Ohio Race Offers Window Onto National Election

“I believe in government,” Democratic congressional challenger Ted Strickland recently told a living room full of contributors in this southern Ohio town. “I believe that people can do things through government which they cannot do as individuals, and I don’t back away at all.”

The Republican incumbent, Rep. Frank A. Cremeans, takes a very different view. “This district is very independent,” he said as he polished off a breakfast plate of bacon and pancakes during an interview. “Our people have a lot of pride. They want government out of their lives as much as possible.”

Strickland, a college professor and prison psychologist, and Cremeans, the millionaire founder of a concrete company, represent the yin and yang of the ideological battle that defines the struggle for control of the House of Representatives in 1996.

The battle line that runs between the two men extends far beyond southeastern Ohio’s 6th Congressional District. Virtually every House race this year has been shaped, at least in part, by the heightened philosophical contrast between the parties that is the chief legacy so far of the 104th Congress and the conservative revolution championed by House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.).

Two factors, however, make this district, which sprawls from the West Virginia line more than 100 miles west to within shouting distance of the suburbs of Cincinnati, an unusually good window onto the nationwide contest.

First is the clarity of the ideological division between the two men. Second is the nature of the political landscape here--in a district that is among the nation’s most closely divided. Strickland won election as a freshman Democrat in 1992 by less than 2 percentage points. Two years later, Cremeans beat him by a similarly narrow margin. Right now, Cremeans’ polls show the two men in a dead heat.

*

Nationally, polls suggest that public anxiety over the upheaval on Capitol Hill has put Democrats in the driver’s seat as they seek to recover the dominance of the House they enjoyed for 40 years. A series of polls by various news organizations in the last two months has usually shown Americans saying they do not think the Republican record merits the party keeping control of Congress.

Such numbers have helped boost Democratic fund-raising: The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee took in a record $5.2 million in the first quarter of this year. The poll numbers also boost the hopes of party leaders. “I think we will get more than the 20 seats we need to take the place back,” said Rep. Martin Frost (D-Texas), chairman of the Democratic campaign committee.

Republicans scoff. Their own fund-raising has already grossed more than $50 million since the start of 1995, and Frost’s GOP counterpart, Rep. Bill Paxon of New York, claims that any advantage the Democrats enjoy now will be wiped out in the months to come.

“They can win the generic poll ballot in the spring,” Paxon said. “We will win the election in the fall.”

While Republicans worry about some of their freshmen--Cremeans included--they console themselves with the thought that Democrats stand to lose a host of seats in the South. The problem is not so much incumbents but retirements, which have opened 15 Southern seats that optimistic Republicans hope to sweep.

And while Democratic strategists hope President Clinton can help congressional candidates in some parts of the country by boosting turnout, his unpopularity in the South makes any such prospect dubious there.

“If he wants to come to North Carolina, we’ll welcome him here,” said David Price, a former Democratic congressman trying to regain the seat he lost two years ago. “But we have never particularly tied ourselves to national coattails.”

*

Nationally, Republican lawmakers hope to sway voters by talking about the cutbacks in big government that Congress passed but Clinton vetoed.

The Democrats, for their part, plan to target about 60 Republicans, including 30 in the 73-member freshman class that has provided Gingrich with many of his most ardent troops. The plan is to run hard against the Republican record, hoping that the controversies stirred up by GOP efforts to squeeze social programs will erase the unfavorable impression that led to the overthrow of the Democrats in 1994.

“In 1994 people perceived Democrats to be in charge of everything, and we didn’t do what we should have done,” said Strickland. “People were legitimately angry and frustrated, and they went to polls and wiped us out.”

After that, Strickland said, “my greatest concern was that Republicans would govern responsibly.”

But that, he said, did not happen. “For the first time in 40 years the public saw what Republican leadership of the House of Representatives is,” he said. “In comparison, the Democrats don’t look so bad.”

Democratic strategists are not pushing as unified a message as Republicans did with their “contract with America” in 1994. “I think this election is not going to be nationalized to the extent that the 1994 election was,” said Frost, reflecting the fact that Democrats remain a more ideologically and culturally diverse party than the GOP.

But party strategists do hope to profit from certain common themes. “In every district in the country there are three critical issues,” said Democratic consultant Mark Mellman, an advisor to House Democratic leader Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri. Those three, he said, are Medicare, education and the extent of environmental regulation.

“That’s been the core of our strategy for the last year and a half, and it will be our effort to bring those issues to the fore in every district in the country.”

Still, despite their current advantages, the Democrats face some notable vulnerabilities. Most important, said one veteran party operative, “many of the people who are giving only a 27% positive rating to the Republican Congress are the same people who are saying they agree that they don’t want to go back to a tax-and-spend Congress.”

*

In this district, whose Appalachian regions near West Virginia help make it the poorest in Ohio, Strickland hopes to avoid that problem by focusing on what he denounces as the “survival-of-the-fittest mentality” exhibited by Cremeans and other Republicans. His aides point to Cremeans’ recent talk at a nearby high school, where one student complained about not having the same quality of educational equipment as students in wealthier communities.

“You have the right to whatever you can afford,” Cremeans told the student.

“He doesn’t seem to understand the needs of the district,” said Doris Smith, a Strickland supporter who partook of the sesame chicken and chocolate cake at a $100-a-head fund-raiser for the Democrat.

But there are sharp divisions in the 6th District on this race, even, as Smith acknowledged, within her own family. Her husband, Dave, a businessman in the small city of Marietta, is “a staunch Republican” who thinks Cremeans “is just wonderful” and views Strickland “as a tax-and-spend liberal.”

That is precisely the idea the 53-year-old Cremeans plans to drive home during the campaign. Taxes and “the idea that he [Strickland] wanted to use an expanded tax base to pay for health care” will be among his main weapons, Cremeans said.

Strickland provided his foe with ammunition in the 1994 campaign, when he remarked during a televised debate that taxes might have to be raised to pay for health care reform, of which he is a vigorous advocate. Cremeans’ staff immediately took the sound bite, stripped away Strickland’s subsequent qualifiers, and made it the centerpiece of their television campaign. Cremeans makes it plain that his Democratic rival has not seen or heard the last of that commercial and that theme.

“I’m very happy with my voting record and the fact that I’ve not voted to increase one penny of taxes,” he said. “That’s going to be one of the major issues between me and him.”

As for Gingrich, Cremeans insists that he goes along with the House speaker only “when it’s in the interest of the 6th District.”

“I’m my own person,” he added. He cited his opposition to the aid package for Mexico in the wake of the peso crisis and his backing for continued funding of the Appalachian Regional Commission, which fosters economic development in the area, as examples of his deviation from stands taken by the House GOP leadership.

*

Republicans say that similar arguments will help other freshmen counterattack as election day draws closer.

“Once you get into a real campaign against a real opponent, there’s a lot of stuff you can do on offense,” said Bill McInturff, whose polling firm counts 24 GOP House freshmen among its clients. “People have a lot of concerns about the Democrats in Congress that are not the focus of today’s debate, but will be when people have to make a real choice to replace our guys.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

House Hotspot

Ohio’s 6th Congressional District is one of the most hotly contested in the nation. The contest there is considered one of the pivotal battles of this fall’s election.