Running scared in Ohio

GOP Sen. Mike DeWine is worried enough about Bush's low approval ratings that he blasted Rumsfeld in an interview. Will the Democrats be able to take control of the state that swung the presidency last time?

By Walter Shapiro

Read more: Politics, News, Walter Shapiro, Ohio, 2006 Elections

Photos by AP/Wide World

Mike DeWine and George W. Bush

April 24, 2006 | COLUMBUS, Ohio -- With his neatly combed brown hair, button-down white shirts, middle-aged slouch and soft-spoken manner, Mike DeWine has probably never inspired a TV booker for a Sunday morning talk show to shout excitedly, "We've got the senior Ohio Republican senator. He's hot!" As local Democratic political strategist Greg Haas puts it with grudging respect, "Mike DeWine is Ohio -- a little understated."

So when I sat down with DeWine last Tuesday in suburban Worthington to talk about his tricky reelection battle against antiwar Democratic Rep. Sherrod Brown, I was not expecting fireworks. But the sky rockets went off as soon as the topic turned to embattled Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

"Rumsfeld has made some very serious mistakes," DeWine declared, repeating his verdict for emphasis. "Very serious mistakes. I think history will judge him very harshly." Just to make sure that I was really hearing one of the harshest attacks yet on Rumsfeld by a Republican senator, I asked, "Which mistakes?" DeWine, who has never repented his 2002 vote for the Iraq war, gave me a what-planet-are-you-on look before responding, "Clearly not enough troops going in [to Iraq]. That was the biggest mistake. And a lot of mistakes would be covered under that."

DeWine boasts an independent streak: He endorsed John McCain for president in 2000; he joined with a bipartisan group of Senate centrists to work out a 2005 compromise on judicial filibusters; and, according to the National Journal's 2005 vote rankings, he is the ninth most moderate GOP senator. But the vehemence of DeWine's judgment-of-history indictment of Rumsfeld represents something new -- less a change of outlook than a sense of freedom in expressing it. What his comments symbolize are the lengths to which jittery GOP incumbents will go to distance themselves from George W. Bush.

Ohio Republicans are dealing with two fearsome four-letter words, Bush and (Bob) Taft. The scandal-scarred outgoing governor, Taft bequeaths his party a job-approval rating so low that pollsters may need to resort to negative numbers. During our conversation, DeWine referred to the difficult "climate" so often that I wondered if an iceberg was headed toward central Ohio.

"It is the perception of where the economy is," DeWine said. "It is what happened in the state house in Columbus. It's what happened on national issues. It's not one thing -- where the president is, where the governor is. It's all of these things."

Again in 2006, as in the late lamented presidential race, evenly divided Ohio is poised to take center stage in the red-state, blue-state color wars of contemporary politics. DeWine is one of the most vulnerable Republican Senate incumbents, although the six-months-from-Election-Day conventional wisdom gives him an edge. "I think DeWine will win, but it won't be by a big margin," says Ohio State University political scientist Herb Asher.

If the militantly conservative Ken Blackwell, an African-American, holds on to his current lead over attorney general Jim Petro in the May 2 GOP gubernatorial primary, it will focus national attention on the Republican Party's new strategy of deploying black candidates (football great Lynn Swann has the nomination in Pennsylvania) to win major statehouse races.

Blackwell, the current Ohio secretary of state, is a particular target of national Democratic fury, since he orchestrated the campaign to put an anti-gay-marriage amendment on the 2004 Ohio ballot (helping Bush win the state) and presided over the Election Day chaos that marred the presidential balloting (helping Bush win the state). If Blackwell is nipped at the wire in the primary, it will be because of state economic issues and ethical gaffes (he held stock as secretary of state in Diebold, the voting-machine maker, and in a drug company that markets the morning-after pill, an odd financial position for a fiery foe of abortion).

These two statewide races should be enough to answer the political question, Why-oh, why-oh Ohio? But journalists eager to impress their friends with dramatic accounts of reporting junkets to the Buckeye State also have the excuse that five Ohio House seats are in play. Three are held by incumbent Republicans Deborah Pryce, Steve Chabot and Bob Ney (the legislator most likely to be indicted in the Jack Abramoff scandal). The other two are being vacated by the Democrats who will be atop the statewide ticket in November -- Brown and gubernatorial candidate Ted Strickland.

It is Pryce's race -- in a district (the 15th) which incorporates a wide swath of Columbus (including the Ohio State campus) and affluent suburbs west of the city - that embodies the great imponderable of 2006: Will a political upheaval like the Gingrich revolution of 1994 give the Democrats the 15 seats they need to win back the House? For Pryce, who easily won her seventh term in Congress in 2004 with 60 percent of the vote, is beatable only if past performance does not guarantee future results.

Next page: Skirting the "old, fat, balding white guy" image; ducking out when Bush comes to town