LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY nebris)

by FRANCES FITZGERALD
From The New Yorker
Ohio’s gubernatorial race tests the power of the Christian right.

Pastor Rod Parsley stood on a flag-bedecked dais on the steps of Ohio’s Statehouse last October and, amid cheers from the crowd below, proclaimed the launch of “the largest evangelical campaign ever attempted in any state in America.” A nationally known televangelist and the leader of a twelve-thousand-member church on the outskirts of Columbus, Parsley had gathered a thousand people for the event, and attracted bystanders with a multimedia performance involving a video on a Jumbotron and music by Christian singers and rappers broadcast so loud that it reverberated off the tall buildings south of the Statehouse. TV crews from Parsley’s ministry taped the event. “Sound an alarm!” he boomed. “A Holy Ghost invasion is taking place. Man your battle stations, ready your weapons, lock and load!” In the course of the performance, Parsley promised that during the next four years his campaign, Reformation Ohio, would bring a hundred thousand Ohioans to Christ, register four hundred thousand new voters, serve the disadvantaged, and guide the state through “a culture-shaking revolutionary revival.”

Among those who spoke at the rally were Senator Sam Brownback, of Kansas, and Representative Walter B. Jones, of North Carolina, both Christian conservatives, and J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio’s secretary of state, who is now the Republican nominee for governor. All talked about the need to bring God and morality back into government. “We refuse to give up or back up or shut up until we’ve made a better world for all,” Blackwell said.

For the past two years, the religious right in Ohio has been on a victory march. In 2004, a coalition of conservative Christian organizations campaigned statewide for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, enlisting hundreds of pastors and collecting half a million signatures. The ballot initiative, known as Issue One, passed with sixty-three per cent of the vote, and many concluded that this effort to bring out “values voters” won the state for President Bush, and returned him to the White House. Parsley and another megachurch pastor, Russell Johnson, of the Fairfield Christian Church, campaigned hard for the initiative, as did Ken Blackwell, whose role in overseeing the election procedures caused a controversy of its own, and who was the only Republican leader in the state to join them. Subsequently, the two pastors formed organizations—Reformation Ohio and Johnson’s Ohio Restoration Project—to get out the vote in 2006 and beyond. This year, there is nothing like Issue One on the ballot, but Blackwell, who carries the standard of the religious right, could become governor of Ohio.

Blackwell, a six-foot-four African-American former college football star, is a thoroughgoing conservative. He’s a supply-sider who for years has advocated a flat tax and a constitutional limit on state spending. His views on abortion, gay marriage, school vouchers, and stem-cell research coincide with those of the religious right, and his position on concealed weapons with that of the N.R.A. He is also a media-savvy politician who has held statewide offices for the past twelve years, and he is well connected in George Bush’s Washington. (His backers include Grover Norquist, Newt Gingrich, Governor Jeb Bush, and Senator John McCain.) With rimless glasses and a small mustache, Blackwell, at the age of fifty-eight, has an air of authority, and he is at ease with all kinds of audiences. At a breakfast for young executives in Columbus, in April, he began, as he often does, with a humorous story about his days as a football player, then told them what he had learned from a peanut seller he had worked for as a kid about the importance of “asset building” as a way out of poverty. (Blackwell is, in fact, a rich man, thanks to an investment he made in a broadcasting company in the nineteen-nineties.) Turning to the economic problems facing the state, he spoke about confiscatory taxes inhibiting capital flows and the need for a new budgeting process. No one challenged him—though some certainly held doubts. In debates, he is aggressive and given to cutting one-liners. He said of one opponent, “He has a difficult time holding a consistent position for six months without fainting from exhaustion.”

But Blackwell can be a mesmerizing speaker. At an Ohio Restoration Project rally in a church outside Columbus, in March, he gave what amounted to a sermon about the obligation of Christians to “serve and engage.” There are, he said, “social, cultural, and political forces that have tried to run God, faith, and religion out of the public square. The issue is, will you take a stand?” His big, deep voice filled the sanctuary, and, speaking without notes, he cited chapter and verse of the Bible. His delivery had members of the audience, which was almost entirely white, shouting out “Amen!” and interrupting his performance with bursts of applause. Before such audiences, he often quotes Martin Luther King, Jr., on the social responsibility of the church, but he is, as National Review has called him, a “post-racial, post-civil-rights campaigner.” Many people like him in spite of his politics, or because they can’t believe that he’s really a doctrinaire right-winger. He still has friends from the early days of his political career, when he was far less conservative, and some of them remember his saying that he would be the first black President of the United States.

