuring a picture of her face, who got caught claiming endorsements she didn't actually receive and lying about her college degree. In a Congress full of provincial dumb-asses, Jean Schmidt is this generation's standout, a Gerry Ford with tits -- a half-bright hayseed who lumbers around Washington in garish black-and-red suits seemingly cut from some prison warden's sofa, racing to stick a foot in her mouth every time someone turns on a video camera.

That's what they think of her outside Ohio. Back in her district, however . . . well, back in her district, they largely think the same thing. Schmidt is the freak-show embodiment of everything wrong with the Republican Party today -- and some say that's the reason why her congressional district, the Ohio 2nd, just might turn Democratic this year for the first time since the Watergate era.

I spent a week in Schmidt's district right before the midterm elections to suss out this season's reigning media cliche: the idea, pushed heavily by Washington pundits and poll watchers, that the GOP base is going to abandon the party. Since the election debacle of 2004, when a controversial vote in Ohio gave the election to George Bush over John Kerry, the media have been obsessed with the state as a symbolic crucible of the red-blue struggle, portraying it as a hotly contested chunk of America's geographic center where the archetypal northern progressive is neighbor to the dip-chewing Republican redneck.

Nowhere is this image more pervasive than in Schmidt's district, a mostly suburban collection of seven counties that stretch east from Cincinnati along Ohio's southern border with Kentucky. This is deepest Bush country, resentful of the "liberal" media, God-fearing and cherishing privacy and family life. It's a place where almost everyone owns a gun, belongs to a church and drives an American car. It's also a place where Democrats simply do not win elections; in fact, the Ohio 2nd has been Republican for all but ten years since World War I. As recently as 2004, when Schmidt's popular predecessor, Rob Portman, ran for re-election against a local Democratic mayor named Charles Sanders, which he won by a whopping 221,785 votes to 87,156.

"There was no Democratic Party," says Chris Gaffney, the party's chairman in Warren County. "No presence at all."