A Hint of Red for the Bluest State?
Mccormack, John
A Hint of Red for the Bluest State? A Republican's uphill battle in Massachusetts. by John McCormack Chelmsford, Mass. Chowing down some fried-chicken tenders at Skip's Restaurant on Chelmsford...
...The scrappy but sanguine Ogonowski—a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel whose brother John was an American Airlines pilot killed in the World Trade Center attacks—is running for the 5th District seat vacated this summer by Marty Meehan when he became chancellor of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell...
...The last time a Republican won this congressional seat was 1972, when Paul Cronin upset John Kerry's first run for elective office...
...He walks a fine line between straight-talk and stridency, saying, "They're also killing a lot of people . . . they're involved in a lot of other crimes across this country...
...But perhaps the right conclusion to be drawn from Hackett's close loss is that voters were not simply fed up with Bush and the Republican party, but with Washington and politicians in general...
...This verbal tic pops up again and again when she's asked about illegal immigration, the other big issue in the race...
...This isn't a referendum on Pelosi, period...
...Although antiwar presidential candidate George McGovern tallied the most votes in the district, the blue-collar and pro-military voters rejected the blue-blooded Kerry who had testified to Congress in 1971 that Americans were raping and murdering Vietnamese civilians "on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command...
...Nonetheless, pundits will divine some national significance in the election results, even if the race is decided by something as trivial as Ogonowski's Y chromosome: The SurveyUSA poll showed Tsongas winning the votes of women by 32 points, while Ogonowski was leading among male voters by 13 points...
...Perhaps swing voters wanted to send a hometown boy to Congress, someone who served in the military, someone who shoots straight even if he's shooting from the hip...
...Tsongas endorses a bill that calls for all the troops to be withdrawn within 270 days of its passage...
...This election is all about turnout...
...While Clinton's star power will help get Democrats to the polls in a typically low-turnout special election, hugging Pelosi tightly may turn off independent voters—a recent Zogby poll had public approval of Congress at 11 percent...
...If history is any guide, 5th District voters take issue with an elite politician linked to attacks on the troops...
...Tsongas favors a "pathway to citizenship" and supports "strong border security," but she thinks a "virtual fence" might do the trick...
...Tsongas has embraced the antiwar left, doing nothing, for instance, to distance herself publicly from MoveOn.org's attack on General Petraeus—though she tells me that the "General Betray Us" ad went "over the line...
...He says that withdrawing before then would lead to "civil war, genocide, absolute chaos—and not just in Iraq, but the neighboring states as well...
...Most commentators now see the close 2005 special election in a heavily Republican Ohio congressional district—in which Iraq war veteran Paul Hackett, the Democrat, lost to Republican Jean Schmidt by 3,000 votes—as a harbinger of the 2006 Republican defeat...
...Asked if pulling out all of the troops in nine months would lead to genocide, Tsongas says, "I believe a timetable puts in place those things that will help control the situation and prevent the kind of situation that you are presuming...
...It's an effective strategy, but also a necessary one for a candidate who, by the October 1 filing deadline, had raised just $430,000—Tsongas had raised $1.9 million...
...Ogonowski opposes President Bush's policies on abortion, Social Security, gays serving in the military, and immigration, but when I ask Tsongas if there is an issue on which she disagrees with Pelosi, the typically on-script candidate tells me, "I'd have to think, um, at this point, but you know, off the top of my head at the moment, I'm very supportive of the kind of changes the Democratic Congress is bringing about for our nation...
...He says amnesty is an affront to local voters, most of whose ancestors immigrated before the advent of the welfare state...
...Democrats are worried enough to have dispatched Nancy Pelosi and Bill Clinton to the district on consecutive weekends to gin up enthusiasm in the local Democratic machine...
...He's lost 40 pounds thanks to his relentless schedule of door-to-door hand-shaking and walking in parades...
...Ogonowski strongly supports Petraeus and the surge, but believes that the 2002 invasion was a "mistake" and wants a complete withdrawal from Iraq as soon as there is a stable government and army...
...No," says David King, a Harvard political science professor who focuses on Congress...
...Can Ogonowski's dogged campaigning and unvarnished personality overcome Tsongas's name recognition and war chest in a heavily Democratic district...
...Yet, the odds are stacked against him: A paltry 14 percent of voters in the district are registered Republicans...
...Someone just like Jim Ogonowski...
...Ogonowski is just as passionate of a campaigner...
...King also thinks it's foolish to draw any national conclusions from this special election, saying, "This isn't a referendum on Bush, period...
...Ogonowski John McCormack is an editorial assistant at The Wffkty Standard...
...Tsongas happily welcomed Clinton, a man her late husband once called a "cynical and unprincipled politician" and "a direct threat to my children's generation...
...We just had more bums," he says in his Boston accent, speaking almost as quickly as he does bluntly...
...believes that voters' frustration with a "broken Congress" will propel him to victory in the October 16 special election...
...I'd have to be very sure that it actually was going to be effective...
...People are fed up with Washington, D.C...
...Democratic leaders are scared because a single-digit margin of victory for Tsongas in true-blue Massachusetts would call into question the present wisdom that supporting General Petraeus's strategy in Iraq—as Ogonowski does—is the kiss of electoral death...
...Ogonowski passionately supports a border fence and opposes amnesty for illegal immigrants...
...My great-grandmother came here in 1904, legally, with four kids—she was a widow," says Ogonowski...
...But Ogonowski is just 10 points behind in the latest SurveyUSA poll...
...Illegal immigrants] use our hospitals, they don't pay taxes, they're a drain on our society...
...I'd look at it," she says...
...The kind of situation you are presuming" is the intentionally vague Washington way of saying "genocide...
...Chowing down some fried-chicken tenders at Skip's Restaurant on Chelmsford Street, Republican congressional candidate Jim Ogonowski explains why his party lost control of Congress in 2006...
...The race should have been a cakewalk for his Democratic opponent, Niki Tsongas, the widow of Massachusetts senator and 1992 presidential candidate Paul Tsongas...
...What about a real fence made of steel or concrete...
Vol. 13 • October 2007 • No. 5