In the primary, in May, Blackwell beat Ohio’s attorney general, Jim Petro, with fifty-six per cent of the vote. His victory has shaken the traditionally moderate Ohio Republican establishment, and Parsley’s and Johnson’s efforts to get out the vote have driven liberal members of the clergy to launch organizing efforts of their own. The election in November will determine whether the religious right will take command of the Ohio Republican Party. It will also make a difference, perhaps the crucial difference, in the next Presidential election.

“The road to the White House in ’08 runs through Ohio in ’06,” Ohio political scientists are fond of saying. Since 1900, Ohio has voted for the winner in twenty-five of the twenty-seven Presidential elections. In 2004, both the Bush and the Kerry campaigns viewed Ohio as the key swing state, and they made the race the most expensive in Ohio’s history, as well as one of the most effective in getting out the vote. In a state with a population of eleven and a half million, nearly three-quarters of a million new voters were added to the rolls, and seventy-two per cent of all registered Ohioans voted. Bush won by a hundred and eighteen thousand votes—two percentage points. However much Issue One contributed to the outcome, the President had a clear advantage in that the Republicans had built a strong state Party organization: they had held the governorship for fourteen years, and in 2004 they controlled all statewide offices and large majorities in the legislature. By contrast, the Ohio Democratic Party was a shambles. Since then, however, the state’s economy has suffered—its unemployment rate is among the nation’s highest—and a wave of scandals has broken over the Republican Party, bringing Governor Bob Taft’s approval rating down to sixteen per cent. The Democrats have an opportunity that they have not had in years to win the governorship and rebuild their Party organization. Blackwell’s opponent, Ted Strickland, is a five-term congressman, from a district that includes a swath of Appalachia, and a United Methodist minister, and he has consistently led in the polls. Still, Blackwell is a formidable campaigner, and he can claim to represent change.

“Ohio has for decades been a balanced state and one that has rewarded moderates,” Mike Curtin, the associate publisher of the Columbus Dispatch, told me. “Look at Mike DeWine”—one of Ohio’s two Republican senators. “He began as a prosecutor in a rural county. As he moved up, he progressed from conservatism to moderate conservatism. It’s a path trod by many.” Party discipline has been equally consistent. For more than a decade, the state Party chairman, Robert Bennett, with the assistance of other Party leaders and wealthy donors, has determined who would run for statewide offices. Bennett has headed off primary races for the top jobs, and he has enforced the “eleventh commandment,” espoused by Ronald Reagan, that no Republican should speak ill of another. This year, however, Bennett failed to avert a gubernatorial primary, and Blackwell, the only successful right-wing politician in the state, repeatedly attacked Taft and other Party leaders. “Ken’s a lone ranger,” Bennett remarked a couple of years ago.

Blackwell first declared his candidacy for governor in 1998, four years after winning his first statewide office, as treasurer. Bennett, who thought that Taft had a better chance of succeeding George Voinovich as governor, persuaded Blackwell to run for secretary of state instead. It was not a job that he wanted—his interest lay in economic policy. But he won, and four years later Bennett pressed him to stay on for a second term. Once reëlected, he announced that he would run for governor when Taft stepped down, in 2006. His candidacy was not taken seriously until 2004, when the job that he didn’t want put him in charge of voting procedures and made him the most important official in the state.

The Ohio election was marred by numerous irregularities, and whether Blackwell discharged his duties impartially and in accordance with the law remains a matter of dispute. Republicans defend his conduct, but Democrats and voting-rights advocates maintain that he deliberately suppressed the vote of Democrats and minorities. Dozens of lawsuits and official complaints were filed, and Representative John Conyers, Jr., of Michigan, and the Democratic staff of the House Judiciary Committee launched an investigation, fielding more than fifty thousand complaints from Ohioans. Blackwell’s rulings have thus far stood up in court, but Democrats, who point out that Blackwell simultaneously served as the honorary co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio, see a pattern of partisanship in his actions. A month before the registration deadline, Blackwell directed the County Boards of Elections to reject all voter-registration forms not printed on eighty-pound-stock paper. He rescinded the order three weeks later—even his own office didn’t have paper that heavy—but in the meantime many voters who tried to register could not. Blackwell also ruled that provisional ballots (those given to voters not found on the rolls) had to be cast in the right precinct, as opposed to simply the right county. Thousands of provisional ballots were invalidated as a result, and Democrats argued that the order discriminated against low-income voters, who tend to move frequently, and therefore were more likely to show up at the wrong precinct. Blackwell called the contention prejudiced. “The assumption that minorities and low-income people should be treated as mentally challenged siblings is just insulting,” he said.

