It's Independence Day in Anderson Township, Ohio, a staunchly middle-class suburb of Cincinnati that went more than 2 to 1 for George W. Bush last November. Anderson is the kind of town whose wide streets and sprawling strip malls have for decades seemed incapable of sustaining Democratic life.
Watching Anderson's Fourth of July parade -- as floats roll by from one church after another -- it's easy to imagine that the millennium is at hand and Republicans will rule here for a thousand years.
But then an unlikely band of believers makes its way up Beechmont Avenue. They're the local Democratic club, and they're out in force, marching behind a youthful man of military bearing. He's sprinting from one side of the street to the other, shaking as many hands as possible. “He's Paul Hackett,” the local Democrats tell the crowd. “He's just back from Iraq and he's running for Congress.”
Hackett, a Marine reservist who returned from Iraq in March, is running in an August 2 special election to replace Republican Rob Portman, the former congressman from Ohio's 2nd District who recently became President Bush's trade representative.
In many respects, Hackett is a Democrat in the John Edwards mold. A tall 43-year-old trial lawyer who looks even younger, Hackett is an economic populist and a centrist on social issues. Though he is pro-choice, Hackett bluntly calls abortion “a bad thing.” While that may leave some Democrats ambivalent, he seems to have won more than a few converts in Anderson.
As Hackett works the crowd, he pumps the hand of a stocky firefighter named Peter Deane. Deane describes himself as “a middle-of-the-road Democrat,” one who hasn't held out much hope for his party in the 2nd District in many years. But Hackett's service in Iraq has convinced Deane that the veteran has a chance to win.
“People know Iraq is turning into another Vietnam,” Deane says, “and I think they want someone in Washington that's been there and knows what's going on.”
Though the 2nd District is deep red -- the GOP's Portman held it for 12 years and always won at least two-thirds of the vote -- local Democratic Party officials believe Hackett has a shot. And with Republicans stumbling both nationally and in Ohio, a Hackett victory could be hugely galvanizing in next year's elections.
Hackett's race is the first federal election since November, the first opportunity for Democrats to prove that they can run hard in red states. Given the stakes, you might think that the national party would have been pouring resources into the race. You would be wrong.
As of early July, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), which gives money to House candidates, had offered none to Hackett's campaign, according to local party officials. Not until July 12, nearly a month after Hackett decisively won the Democratic primary, did the DCCC put a notice on its blog asking readers to contribute to his campaign. Only after an outpouring of calls from local party activists, and with just three weeks remaining in the race, did the DCCC reportedly commit its own resources to the campaign. When asked about the Hackett race, DCCC spokeswoman Sarah Feinberg would not comment.
“We keep hearing that they're going to be helpful, but it's been frustrating,” says Tim Burke, chair of the Democratic Party in Hamilton County, which includes Cincinnati, Anderson, and a large slice of the 2nd District.
Burke believes a rare convergence of factors makes the race winnable: the absence of a GOP incumbent, the presence of a strong Democratic candidate, and the likelihood that low turnout in a summer special election will allow far fewer votes than usual to win the seat.
There are other forces at work as well. Bush's base is palpably eroding across the country this summer. And in Ohio, the GOP is reeling from “Coingate,” the bizarre scandal in which the state lost millions investing in the rare-coin collection of a Republican donor.
Now Hackett's opponent, former state Representative Jean Schmidt, has been snared in a scandal of her own. On July 8, The Columbus Dispatch reported that Schmidt improperly failed to disclose that a biotech lobbyist treated her last fall to a lavish dinner and skybox seats at a Cincinnati Bengals game.
“We've got a real opportunity here,” Burke says. “Even if we lose, you at least are getting a great candidate out there talking the Democratic Party position on things like Iraq and Social Security and health care.”
The DCCC's failure to support Hackett until late in the race raises questions about party Chairman Howard Dean's promise to start competing in Republican strongholds. Will the Democrats start taking chances in red-state redoubts like the 2nd? Or will they remain a risk-averse party that falls ever further into minority status?
“This race is a long shot,” admits Brewster Rhoads, a Cincinnati-based political consultant. “But the payoff is potentially huge. If Hackett does well, it shows that the Bush bandwagon is losing its wheels even on Republican turf.”
