Column: Ken Blackwell, as steady as the breeze

My Jan. 8 print edition column, posted early as a reaction to Monday’s RNC debate.

I’ll say one thing about J. Kenneth Blackwell: The man can work a room.

Blackwell and five other contenders for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee faced off Monday in a debate at the National Press Club in Washington. Blackwell had his zingers ready.

One of his favorites is the following: He has little use, he said, for Republicans “who campaign like Ronald Reagan and then govern like Jimmy Carter.”

This line leaves conservative Republicans weak in the knees, and, improbably, Blackwell is gaining some real momentum in his quest to become national party chairman. The former Ohio secretary of state and failed gubernatorial candidate has locked up endorsements from some important, right-wing leaders, such as anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly, Focus on the Family leader James Dobson, American Conservative Union Chairman David Keene and others.

The funny thing about Blackwell’s frequent Carter riff is the part he leaves out: Blackwell, in 1980, backed Carter for re-election over Reagan. He became a Republican after Reagan won.

As Bob Dylan once sang, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” Quite right; you just need Blackwell.

Blackwell has such a tendency for changing his stripes that he was known in his hometown, Cincinnati, as “Switchwell,” said Charlie Luken, a Columbus lobbyist and Democrat who defeated Blackwell in a tight congressional race in 1990.

More recently, Blackwell pushed for a constitutional amendment limiting state spending growth. In early 2005, he vowed that “in one form or another, it will be on the ballot this November.” It wasn’t. Nor was it on the ballot in 2006, because Blackwell, conveniently after winning the GOP gubernatorial nomination, went along with a legislative compromise worked out by the moderate Republicans he loves to decry.

In his defense, Blackwell’s acolytes cite the flimsy statistic that Blackwell has won 13 of 17 elections in his political career.

“I know how to win elections,” Blackwell said during the debate.

Those victories include some City Council races as a member of Cincinnati’s hardly conservative Charter Committee, a third party, and down-ticket statewide races for treasurer and secretary of state. But Blackwell, like the Ohio State football team, gets worse as the stakes get higher. He narrowly lost to Luken in that 1990 congressional race. And he was blown to pieces by Democrat Ted Strickland in the governor’s race in 2006, losing 60.5 percent to 36.7 percent. To put this in perspective, it was the worst performance by an Ohio Republican running for governor since 1912, when Robert B. Brown took 26.3 percent of the vote in a crowded six-way field.

My enduring memory of Blackwell’s gubernatorial campaign was an appearance he made at the Tusco Rifle Club in Dennison, near New Philadelphia, in early October 2006. Amongst the country folk, Blackwell, a giant of a man, threw his shotgun over his broad shoulders, walked out to the range and proceeded to shoot 13 of 15 clay pigeons in between telling me about how he wanted to crack down on abortion.

Blackwell, on that day, was the caricature of a conservative Republican. In the months and years since his colossal defeat, he’s honed the caricature by joining seemingly every conservative organization under the sun — seriously, read his bio at kenblackwell.com — and writing column after column of conservative boilerplate. But a party chairman doesn’t make policy; rather, he plots how to elect candidates, who then make policy. There’s a difference.

In 2006, Blackwell destroyed the Ohio Republican Party by tacking too far to the right in his inept gubernatorial campaign; in 2009, he offers the same to the national party.

Luken said he’d be pleased if Blackwell became RNC chairman. Among Democrats, Luken surely isn’t alone in that sentiment.

UPDATE: An irate reader told me that Blackwell had to be carrying not a rifle, as I previously wrote, but a shotgun, which is true. I changed that.