On Election Day, voters in traditionally Democratic areas encountered a variety of obstacles, among them Republican challengers at the precincts, the improper purging of names from voter rolls, and, the most serious, a scarcity of voting machines. In suburban and rural areas, there were plenty of machines, but in urban precincts, where many African-Americans voted, and in other Democratic-leaning precincts, such as those around college campuses, people had to stand in line for as long as ten hours, and many of them just gave up.

After the election, more irregularities were discovered, among them spoiled ballots, voting-machine errors, provisional ballots mistakenly invalidated, and biased sample recounts. Blackwell dismissed most of the complaints as “partisan jibber-jabber” and asserted that none of the Election Day “glitches” were “of a conspiratorial nature, and none of them would have overturned or changed the election results.” Blackwell has, however, reignited the controversy by interpreting a new election law with rules on voter registration so restrictive they could halt most registration drives in Ohio. A coalition of six civic groups is suing on the ground that the law will disenfranchise poor and minority voters, and Democrats are protesting that Blackwell should not be overseeing his own election.

Blackwell took advantage of the media attention that fall to launch his campaign for the governorship. He spoke out on issues from the sales tax to the Ohio Turnpike Commission, and he led the campaign for Issue One. Taft, Voinovich, and DeWine opposed the amendment, because it seemed to bar domestic-partnership benefits, but Blackwell travelled the state denouncing gay marriage. “The notion that a same-sex marriage can carry out the function of procreation or replenishing the human race defies not only human logic but barnyard logic,” he said in a church outside Toledo. Often he toured in the company of Rod Parsley or Russell Johnson.

Ohio has long had chapters of national religious-right organizations, such as the Christian Coalition, as well as homegrown right-to-life and family-values groups. As in other states, these groups have mobilized voters and gained considerable influence in Republican county organizations. In recent years, the state legislature has passed a series of bills on the religious-right agenda, among them an experimental school-voucher program, a ban on late-term abortions, and a Defense of Marriage Act. Meanwhile, the state school board has been fighting over a proposed science standard that calls for “a critical analysis of evolution.” But Parsley’s and Johnson’s leadership in the Issue One campaign brought religious-right activism to a new level.

The tabernacle, or sanctuary, in Parsley’s World Harvest Church has upholstered pews arrayed in a semicircle around a stage lit for television. On the Sunday morning that I attended, almost all of the fifty-two hundred seats were filled, and the worshippers, many of them African-Americans, were swaying to the beat of a band heavy on brass and percussion. Huge video screens magnified images of the singers on the stage and a choir in purple robes standing on a balcony above it. Eventually, Parsley, a tall man with a graying brush cut, bounded onto the stage. He introduced his wife, Joni, spoke of voter registration, brought his congregants to their feet in waves, and had them shout a countdown to his call “It’s showtime!” When he preached, he used his whole body and the full range of his husky baritone. Parsley is white, but, as black ministers say, he preaches black—he has the phrasing, the sighing intakes of breath, and the dramatic arc of the sermon.

A Pentecostal, Parsley preaches latter-day miracles, the healing of physical, spiritual, and financial ills, and the promise that those who give to the church will be rewarded in abundance. That Sunday, invoking Martin Luther, he called for a spiritual army to “track down our adversary, defeat him valiantly, then stand upon his carcass.” Conservative Pentecostal pastors often use military metaphors, but Parsley’s sermons are notable for their graphic detail. At the service that I attended, he spoke of the moment when “God broke into the world through the bloody flanks of a fourteen-year-old virgin.” This puzzled me, until I understood that he was picturing Mary as a teen-ager who chose not to have an abortion.

