NATIONAL AFFAIRS: OHIO BURNING

The irony of a defection like Saxbe's is striking. Republicans surged to preeminence in the early Nineties, campaigning against Washington politics. Now the party itself is being perceived as a troublemaking, cynical carpetbagger by some of its own voters. And it's not only moderates like Davis and Saxbe who feel that way. In the case of Ohio's 2nd, even some hard right-wingers have begun to perceive the implied insult of their situation: You have to really not give the slightest fuck about what people think to offer Jean Schmidt as a candidate.

"She's a puppet for the national party," says Nate Noy, who is running against Schmidt as a right-leaning write-in candidate. "The Constitution says you're supposed to represent your district, not your party. But she represents the party all the way, and she's forgotten about the district."

Noy is a classic Reagan-era conservative and a passionate free-market ideologue, the kind of guy who sounds like he's made a call or two to Rush over the years. His heavyset face flushes dark red at the very sound of Schmidt's name. He decided to run for office when Schmidt showed her willingness to support a Republican plan to open a spent nuclear-waste facility in his hometown of Piketon. But what really got Noy was the Murtha incident -- not so much what Schmidt said, but how she said it.

To recap, Schmidt stood up on the floor of the House in support of a Republican resolution that sought to expose Murtha's demands for troop withdrawals from Iraq as "out of the mainstream." By way of showing support, Schmidt claimed she had gotten a call from Danny Bubp, an Ohio state legislator and former Marine, asking her to condemn Murtha.

"If you watch the video of her speech that day," Noy says, "you can see that she's looking down at her notes as she talks. She's saying, 'He [Bubp] also asked me to send . . . uh . . . Congressman Murtha a message: that cowards cut and run.' "

Noy pauses and shakes his head. "You understand? '. . . uh. . . Congressman Murtha.' She had to look at her notes to remember the name. And Bubp, of course, denied ever naming Murtha in the call. Clearly, someone in the party told her to do it. It's disgraceful."

Later that year, Schmidt -- as dependable an airhead as American politics has ever seen -- characteristically exacerbated the Murtha scandal. She claimed giddily that she had received fan mail after the incident. "I have! It's amazing," she gushed. "There have been three marriage proposals and lots of dates. They think I'm a hottie." She went on: "Of course, I denied all of them. Have you met my husband and know how cute he is? . . . Well, he's a hottie, come on!"

There were really two kinds of Republicanism in the Bush years. There was the Bush/Rove/DeLay revolution, a brilliant perpetual plan for winning elections, raising money and concentrating power. Even if they were never verbalized, everyone implicitly understood the revolution's prime directives: support the president blindly, demonize the opposition and never break ranks. It wasn't hard to be this kind of Republican. If you could read at a fourth-grade level, pray to Jesus and exhibit genuine terror before photos of men holding hands, you could ride the revolution all the way to Washington with a ten-point cushion. There was room for even the very dumbest in this revolution, and Jean Schmidt was the very dumbest.

The other Republicanism was the old-school conservatism that supposedly provided the revolution's ideological underpinnings. But somewhere along the line, the Bush revolutionaries broke free of those principles and sailed off into the unknown.

The lesson of this election season is that the loyal apparatchiks who took off with Bush on that journey are all paying for it now. And the defining issue, of course, remains the Iraq War -- Bush's great end run around small government and fiscal restraint. The longer the war goes on, the more it becomes a matter of principle not just to the left but to the conservative wing of Bush's own party.

"Everyone is struggling with the enormous cost of this war," says Saxbe.

Gianluca Bruno, a young Adventist pastor who recently moved to Mason, agrees. "Even the most conservative people I talk to are saying that maybe it's not a good thing that we went to war," he says.

Schmidt, meanwhile, returned to her district this campaign season in a state of blissful ignorance about her constituency's growing disenchantment with the war. Her cluelessness wasn't really all that surprising, given the way she got elected in the first place: She stumbled face-first into the House of Representatives like a drunken wino, conducting one of the weakest campaigns for national office in American history, yet winning purely on the strength of national party momentum and district demographics.

Schmidt entered Congress in 2005 after her predecessor, the immensely popular Rob Portman, left his seat to become Bush's U.S. trade representative. Bush's nomination of Portman, a likable and low-key former associate counsel to the first President Bush, who had held his seat with little or no opposition since 1993, forced Ohio's 2nd District to hold a special election.

In a race that turned out to be a preview of things to come, Schmidt ran into a surprising challenge from Paul Hackett, an Iraq War veteran who pounded Schmidt as a shill for Bush's war policies. Hackett was as good as it could get for southern-Ohio Democrats, an individual of rare personal charisma and military chops in a support-the-troops district. Schmidt -- a political neophyte with virtually no record of political accomplishment -- fell back on the same old electoral cocktail that Republicans have relied on throughout the Bush years: abortion, guns, gay marriage and putting the Ten Commandments in public schools. This time, however, it was barely enough. Schmidt won by just four points, suffering huge defections in traditional Republican strongholds: Warren County, for instance, delivered forty-two percent to Hackett, after giving just twenty-six percent to John Kerry.

Once in Washington, Schmidt promptly proved her loyalty to the party by taking a shot at Murtha. Her attack was widely perceived as a congressional initiation rite, the Hill version of a young Crip proving his gangsta by capping an old lady in a parking lot. She then spent the next year making an ass of herself before returning to the district for her re-coronation. But things had changed in Ohio while she was gone.