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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."
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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."
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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.
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In a bizarre letter sent to her constituents this past August, Schmidt reinforced her hard-earned reputation as the most stay-the-course of all the stay-the-course Republicans. Written in her inimitable kinder-prose ("On every continent in every corner of the planet you will find people that [sic] know of the United States of America"), the letter describes the situation in Iraq from the vantage point of a Spanish conquistador making a field study of his conquered savages:
"The Iraqi's perception is that we are all powerful," Schmidt wrote. "We watch them from space with technology they cannot even imagine. He has no idea how large the problem is but he knows we can do anything. He was angry. Eventually his air conditioning began running and his anger cooled."
That is the Bush wing of Republicanism in a nutshell -- a candidate who thinks the chaos in Iraq can literally be cooled down with air conditioning!
On the campaign trail again, Schmidt is unrepentant, rolling out a patented Rovian smear job that is almost embarrassing for its mind-numbing repetition. Her latest TV ad accuses her opponent, an ostentatiously nice doctor with an Albert Schweitzer-esque profile as a founder of a relief agency and caregiver to African AIDS orphans, of being a fag hag.
"What will Victoria Wulsin think of next?" the Schmidt ad cheerily asks. An image of two tuxedo-clad men on a wedding cake appears onscreen. "How about gay marriage?"
The ad followed mass mailings of a flier -- based, it appears, on generic campaign materials put out by the national party -- that accuses Wulsin of being soft on illegal immigrants. It also came after Schmidt was caught putting her name to a newspaper editorial about Medicare that turned out to be the text of a national party brochure, used in almost identical form in a press release issued by fellow Ohio Republican Congresswoman Deborah Pryce. The same old bullshit, in other words -- queers, Mexicans, abortions and a by-the-numbers campaign smear kit sent by the pinheads in Washington.
Schmidt apparently did not expect to have to break a sweat in this election. Earlier this fall, when Wulsin went to Schmidt's campaign office to present her with a written challenge to a debate, she found the office closed. A sign taped to the door read GONE TO LUNCH.
Four days later, when Wulsin returned, she found the same sign, along with her written debate challenge, still taped to the door. It was only later, when the poll numbers came out, that Schmidt started campaigning in earnest. She was literally GONE TO LUNCH too long.