A Bible-school dropout, Parsley began preaching in his parents’ back yard, in the city of Pickerington, just east of Columbus. Today, World Harvest has two campuses, with a school, a Bible college, nine outreach programs, and a state-of-the-art television studio. His program, “Breakthrough,” appears on fourteen hundred stations and cable affiliates. The church has a staff of three hundred and an annual budget of forty million dollars. Parsley frequently presents himself as a political centrist. However, in his book, “Silent No More,” published last spring, his solution to poverty is for the government to “get out of the way,” remove all constraints on the free-enterprise system, and let the churches assume their traditional role in helping the poor. He fulminates about homosexuality, and writes of Islam, “I do not believe that our country can truly fulfill its divine purpose until we understand America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed.” On the book’s jacket is a blurb from Ken Blackwell, whom Parsley has known for years, though they were only slightly acquainted before 2004. “This book should inspire men and women of faith,” Blackwell wrote, “and make ‘values voters’ a force that politicians can no longer ignore.”

In a conference room after the service, Parsley told me that his call to activism had come when he attended the signing of the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act, at the White House, in 2003. Parsley had spoken on occasion about social issues in his television ministry, but, standing in the room with other Christian leaders and President Bush, he felt “the need to use the platform I was given.” The following summer, he formed the Center for Moral Clarity, to educate citizens nationwide about legislation in statehouses and Congress. That fall, he travelled around Ohio, advocating the passage of Issue One. “I believe we had an impact,” he said. “We have a multicultural church—and our urban ministries are largely black and Hispanic. The President won eleven per cent of the African-American vote nationally; he won sixteen per cent of it in Ohio.” Parsley said that he hoped to open Reformation Ohio offices in Columbus, Cincinnati, and Cleveland, and to hold two hundred citywide outreaches, adding, “We set a time frame of four years, because we didn’t want to be perceived as following the election cycle, but we are going to ramp up before the primary.”

Russell Johnson’s Fairfield Christian Church is in Lancaster, some fifteen miles south of World Harvest. It has a large sanctuary and a K-through-12 school for seven hundred students. Evangelical and nondenominational, the church attracts people from different doctrinal backgrounds, but its congregation of thirty-five hundred is almost entirely white. Johnson, who attended Kentucky Christian University, is a man of medium height, trimly built, with sandy hair and pink cheeks. He doesn’t have Parsley’s imposing presence, but he is shrewd, energetic, and highly articulate. On a tour of the church, he talked all the way. In a coffee shop above the sanctuary, an aquarium of exotic fish started him off on intelligent design. That led him to what he called “the secular school system,” and principals who resist school-voucher programs—“They teach survival of the fittest, they just don’t want to practice it.” He also said that Roe v. Wade had led to the crisis in Social Security: “Abortion is also an economic issue. It has killed millions of American consumers.”

Johnson has been involved in local politics for twenty years. Church members have been elected to county and municipal offices, and one, a volunteer pastor, serves as vice-chair of the Fairfield Republican Party. The church has invited local Republican politicians to speak, and, over the years, Johnson has got to know many social-issue activists and politicians around the state. But it was Issue One that propelled him into state politics and into an alliance with Parsley and Blackwell.

In 2004, there were similar amendments on the ballot in eleven states, and many Democrats suspected that Karl Rove had helped orchestrate them. In Ohio, the initiative came from Phil Burress, the president of Citizens for Community Values, a Cincinnati-based organization associated with James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. The Ohio legislature passed its Defense of Marriage Act in January, 2004, but that May, when the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage took effect, Burress decided to try to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot. At a Johnson rally, Burress said that he had hired a polling firm and learned that the amendment would give the President three to five percentage points in the state. He asked Johnson, among others, to help circulate petitions. The coalition needed a spokesman, and Burress asked Blackwell, who accepted enthusiastically.

Johnson created the Ohio Restoration Project with the goal of enlisting two thousand pastors to commit themselves to registering three hundred new voters each by the end of 2006. He planned to raise a million dollars and to hold meetings across the state to find these “Patriot Pastors.” On his church’s Web site he wrote, “This is a battle between the forces of righteousness and the hordes of hell.” To me, he said, “This is to elect values candidates.”

