Cincinnati values vote at center of fight

Despite a focus on the economy elsewhere, the social agenda is still alive and well.

CINCINNATI (AP) — George Washington in a dress isn’t everyone in Cincinnati’s idea of funny.

This is family values country, and whether a mural of America’s first president in drag was intended to be whimsical is immaterial. It is the subject of disdain among many patrons of the storied Camp Washington Chili next door.

“I just think it’s awful. How could you put the No. 1 man of our country ...?” says exasperated cook Peri Rice, 47, stopping herself. “To me, it just presents that they’re trying to say that he was a gay president.”

Republicans in this region led the national political charges against both gay marriage and legalized abortion. Despite a laserlike focus on the economy elsewhere in this year’s election, the social agenda is still alive and well in the race for Ohio’s 1st Congressional District.

“More than it ever was, because it’s slid one hell of a ways,” 85-year-old Forrest Herbert, a campaign worker for incumbent U.S. Rep. Steve Chabot, said as he finished a plate of Cincinnati-style chili, served on spaghetti.

“It’s going to take a long time to get back up to normal,” Herbert said. “And we [in America] were never normal, we were above normal. We didn’t follow, we led.”

Recognizing local sentiment, Democrats are running a pro-life, fiscally conservative Catholic, state Rep. Steve Driehaus, against Chabot, 55, the six-term Republican incumbent. It is a strategy Democrats are also employing elsewhere.

“There is a move across the country that Democrats have been recruiting candidates that are more moderate, or sometimes even conservative, on issues to run in the more conservative districts,” said John Green, director of the University of Akron’s Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics.

Democrats view Ohio’s 1st District as especially vulnerable this year due to negative sentiment toward Republicans and Congress in general and to a black population of more than 27 percent that is expected to mobilize for Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama. Obama won almost 64 percent of the vote here in the Democratic primary.

Republicans now control Ohio’s congressional delegation 11-7.

Green said catering candidates’ views to a district isn’t new.

“It’s something that parties have actually done throughout all of American history, because this is such a diverse country that being doctrinaire on the right or the left reduces your reach with voters,” he said. “What makes perfect sense in one year doesn’t make any sense a few years later.”

In 2004, a movement to pass state gay marriage bans germinated in the Cincinnati offices of the conservative Christian group Citizens for Community Values. The issue appeared on Ohio’s ballot and was credited with boosting turnout among conservative voters and clinching George Bush’s victory.

The 1st District includes most of Cincinnati and the city’s northern and western suburbs, as well as part of adjacent Butler County. One of the state’s poorest, most demographically diverse districts, it went to Republican George Bush by a hair in 2004 and narrowly to Democrat Ted Strickland in the 2006 governor’s race.

Chabot campaign spokeswoman Katie Fox said Chabot’s constituents put a priority on the abortion issue, and will credit him with his work on a federal ban on a type of late-term abortion.

“Particularly on the west side of Cincinnati, there’s a large percentage of Catholic voters, and people obviously want their representative in Congress to reflect their values,” she said. “The pro-life stuff means a lot out here, and it means a lot to him as well.

“I don’t think it’s a political thing, it’s just his beliefs. He’d be for pro-life policies no matter what arena he wound up in.”

She said his common roots also reflect an aspect of the district’s family values. Chabot was born in a trailer park and his father served as clerk to his first law practice, she said.

Chabot also has a handy fundraising lead, with $1.3 million in the bank compared with Driehaus’ $631,000.

Driehaus, 41, believes his local Catholic upbringing and pro-life stance are important to local voters, but he sees them as a baseline for any candidate with a chance at victory on Cincinnati’s west side. He prefers to define values more broadly.

“I’m not exactly sure what that definition of values is. It varies based upon where you are in the state and where you are in this district,” he said.

“There are religious values, but those sometimes play out into political values. I see the value in education, the value of universal health-care coverage, the value of availability of affordable housing, the value of taking care of seniors late in life.”

What about the value of George Washington in a dress? It’s part of a joint project of the city and ArtWorks, a nonprofit, to bring vibrancy and color to local neighborhoods.

Washington is there to represent the neighborhood’s name, and the dress evokes a well-known area costume company, Schenz Theatrical Supply. Many other symbols are also included.

“The mural really is a fun, a humorous, a campy, didactic, most clever description of the neighborhood,” said ArtWorks director Tamara Harkavy, who said the design was picked through a lengthy community vetting process.

Green said the outcome of the congressional race, and the role played by values, will depend on how closely local voters decide to pay attention to the candidates’ parties.

“If a more moderate or more conservative Democrat runs against a conservative Republican, then certain issues are just taken off the table. If everyone in the race is pro-life, it’s hard for abortion to be an issue,” he said.

“But that’s assuming that voters look only at the issue positions of the candidates. You can imagine a family values voter in Cincinnati saying, ‘This Democrat’s good, but his party isn’t.’”