The Lonely Goatherd Blog And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats - Matthew 25:32
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August 03, 2005
Schmidt beats Hackett in Ohio special congressional election So there it is, the big special election in the 2nd congressional district next door in southern Ohio. The Republican Jean Schmidt has beaten the Democrat Paul Hackett to replace Republican Rob Portman, selected for a trade post in the Bush administration.
JEAN SCHMIDT 57,974 52% (W) PAUL HACKETT 54,401 48%
Congratulations are in order for Congressman Schmidt. However, as president of the SNL Mr Belvedere fan club Tom Hanks said after they voted not to kill their idol, the vote shouldn't have been that close. President Bush carried this district with 64% a few months ago.
Watching the campaign as a local Cincinnati news story, Hackett actually seemed like a very poor candidate. He had the one big positive thing, his gimmick: He's a recent veteran of our war in Iraq. Obviously that looks good on him. But absolutely everything else about him was phony and hostile and disrespectful.
Particularly, he absolutely called the president an SOB while he's running as a candidate in a district that voted nearly 2 to 1 for the guy. That struck me as being stupid, besides being rude and unstatesmanlike. Yuck. Then he actually runs positive footage of Bush talking about patriotism and service in his ads. Mr Hackett's got stones, you have to give him that.
Worse yet, he absolutely pitched the "chickenhawk" charge. Right from there, I'm all done with him. Those who pitch the chickenhawk charge are automatically discredited for rejecting the basic bedrock American principle of civillian control of the military. Thus he's either a fascist, insisting that only veterans have any right to participate in military decisions, or he's simply a demagogue scratching for an emotional hot button. Either way, this pretty much burns off all the goodwill he gets for being a veteran.
Yet he came within 4,000 votes of beating the Republican. Either there were a lot of voters so highly impressed with his service as a Marine that they weren't paying a bit of attention to anything he actually said, or the Republicans have some trouble. A Democrat should never have gotten within striking distance in this district.