By March, some of the pastors’ goals had proved too ambitious. Johnson had to cancel a planned Ohio for Jesus rally for lack of funds, and Parsley has held only three Reformation Ohio events this year. The pastors had, in any case, no hope of registering hundreds of thousands of new voters: after the 2004 campaign, there weren’t that many unregistered Ohioans left. They could, however, mobilize values voters for an off-year election, and effectively that’s what they have done. Since the fall of 2004, Parsley, through his Center for Moral Clarity, has hosted breakfast meetings every three months, for a thousand to two thousand Ohio pastors, to discuss legislation, and at one of them former Senator Zell Miller, the maverick Georgia Democrat, endorsed Blackwell for governor. Johnson has held eight O.R.P. meetings and rallies across the state—seven of them featuring Blackwell—and he plans four more before November. He told me he had four hundred thousand people on his e-mail lists, organized by county and congressional district, and hundreds of prospective volunteers. He was preparing to distribute half a million copies of Citizen USA, the conservative Christian newspaper, with voter guides on the positions of candidates. When I spoke to him in late March, he told me that Senator DeWine, who is facing a difficult race this year, had just called him to say that he would be co-sponsoring the federal Marriage Protection Act, and to consult him about the immigration issue.

Many mainstream Ohio clergy members have long worried about the growing political influence of the Christian right, and Parsley’s and Johnson’s campaigns finally moved them to action. On January 15th, twenty-eight Protestant ministers and three rabbis in the Columbus area filed a complaint with the I.R.S. charging Parsley’s and Johnson’s churches and their tax-exempt affiliates with engaging in “a continuing pattern of political campaign activity” and promoting “one particular political party and one specific candidate.” Parsley, Johnson, and Blackwell called the allegations false, and an attempt to deny freedom of speech to Americans who stood for Biblical morality. Eric Williams, a United Church of Christ minister and the group’s spokesman, responded that he had no objection to pastors speaking out about religious values or political issues, but he did object to their endorsing a candidate. He told me, “What I’m afraid of is that they’ll legislate their values, and make my brand of faith and the people in my congregation illegitimate.” A month after the complaint was filed, the I.R.S. commissioner, Mark W. Everson, gave a speech in Cleveland in which he said that the enormous increase in campaign funding during the 2004 election cycle had led the I.R.S. to investigate complaints against eighty-two churches and charities, and that it had found merit in more than half of those cases. He concluded, “We can’t afford to have our charitable and religious institutions undermined by politics.” In April, the clergy members, who now numbered fifty-six, filed a second complaint, based on new information, and a third was lodged on Williams’s behalf. Parsley and Johnson have not said whether the I.R.S. has contacted them, but Everson’s speech might be interpreted as a warning to organizations like theirs.

Other clergy members who shared Williams’s alarm decided to create their own activist organization. Tim Ahrens, the senior minister of the First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, in Columbus, told me that when he read about Parsley’s rally at the Statehouse he thought, This is Tiananmen Square. It’s time to stand in front of the tanks. The next day, he sent out an e-mail to colleagues, asking, “Is anyone alive out there?” Ahrens has since put together We Believe Ohio, a coalition of three hundred pastors, priests, rabbis, and imams in the Columbus and Cleveland areas. “We’re not all liberals, theologically or otherwise,” Ahrens said, “but we have a similar understanding of the relationship between faith and politics, and we can all stand up for justice for the poor.” The members are putting on public events, doing advocacy work on issues such as housing and health care, and aiming to get eighty per cent of their congregations out to vote. “We’re a bit late on this,” Ahrens told me, “and we haven’t much money, but just by saying ‘We’re people of faith, too,’ we’ve emboldened others.”

Ken Blackwell might once have sympathized with much of what We Believe Ohio stands for. The son of a meatpacker, he and his parents and younger brother lived in a housing project on the west side of Cincinnati until he was six. His parents believed in education, and in 1966 he went to Xavier University, a small Jesuit school in Cincinnati, on a football scholarship, becoming one of its few black students. In his sophomore year, he married his childhood sweetheart, and they moved into an apartment building that he helped manage. (Rosa Blackwell is now the superintendent of schools in Cincinnati.) The events of 1968, including a riot in an adjacent neighborhood, had a profound impact on many students at Xavier, and after Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated Blackwell persuaded the university to send him and a few other students to the funeral. That year, he became president of the nascent black-student association, grew an Afro, wore dashikis, and embraced the Black Power rhetoric of non-negotiable “demands.” However, according to classmates and to John Henderson, the assistant dean of men and the first black administrator at Xavier, he played an entirely constructive role in persuading the university to recruit more black students and teachers, to treat its cafeteria workers better, and to invite civil-rights leaders to campus.

After graduating, Blackwell was called for a tryout with the Dallas Cowboys; when he didn’t make the cut, he taught school for a few months, then returned to Xavier to work with Henderson, who had been chosen to direct a new office of university and urban affairs. When Henderson left for another university, Blackwell succeeded him in the job of recruiting and advising black students and of involving the university in the low-income communities surrounding it. In 1986, he became Xavier’s vice-president for community relations.

