Bob McEwen’s Unholy Alliances

The four-day hiatus from the McEwen campaign was wonderful. The longer-lasting one that I expect to occur in a few days will be even more satisfying. But there are matters to address before the books on the Second District Primary campaign are closed.

This will be a difficult but necessary series of posts. Difficult because I’m not in my comfort zone commenting on someone’s core beliefs, or lack thereof, but necessary because there has been too much happening in and around the 2006 McEwen for Congress campaign for me to remain silent about it any longer.

Let’s go back to 2005. I had many objections to McEwen’s run last year: his one-month residency after a 12-year absence (an objection, based on recent news reports, was even more pertinent than it first seemed); his endorsements by religious leaders and out-of-town powerbrokers who could not credibly claim that he was the best choice of the roughly half-dozen strongly prolife and profamily GOP candidates on the ballot (and would not be able to until they interviewed them, which they of course did not); the attempt to appear to less-than-informed voters as the 2nd District incumbent, or at least as a current officeholder, by calling himself “Congressman McEwen” in literature, radio ads and TV ads; and of course what turned out to be the principal objection that carried into the 2006 campaign, namely the 12-year “blank slate” resume he expected voters to swallow whole (something that a few of us attempted to fill in, with some success).

But one thing you could say about the 2005 candidate and campaign: IF you accept the premise that they meant no harm with the “Congressman McEwen” appellation (a contention I still reject, as does the Ohio Elections Commission), the campaign otherwise generally conducted itself with decorum. Although there were many who went after supposed frontrunner Pat DeWine (in retrospect, it’s hard to believe, polling data to the contrary, that he was ever REALLY the frontrunner), and did so with a vengeance, McEwen did not appear to have any association with them, and as a matter of fact did not go negative in his ads until well after Pat DeWine did. In fact, those who went after Pat DeWine were more often behind Tom Brinkman’s candidacy than they were McEwen’s, though I believe it can be fairly said that Brinkman was not directly associated with the anti-DeWine efforts.

But things have changed in 2006, both in the candidate himself and in the campaign, and for the worse. Those changes call into question Bob McEwen’s core beliefs. Those changes, in ironic combination with his involvement in the Ohio Restoration Project, frankly call into question whether Bob McEwen has any remaining core beyond his quest for power and influence.

Posts during the next couple of days will cover the troubling things I have observed over the past four months — things that I simply cannot and will not allow to slide by without comment.

In the meantime, a little humor:

Corrected caption: Ken Blackwell reacts
to Bob McEwen’s suggestion that he
be named Blackwell’s
Lieutenant Governor.