Hackett does seem well-suited for battle in GOP territory. As Rhoads says, “The guy looks more like a Republican than a Republican does.”
Seeing Hackett at his historic stone home in Cincinnati's exclusive Indian Hill suburb, he seems the very model of Republican rectitude. The youngest of his three children, Liam, a towheaded boy of 20 months, romps in the backyard. The family's German shepherd roams out front.
“I know I'm incredibly lucky,” Hackett says, unwinding (if you can call it that) with a glass of water on his patio after a long Fourth of July. The reason Hackett's a Democrat, he says, is that the party still stands for “the less fortunate, for the underdog -- and I think that's a noble cause.”
On economic issues, Hackett is solidly progressive. The corporate-friendly bankruptcy bill, which passed the House with a fair number of Democratic votes, Hackett calls “garbage.” And he's appalled that Democrats have let the GOP define the debate on the “death tax.” “We should call it the ‘anti-aristocracy tax,'” he insists.
On questions of values, Hackett's libertarian tendencies take over. “When I elect someone to go to Washington, D.C.,” he says, “I don't elect a spiritual leader. I get that from my minister on Sundays when I go to church. Congress isn't invited into my personal life; they're not invited into the decisions my wife makes with her doctor any more than they're invited in to check out what guns I've got in my gun cabinet.”
Hackett says that message has resonated strongly in the 2nd District, which extends from Cincinnati's suburbs roughly 100 miles east into rural counties that hug the banks of the Ohio River. On the stump, he says, “I get a whole lot of heads shaking up and down.”
On Iraq, Hackett's stance may seem surprising. “I disagreed with the war,” he says, calling it “a diversion from the real war on terror.” Nevertheless, Hackett volunteered for service; he had been discharged from the reserves in 1999 and had to get an age waiver to be readmitted. Hackett says he went to Iraq because “I saw Americans were over there dying, and I felt that I had an obligation to go help.”
Hackett, who worked alongside and helped train Iraqi troops, believes U.S. forces should remain in Iraq until at least 140,000 Iraqi soldiers have been trained, and won't put a timetable on American withdrawal.
Though Hackett's Iraq service certainly adds interest to his candidacy, Democrats in Washington have reason to be skittish about his race. Just nine months ago, 64 percent of 2nd District voters cast their ballots for Bush. And Schmidt, Hackett's opponent, is president of Right to Life of Greater Cincinnati. Special election or not, she's likely to bring a well-motivated army of social conservatives to the polls.
From Washington, Hackett probably looks a bit like Jeff Seemann, an energetic but inexperienced Democrat who ran for Congress in Ohio's heavily Republican 16th District last year. Seemann mounted a spirited campaign -- winning high-profile support from Howard Dean's Democracy for America and the blogger Daily Kos -- but he ended up winning only 33 percent of the vote.
Still, Democrats in Ohio point to a different precedent. They look across the Ohio River to the nearby 2nd District in Kentucky. There, in a special election in May 1994, national Republicans decided to take a shot at the seat -- even though Democrats had held it uninterrupted for 129 years. Newt Gingrich's personal political action committee gave money to Ron Lewis, an untested Republican candidate, whose stunning upset helped pave the way for the GOP take back of the House that November.
Ultimately, the best case for taking a risk on Hackett may come from Dean himself. In a recent Washington Post profile, Dean said of long-shot races, “If you lose, so what? It's worth the investment if we can have somebody there who gives the message, who's articulate and … respectful of the voters, because they'll get a better impression of Democrats than they would otherwise.”
There are few places where Democrats need to make a better impression than Ohio, the most fiercely contested battleground of 2004 and the site of crucial races for U.S. Senate and the governorship in 2006. At a time when Democrats have been hamstrung by debates over terrorism and national security, it's hard to imagine that they're going to get a much better messenger for the party than a charismatic Marine.
“There's no downside” to supporting Hackett, says Rhoads, the Cincinnati political consultant. “With this candidate, with his message, we can beat the Republicans.”
Jim McNeill, a journalist in Washington, D.C., is a former managing editor of In These Times who has written for The Chicago Tribune, Newsday, Dissent, and The Baffler.