While working for Xavier, Blackwell launched his political career. In 1975, he ran for the Cincinnati board of education, and, though unsuccessful, he gained the backing of the Charter Committee, a traditional, local reform organization, in a run for the City Council two years later. He won, and two years after that he became mayor. At the time, the post was largely ceremonial, with a one-year term, but the nine-member City Council had power, and Blackwell was reëlected to it five times. Colleagues and city-beat reporters found him friendly, hardworking, ambitious, and brilliant at attracting press coverage, but without much of a policy agenda. Initially a Democrat (as well as a Charterite), he worked for Jimmy Carter’s reëlection, but after the Reagan landslide in 1980 he became a Republican.

In recent years, Blackwell has told reporters that he was never really a Democrat, and that he worked for Carter only because his wife was running as an alternate delegate to the 1980 Democratic National Convention. He has also said that he left the Charter Committee because it became “an advocate for bigger government and more taxes” and “a leading advocate for abortion rights.” In fact, the Charterite positions did not change substantially. A more plausible explanation for his defection has to do with his friendship with Jack Kemp, whom he had met in 1977. A former Buffalo Bills star and then a prominent member of Congress, Kemp felt strongly that the Republican Party should reach out to black Americans. By December, 1980, Blackwell was quoting Kemp on economics. In his campaign biography, Blackwell says that he “was recruited to leadership in the Republican Party by President Ronald Reagan and many of his advisers, including Jack Kemp, Lyn Nofziger, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Ed Rollins.” He actually remained on the Cincinnati City Council through Reagan’s Presidency, but in 1989, when George H. W. Bush appointed Kemp Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Kemp hired Blackwell as a deputy. The following year, Blackwell had an opportunity to run for Congress, and Kemp urged him to take it.

Blackwell and his Democratic opponent in the race, Charlie Luken, had served on the Cincinnati City Council together for ten years. They had been friends, and occasionally allies, but the race was hard fought. Luken told me, “The Republicans didn’t have an African-American in Congress back then, so they made a big effort. Jack Kemp came, Barbara Bush, President Bush came twice, and Ollie North was campaigning door to door.” In the end, Blackwell lost by twenty-three hundred votes—in Luken’s view, because he came out against the 1990 extension of the Civil Rights Act. The race nonetheless established Blackwell within the Republican Party. In 1991, Bush made him ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission; in 1994, Governor Voinovich appointed him state treasurer, to fill a vacancy, and in the Republican sweep of that year Blackwell was elected to the office.

At the time, Blackwell seemed to be a moderate Republican. However, as the national Republican Party moved to the right Blackwell did the same. In 2000, he served as the national chair of Steve Forbes’s Presidential campaign, then moved to the Bush campaign, and, later that year, worked on the Florida recount. In December, 2003, he broke with the Ohio Republican leaders over an increase in the sales tax that Taft had instituted to balance the budget. In fund-raising letters, he charged that the Party was selling out Republican principles and positions “to the highest bidder.” Robert Bennett, the state Party chairman, was furious. “He’s willing to knife his own party in the back just to advance his own political career,” he said. But Blackwell, it turned out, did exactly the right thing in putting distance between himself and the rest of the leadership.

Last April, the Toledo Blade published the first in a series of stories about Tom Noe, a rare-coin dealer who had contributed to the campaigns of almost every prominent Republican politician in the state and had raised a hundred thousand dollars for George Bush in 2004. The Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation, the Blade disclosed, had invested fifty million dollars in Noe’s coin funds, and two of the most valuable coins had disappeared. Federal and county investigators eventually learned that thirteen million dollars had gone missing from the funds, and that the bureau had lost more than two hundred million dollars in two other investments that were just as difficult to explain. They also found that Noe had laundered almost half the money that he had raised for Bush and had given several state officials small gifts, which they had not reported. Governor Taft was one of them. In August, after investigators had gone through his accounts, he admitted that he had broken state ethics laws by failing to report fifty-two gifts, including golf outings, hockey tickets, and meals. He was convicted of four misdemeanors and had to apologize to the citizens of Ohio.

