At the end of a gloomy hallway, in the nearly empty Cincinnati office of Reform Ohio Now (RON), David Little waited grimly for someone, anyone, to show up on the Saturday before last week's election. Little, RON's Hamilton County field director, was slouched next to a pile of leaflets that urged voters to approve Issues 2, 3, 4, and 5, the laundry list of amendments to the state constitution that RON promised would cleanse Ohio's “culture of corruption.”
Eventually, a despondent volunteer filed into the office. She told Little she'd been making calls to voters from her home. “Every single person I've reached says they don't understand the issues,” she moaned. “Once I talk to them, everyone says they'll vote yes, but they seem really, really confused.”
Their confusion was understandable. The full text of the four amendments -- which aimed to limit campaign donations, improve election procedures and create more competitive districts -- ran seven pages. None of the four was easy to explain in a sound bite.
Nevertheless, good-government liberals like Little had once been optimistic about RON's chances. In theory, the climate for reform could hardly be better. Ohio's entire Republican leadership has been tarnished by “Coingate,” an ever-widening scandal that began in June with revelations that the state had lost millions investing in the rare coin collection of a GOP donor.
But with Rovean brazenness, RON's Republican opponents aired television commercials -- made by the same firm that did the notorious Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads -- that insisted that voting no was the only way to punish Ohio's corrupt politicians. And being Swift-boated wasn't the worst of it. Although RON's amendments said nothing about social issues, a printed piece attacking RON featured a picture of a pregnant mother cradling her belly and warned, “Ohio's family values are on the line.”
“Hot button issues are the last refuge of these scoundrels,” said Little in his lonely office. “Now the debate isn't about corporate power or corruption. It's about lesbians and stem cells.”
RON's good-government liberals had been dragged out into the unforgiving terrain of the right. And so last Tuesday the state's voters decisively rejected all four reform measures. None of them cracked 40 percent of the vote.
The defeat has to be seen as a setback for Ohio's Democrats, since RON, though billed as nonpartisan, drew the vast majority of its support from unions and other left-leaning groups. Tuesday's result should also give pause to national Democrats who assume that Bush administration scandals today will automatically translate into GOP losses in 2006.
At least in Ohio, the Republicans proved that even when mired in scandal they remain a more disciplined and effective party than the Democrats. By contrast, the suicidal tendencies of the Democrats were all too evident.
In Cleveland, Jimmy Dimora, chair of the Cuyahoga County Democrats, recorded a robocall that went to thousands of party members in the final days of the campaign advising them to vote against RON. While there may have been intellectually defensible reasons for Democrats to oppose the amendments, Dimora recorded the call for Ohio First, the all-but-Republican group that led the opposition to RON.
“These reforms were a necessary, albeit imperfect, first step in cleaning up Ohio,” said Chris Glaros, president of Blue 88, a group that is working to rebuild the Democrats' grassroots base in the state's 88 counties. Glaros predicted that “rank-and-file Democrats will not tolerate” defectors like Dimora. But that's no substitute for a party structure that can prevent such defections in the first place.
The Republicans rightly saw RON's call for campaign finance reform and legislative redistricting as a threat to their stranglehold on state government. (Despite the near-deadlock in Ohio's 2004 presidential vote, gerrymandered districts have given the GOP almost two-thirds of the seats in the General Assembly.) With Republican control in jeopardy, the party adopted and enforced a unified strategy to defeat RON. Republican Secretary of State Ken Blackwell had been intent on placing a tax-cap initiative on last week's ballot in order to build momentum for his gubernatorial run next year. But party leaders, fearing that the initiative would detract from efforts to beat RON, pressured Blackwell to put his initiative on hold.
The Republicans didn't just keep their troops in line, they turned them out in impressive numbers. A Columbus Dispatch poll published two days before the election predicted that two RON amendments would pass and that one was too close to call. Instead, all four measures lost in a landslide.
Ohio's religious right deserves much of the credit for routing the amendments. Russell Johnson, the founder of Ohio's Patriot Pastors movement, began focusing his fire on “Ruin Ohio Now” this summer, when many progressives were barely aware of it. Ministers from more than a thousand Ohio churches are active in the Patriot Pastors, according to Johnson, and in the weeks leading up to the election the group held meetings with 800 leaders from more than 300 Ohio congregations. On the Sunday before the vote, Johnson, like conservative ministers across the state, asked his congregation at Fairfield Christian Church to pray that Ohioans would spurn the “forces of the secular left” that were behind RON.
Many Democrats hear such rhetoric and dismiss Johnson as one more religious zealot bound to lead Republicans into the political wilderness. But in his office after Sunday services, the easy-going Johnson chuckled at his critics, who “see us all as Neanderthals marching in lockstep.” Wearing a slightly rumpled suit, Johnson seemed more a kindly professor than a crazed preacher.
He is likely to disappoint Democrats waiting for the GOP to self-destruct. Some expect Johnson to promote a nasty primary fight between hard-right Republican Bob McEwen, a former congressman who is a mainstay at Patriot Pastor events, and incumbent Senator Mike DeWine, who is up for re-election in 2006. But Johnson seems to be trying to engineer a cross-endorsement between DeWine and Blackwell, a move that would unite the party's moderate and conservative wings.
And Johnson isn't at all demoralized by Coingate and the many other scandals engulfing Ohio's Republicans. He notes that Governor Bob Taft, who was recently convicted of four misdemeanors for fundraising violations, opposed the anti–gay marriage initiative that the religious right championed in 2004. Good riddance, Johnson all but said. While he admitted that some Republicans have gone wobbly, he said the church will help the party “regain its spinal column” in 2006.
If Democrats in Ohio intend to stand taller on election day next year, they need to get serious about strengthening their own institutions. Perhaps the key problem with RON was that it never became much more than a stick to wave at Republicans. It was conceived back in December by well-meaning political scientists and well-connected political consultants who hoped to feed off the energy of the 2004 elections. But they failed to build a grassroots movement, relying mainly on paid canvassers rather than volunteer activists to collect the signatures that put RON on the ballot and targeting only 16 of Ohio's 88 counties in their final get-out-the-vote push.
Nevertheless, there are reasons for Democrats to be hopeful in 2006. The goo-goo liberalism of RON is giving way to a broad-based movement to raise the state's minimum wage. Ohio Senate Democratic leader C.J. Prentiss is leading the effort, and she had more than a thousand volunteers out on election day circulating petitions to get a minimum-wage initiative on next November's ballot. Unlike RON, the minimum-wage hike is easy to explain and will be much harder to attack.
In addition to the initiative, Democrats in 2006 should also have strong candidates in the top-ticket races for Ohio governor and U.S. Senate. There's always a chance that an ugly primary battle could break out, especially in the Senate race between Iraq War veteran Paul Hackett and U.S. Representative Sherrod Brown; sparring between the two camps has already begun. But if Ohio Democrats can keep their suicidal tendencies at bay, they just may be able to focus on the bread-and-butter concerns of ordinary Ohioans and win an election or two.
Jim McNeill, a writer based in Washington, D.C., reported on the special election this summer in Ohio's 2nd congressional district for the American Prospect. A former managing editor of In These Times, his work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Dissent and the Baffler.
