NATIONAL AFFAIRS: OHIO BURNING

That's why it's all the more stunning that Schmidt is now in a neck-and-neck race here with Democrat Victoria Wulsin, a local doctor who was heretofore little-known -- polls show the two virtually even. Which means the Ohio 2nd is the ultimate worst-case scenario for the Bush-era Republican leadership: a district that went from totally safe to absolutely up for grabs in less than two years.

The swift rise and fall of Jean Schmidt is a sort of Aesop's fable about the arrogance of the Bush/Rove/DeLay Republicans, an object lesson in what happens to a political party when it strays too far from its moorings. Like a line of Austro- Hungarian royals, the Bush Republicans ruled comfortably for a while but finally became corrupt and inbred, producing heirs too weak and stupid to rule. And it might be here in Ohio, a key battleground for red-blue politics, where the pitchforks will first crash through the castle gates.

The town of Mason, Ohio, exists on a kind of philosophical fault line of Republican politics. The heart of Warren County, perhaps the most conservative and religious of the district's seven counties, Mason is rapidly splitting into two separate and distinct political blocs: old and new.

Twenty years ago, this county was nothing but flat farmland, a few old houses here and there in a huge sea of soybean fields. But in the time since, it has become a New Economy boomtown, attracting companies like Procter & Gamble and the optics firm Luxottica, which in turn have drawn thousands of affluent new settlers to the area.

Towns like Mason are now half old-fashioned, Reagan-esque farmhouses and country parishes, and half a kind of idealized corporate Pleasantville, full of gleaming suburban residential developments, strip malls and huge new megachurches. You can walk down Mason-Montgomery Road in the center of town and literally see old-school fiscal conservatism on one side and the new suburban evangelical Pax Americana on the other -- the ghosts of Republicans past and future, hand in hand.

I'm standing alongside this vantage point late one afternoon before the election when a burly young man in a WearGuard jacket and boots, maybe a mechanic of some kind -- old Mason, rather than new Mason -- approaches from the far end of the downtown street. I walk up and ask him what he thinks of the candidates in the congressional race.

"The candidates?" he hisses. "The candidates?"

"Right," I say warily. "The candidates."

The man glares at me, then tilts his head back, hocks up a ball of something in his mouth, and power-loogeys a nearby stop sign. The gooey spitball lands with an audible pang, then clings slothfully to the cold metal.

"Anything else you want to talk about?" he asks.

"Um, no, I'm good," I say. "Candidates not a good topic, I hear you."

"Goddamn right they're a bad topic," he snaps, storming away.

There's a faint whiff of trouble in this remade Republican paradise, a kind of weird tension percolating below the surface. A former farmer complains that his once-quaint town now looks like Disneyland in the new sections. A plumber nursing a beer at a sports bar at lunchtime goes off about "all those soccer Mom bitches." A churchgoer confesses displeasure at his congregation's demand that an American flag be posted behind the pulpit ("That's a big no-no to me -- those things should be separate"). And when talking about politics, local conservatives complain about the rancor, the divisiveness, the partisan bitching, the negative campaigning, the shallowness of politics today.

This is why the geography of towns like Mason suggests a possible future fissure within the Republican Party. What began as grumbling between residents of different parts of town has become a tangible ballot phenomenon, as a growing number of traditional fiscal conservatives are breaking politically with the hard-core, extreme social conservatism of the new Bush-era evangelical Republicans across town.

In Warren County, that split is symbolized by the defection of Betty Davis, an old-school conservative who served as mayor of Mason for two years and a city council member for twenty-one. This election season, Davis has decided to back Rep. Ted Strickland, the Democratic candidate for governor, against Ken Blackwell, Ohio's notorious secretary of state who helped rig the 2004 election in Bush's favor.

"In Warren County there's a divide between what Republican values used to be and what they are now," says Davis. "Nowadays, the right-to-lifers control everything."

Davis is part of Republicans for Strickland, a group of 300 or so prominent Ohio Republicans across the state who have jumped ship. Another member of that group, prominent Columbus attorney Rocky Saxbe, explains that the state's new Republicans have left moderate conservatives with no place to go. He cited abortion, gay rights and an unwillingness to work with Democrats as three areas where moderates like himself are upset with Republicans like Blackwell and Schmidt. Local voters, he adds, are also increasingly pissed about the scorched-earth, negative style of campaigning favored by these new-school Republicans.

"It's a national phenomenon," says Saxbe. "A lot of those negative ads and fliers are coming primarily out of Washington. It's run by people who don't live in the district, who care only about winning."