Since the mid-nineteen-seventies, Ohio has had laws on its books designed to prevent pay-for-play arrangements between elected officials and companies that do business with the state. But these laws are easily circumvented. After the Noe scandal broke, journalists and other investigators turned up case after case in which officials had, quite legally, received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign funds from employees or associates of state contractors, some of it channelled through Republican Party committees. The scale of the donations and the amount of business that their firms received—plus a few allegations of extortion—suggested that campaign contributions had become the price of doing business with the state. “Ohio is more corrupt than New Jersey,” Herb Asher, a professor of political science at Ohio State University, told me. “Pay-for-play has become systemic, and no wonder. With the Republicans holding all the statewide offices and sizable majorities in both houses of the legislature, there’s been no oversight except from the inept Democrats and the newspapers.”

Whether or not pay-for-play was involved, the Ohio G.O.P. has raised millions of dollars each year from state contractors. This was certainly a consequence of one-party rule; it was also in some measure a cause of it—and, indirectly, part of the reason for the growing influence of the religious right. In the past four election cycles, the Republicans outspent the Democrats six to one, and in 2001 they redistricted and reapportioned the state with extraordinary precision. Ohio voters divide almost evenly in Presidential elections, yet the Republicans have a lock on twelve out of the eighteen congressional districts as well as on the state legislature. The result has been a rightward swing in the Party. “Most Republican candidates haven’t had to worry about the Democrats,” one Democratic analyst explained. “The only challenge they’ve had is from conservatives and religious conservatives in the primaries. So even moderates start moving to the right.”

During the gubernatorial primary, Blackwell savaged Jim Petro, his establishment opponent, and made no concession to moderate Republicans. He came out for a law banning all abortions, without exception for the life of the woman. He also put considerable resources into getting onto the ballot a constitutional amendment to limit government spending. Spending cuts appealed to conservative primary voters, but the amendment was so restrictive that most of those who had actually read it thought that it would cripple the ability of state and local governments to budget for essential services. By late April, there was so much opposition among local officials that many predicted the amendment would destroy Blackwell’s chances in the general election. Two weeks after the primary, the leaders of the Ohio legislature offered to pass a law limiting spending if Blackwell would get the amendment taken off the ballot. He immediately accepted the deal.

Blackwell refused to debate Petro, and in the last two weeks of the campaign he avoided newspaper reporters and spoke only to small-town conservative audiences. By that time, there was evidence that Parsley’s and Johnson’s efforts were succeeding. Blackwell, who raised more than six million dollars from January, 2005, through the end of the last reporting period, in June, had received more individual donations in amounts of two hundred dollars or less than all the other gubernatorial candidates in Ohio combined. In a Columbus Dispatch survey taken in April, forty-five per cent of prospective Republican voters identified themselves as born-again or evangelical Christians, and most of them supported Blackwell.

In the general election, Blackwell faces a strong opponent in Ted Strickland. As a minister, Strickland is comfortable talking about values and the role of religion in politics. He grew up in circumstances no better than Blackwell’s: he is the eighth of nine children, his father was a steelworker, and his family lived in a chicken coop and a smokehouse for a period after their house burned down. He votes as a liberal on economic and social-welfare issues but favors restrictions on abortion and opposes gun control. According to an experienced Cincinnati reporter, he’s the most underrated politician in the state: he lost a race in 1994, came back in 1996, and survived the redistricting of 2001. He isn’t an orator, but, a tall man with an open face, he looks like the quintessential Midwesterner, and he speaks with a sincerity that may appeal to Ohio voters. In the past few months, he has introduced “Turnaround Ohio,” a series of proposals on matters such as the development of alternative-energy sources, early-childhood care, job training, and higher education, all with the goal of bringing Ohio into the post-industrial economy. Never having run for statewide office, he is not as well known as Blackwell, but, for an Ohio Democrat, he has raised an unprecedented amount of money—slightly more than Blackwell in the same period—some of it from Republican businessmen.

By all measures, this should be a year for Democratic gains in Ohio. Bush is as unpopular there as he is nationally, and, according to a University of Akron poll, most prospective Ohio voters think that the state is on the wrong track. According to another poll, only a third of Ohio voters think that the Republicans should continue in office. Increasing numbers of liberal clergy are joining up to contest the right on social issues. But Blackwell is preparing to run another aggressive campaign and is hoping to draw African-Americans and conservative Catholics away from the Democratic Party. The night of the primary, he said, “Message to Brother Strickland: You can run but you can’t hide. We’re coming right atcha. We represent change, we represent the future, and there is no retreat in our bones.”