September 25, 2006
House Race Hotline Update: Ethics In Iowa
HoThe ethics issue appears to be hitting OH GOPers hard, and it's most apparent in Rep. Bob Ney's (R-OH 18) district. Dover legal dir. Zack Space (D) is leading Ney's favored candidate, state Sen. Joy Padgett (R) 45-31% in a new Dem-sponsored poll.
-- The poll suggests that voters are connecting Ney's guilty plea and Gov. Bob Taft's (R) ethical problems to Padgett. She has a 34% unfavorable rating (41% positive) even though the campaign has just begun.
-- Space's latest ad seeks to capitalize on that trend. It pictures Padgett alongside Ney and Taft. Ney has been a burden on her campaign; she called for his "immediate resignation" on 9/20. But the longer he stubbornly remains in Congress, the longer the connection will stick.
-- And the NRCC's attack ad, while ridiculing Space, acknowledges that unemployment is a serious problem in Southeastern Ohio. That's not exactly a ringing endorsement for the GOP.
-- When the environment is as bad as it is for OH GOPers, it doesn't take a first-tier candidate to win. And the picture in this GOP-tilting CD isn't looking good for the majority party. [JOSH KRAUSHAAR] 
Posted at 11:54 AM
Comments
Ohio, Iowa? What's the difference?
Not sure why you've got an Iowa headline on an Ohio story.
Idaho = potatoes
Iowa = corn and soybeans
Ohio = corrupt Republican politicians
terje | 09.25.06 01:16 PM
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Joy Padgett said she became a Repubican because the Democratic Party she was a member of at the time "left her." She says her decision to run for the Ohio Senate, after serving in the House where she pushed for an Ohio concealed carry bill, resulted from reading "The Purpose Driven Life."
In her first election campaign for the Ohio Senate, running again Terry Anderson, America's longest serving hostage who is belived to have been captured by Shiite Hezbollah militants in an attempt to drive U.S. military forces from Lebanon during the Lebanese Civil War, Padgett ridiculed Anderson as a sympathizer to terrorists for having revisited his captors to talk to them, not kill them.
Known in the Ohio Senate for her pit-bull-like stoutness and appetite for agression, Padgett may have to invoke divine intervention this election cycle if she is to distance herself from the corruption-tainted swamp that has risen around the Statehouse in Columbus due to one-party rule that has, if not condoned or advanced by intention, certainly shown that it has chosen to turn a blind eye to one scandal after another. Tom Noe and the BWC scandal top the list.
And for all her Christianity, Padgett feels no compulsion to be Christian when eviserating an opponent, as she did with Anderson, who correctly prognosticated in his first bid for elective office that "something smells funny in Columbus." He was right.
Despite having a name like Zack Space to make fun of in her campaign commercials, the joke may be on her as Ohioans, tired of 16 years of Republican rule in all statewide offices and the legislature, are showing, poll after poll, that the battleground state's poor economy and its rising tide of disaffection with the direction President Bush is taking the country in and the direction Ohio officials [Padgett among them] are taking the state in, are ready to "throw the bums [all Republicans] out."
With state Democratic candidates ahead of their Republican challengers, the civic awakening taking place in Ohio will help level the playing field between a newcomer like Space and Padgett, a veteran Ohio candidate whose Christian, conservative credentials were not enough to help her, running as a candidate for Lt. Governor with Attorney General Jim Petro in this year's Republican primary for governor, defeat Ken Blackwell, who is well behind Ohio native and Democratic Congressman Ted Strickland.
Indeed, Zack Space may be going where no unknown , small-town attorney has gone before, namely, to Congress.
Furious J | 09.25.06 04:30 PM
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