2nd Congressional District (OH) GOP Primary: Winners and Losers, Part 2

Welcome Wizbang Trackback Carnival Readers: The 2nd District Congressional Primary had some important national lessons for the GOP, especially its “values” leaders, that are being ignored at the party’s peril. Read on, and you’ll see what I mean. If you want to see more on the primary, go to the Election Day and Aftermath and/or Post-a-Rama collections. Enjoy.
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Continuing to digest the meaning of the 2nd District Primary Results, who gained, and who lost (Part 1 is here):

(click “more,” if necessary, to read about the second batch)

Losers: James Dobson, Don Wildmon, and the out-of-town “values” gurus: Your prayers today should be that the rest of the country didn’t somehow get a whiff of how you guys completely and utterly embarrassed yourselves and, by extension, your nationwide political efforts, by backing Bob McEwen. Did you vet this guy at all? With no evidence that you did even the tiniest bit of research into 9 of the other 10 competing candidates, you decided the McEwen was the best guy in a field of 11 simply because you didn’t like the 10th (DeWine), who appeared to be the frontrunner. Advice: Let local conservative voters do the vetting in Republican primaries, OK? Then, in a general election, if the conservative has values you support and is up against someone whose values are clearly different from yours, you might consider stepping in–carefully (that means hold the thunder and lightning).

Loser: Paul Weyrich. Though he could be lumped into the Dobson-Wildmon group, he deserves a special mention because despite his past vocal support for term limits, he was perfectly fine with the idea that a guy (McEwen) rejected by the voters twice 12 years ago could have waltzed into the House on August 3 with 12 years of seniority, and that this was somehow a good thing.

Losers: Council for National Policy (CNP), the apparent origin of the idea that having fellow member Bob McEwen hijack the 2nd District would be a good idea. Folks, you don’t get to tamper with local elections around here just to help out a guy who happens to be in your hush-hush insiders’ club (at least not if BizzyBlog can help it). To be clear, the link is to a compiled members’ list as of 1998 by a left-wing site, as it is reported that CNP does not publish a members’ list and attempts [without much success] to keep its meetings and other activities hidden from view. Note that outside endorsers Dobson, Kemp, Meese, Perkins, and Wildmon are members, as is Cincinnati-area endorser John Willke. A look at the list of other CNP members makes for interesting reading. Just a few: Delay, Devos (yes, two of the Amway-Quixtar Devoses), Falwell, Robertson.

Loser: Club for Growth. Did I hear correctly that they blew over 100 grand on the anti-Schmidt ads? Considering the result, it was a less-than-perfect display of fiscal prudence, doncha think? Your first hit on Schmidt displayed your ignorance by lumping McEwen in with Brinkman and DeWine as “proven” fiscal conservatives, even though McEwen has been out of office for 12 years. As noted in a previous post, the anti-Schmidt ad that ran in the last few days before the election struck me as heavy-handed and condescending, and made me instinctively want to defend the local person against the outside invader.

Losers: Local “values” guy Phil Burress and Citizens for Community Values. You do great work in a lot of areas, but this time you exposed yourselves as political opportunists who don’t respect hard-working local candidates, and who don’t trust local conservative voters. I suspect both sets of locals will remember.

Winner: Clermont County Republicans. The grass-roots work for Schmidt in Clermont County totally outdid that of the top-down pro-DeWine forces in Hamilton County and held off the McEwen challenge in the remaining counties. I sense a disturbance in the local GOP “power force,” and I believe it is moving eastward.

Loser: Congressman John Boehner, a guy who prides himself in NOT getting pork for his district, who in the last week of the primary endorsed a guy (McEwen) famed for his “pork for me but not for thee” outlook when he served. Zheesh.

Loser: Bob McEwen (if he really believes what I see on his web site today, and wasn’t just humoring his supporters)–

McEwen then told the cheering crowd that this would not be his last campaign, and went on to say that public service was his calling.

Memo to Bob: Follow this suggestion from Tom Petty.
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UPDATE: Michael Meckler gets in a nice rip on the outsiders:

And herein lies a warning message to national groups that claim to speak for conservatives (such as Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, who was a major promoter of McEwen’s candidacy): “values” voters believe politicians must uphold ethical standards in their personal and professional lives; voting the right way on selected issues is not enough if those votes are merely hypocritical pandering to cover up sleazy personal enrichment through political power.

UPDATE 2: The learning process for the outside “values” people is clearly going to be slow to nil. Here’s McEwen endorser and Family Research Council President Tony Perkins today in the Christian Science Monitor (HT Ohio 2nd Blog; bold is mine):

While taking the long view on abortion, Perkins took partial credit for a short-term political victory. In a congressional primary in Ohio Tuesday, Pat DeWine took fourth place after having been the favorite. He is the son of Sen. Mike DeWine of Ohio, who supported a compromise - opposed by the Council - on judicial nominees.

“We were in the state of Ohio simply bringing attention to what the elder DeWine did on the compromise,” Perkins said. “I don’t know that I would call it a victory…. It sends a signal. It is a wake-up call for those who think that they can compromise in this city and go home and campaign and not have repercussions.” Local observers say the Christian right was a factor in Pat DeWine’s defeat, but so were reports of his marital problems.

Uh, Mr. Perkins: You were here to install “your guy” Bob McEwen first and foremost because you didn’t trust us to do the “right thing” by your definition, and you had your hat handed to you. Stop pretending otherwise. And a memo to Christian Science Monitor: Stop merely taking dictation and do some real reporting.

UPDATE 3: Mr. Perkins, Dr. Dobson, and Don Wildmon all were sent e-mails tonight by BizzyBlog similar to the following requesting personal responses:

I agree strongly with the values and goals of your organization, which makes sending this e-mail to you difficult but necessary.

I am a GOP voter in the Second Congressional District in Ohio. I want to tell you a few things about how foolish and potentially harmful your involvement in the primary just held has been, specifically your personal endorsement of Bob McEwen:
- Your endorsement of a gentlemen who has spent almost no meaningful time in the district in the past 12 years was a direct slap in the face of several fine conservative candidates, including Jean Schmidt, the strongly vocal prolife woman who won the GOP nod, and, frankly, a poor moral choice.
- You cannot possibly have made an informed endorsement, as you do not know the other candidates, and therefore could not have concluded that Mr. McEwen was the best person for the job. It is your moral responsibility to do this any time you endorse a candidate, and you did not do that.
- To make matters worse, you seem to have ignored at least three significant problems with McEwen’s candidacy, and perhaps his character, over and above his lack of long-time residency:
— His involvement with the House Bank Scandal 12 years ago, and his rejection (twice) by voters because of it.
— His employment by a lobbying firm in Washington whose business is primarily if not entirely with foreign governments and entities trying to gain special favors with Congress.
— His (undisclosed to voters until I personally disclosed it) involvement with Amway Quixtar (AQ) as a $10,000-per-appearance speechmaker and seller of motivational tapes to AQ distributors who many believe may be victims of a pyramid-like scam.

Mr. Perkins told the Christian Science Monitor in a post-election article they wrote that your main goal was to defeat one particular candidate. That is nonsense–all of you (Perkins, Dr. Dobson, Don Wildmon, Paul Weyrich, Ed Meese, Jack Kemp, and others) were humiliated on Tuesday, as Bob McEwen finished second by 2700 votes to a candidate you didn’t trust to beat the person (Pat DeWine) you apparently didn’t want to win no matter what.

I suggest that FOF, FRC, AFA, and all of the generally noble values organizations that inexplicably and immorally tampered with this race should in the future trust local conservative voters to select their own local conservative candidates instead of foisting candidates on people just because they happen to be fellow members of the Council for National Policy. You have the potential to do a great deal more harm than any good you might think you will accomplish, and I hope you will reconsider such future efforts. In this area, I will stay alert and at the ready to fight any future attempts at tampering.

Regards,
Tom Blumer
Mason, OH
www.bizzyblog.com
biz@bizzyblog.com

UPDATE 4, June 19: A newspaper 230 miles away (Cleveland Plain Dealer) notices what the local newspapers can’t, or won’t:

The epitome of chutzpah is losing an election - and then proclaiming you won.

Yet that’s pretty much what Christian-right leaders did the other day after Sen. Mike DeWine was denied a chance to have a political dynasty in Washington.

…. The religious right wanted them all. They called Mike DeWine a sellout. They also used it against his son, making him not only a proxy for his father but also a straw man to show their might in Ohio politics. The race in Ohio’s 2nd Congressional District, after all, was merely a prelude to next year’s governor’s race.

So when Pat DeWine lost, the movement won - right?

Wrong.

Never mind that Perkins called it “a wake-up call for those who think they can compromise in this city [Washington] and go home to campaign and not have repercussions,” according to the political newspaper Roll Call.

There’s one problem: McEwen also lost.

UPDATE 5, June 20: Meckler wrote a great column in June 20’s Columbus Dispatch (link requires paid subscription) called “Conservatives’ clout wasn’t the key to Pat DeWine’s GOP primary loss” that agrees with BizzyBlog’s take on the raced (making him a genius, of course) and notes BizzyBlog’s involvement (thanks):

By any objective analysis, McEwen was a flawed candidate and a tough sell to 2nd District voters. Yet the insistence with which national conservative organization pushed McEwen ended up generating resentment by Ohio conservatives against those groups. Tom Blumer, a certified public accountant from Mason, regularly posted messages on his weblog, BizzyBlog, that documented his increasing anger with these national organizations. Blumer wrote on the day of the election, “If the supposed wise men at the national shrines of conservatism and ‘moral values’ can bless and drop a seriously flawed candidate in on top of this district, and take him over the top with the sheer force of their media muscle, star power and celebrity, they can, and will, try it elsewhere.”

Blumer clearly was not alone in his indignation. Radio ads in the final week of the campaign directed against Schmidt by the Washington-based anti-tax group Club for Growth (which did not exclusively endorse McEwen, though many observers suspected Mc-Ewen was meant to be the main beneficiary) apparently backfired, as conservative voters became increasingly disgusted with what they viewed as outside interference.

National conservative groups lost a lot of credibility in southwestern Ohio because of their relentless promotion of McEwen’s candidacy. The main lesson that came out of Schmidt’s primary victory is not that national right-wing groups have achieved dominance in Ohio but rather that conservative voters are becoming alienated from national organizations that ignore local concerns and local candidates.