BY HOWARD WILKINSON
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Steve Chabot
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Most politicians would cringe at running 25-year-old wedding pictures on the cover of their campaign brochures.
But Steve Chabot doesn't seem to mind. After all, there was no such thing as a good-looking suit made in the 1970s.
But there it is, smack in the middle of a campaign brochure that by now has been seen in thousands of 1st Congressional District households -- a 20-year-old Mr. Chabot, grinning proudly in a white tuxedo with black trim, the obligatory ruffled shirt and too-short sleeves, sporting mutton-chop whiskers and the kind of hairstyle that made many a '70s father go into his why-don't-you-get-a-haircut routine.
And, right next to the 1973 wedding photo of him and high school sweetheart Donna, is a contemporary photo of the Chabot family -- Steve, Donna, and their daughter and son.
It evokes a theme that Mr. Chabot, the Westwood Republican, has pounded away at throughout his campaign to win a third term as the 1st District's congressman:
Family.
Working Hard for Working Families, as the campaign slogan goes. The brochure draws comment wherever Mr. Chabot goes, and he goes a lot of places in the 1st District, spending nearly every free hour he has passing out brochures door-to-door or standing in front of neighborhood grocery stores passing out the brochures or his signature plastic campaign cups.
One Saturday afternoon recently, Mr. Chabot and a campaign aide walked from house to house on a quiet Delhi Township cul-de-sac. He chatted in a driveway with one woman about his age -- he is 45 -- and she smiled and shook her head when she looked at the wedding picture. "I guess we all looked pretty funny back then," she said.
The brochure and the Chabot campaign's positive TV spots -- showing scenes of family picnics, his mother, his son in a Reds T-shirt -- are aimed at connecting with voters like the Delhi homemaker. They aim for Mr. Chabot's political base -- the vast suburbs and the middle-class neighborhoods of Cincinnati's west side, where Mr. Chabot was born and raised.
"Steve Chabot is a west-side original," said Greg Vehr, who worked as an aide to Mr. Chabot when he was a Cincinnati councilman in the 1980s and who is now chief of staff to Ohio Treasurer Ken Blackwell.
Mr. Chabot has used those kinds of family images in the past -- filling campaign literature with pictures of himself as a young La Salle High School defensive back, chasing a fullback down the field; as the young, bearded teacher at a West End school in the mid-'70s; and with his parents and siblings in front of the trailer home they lived in until his parents could afford a house.
Mr. Chabot has depended on conservative, middle-class, Republican-leaning voters on the west side through his 20-year political career -- first as a councilman, later as a Hamilton County commissioner and, since 1994, as a congressman.
He is a known commodity to those voters -- not only as a politician, but as someone who grew up in the neighborhood. Stand with Mr. Chabot in front of the Western Hills Kroger store for any length of time while he is passing out his campaign cups, and you will meet people who say they knew him as a boy, know the family, had a son who went to La Salle with him.
But a congressional campaign is about more than family ties and the old neighborhood.
It is about issues, and, on that score, Mr. Chabot has been consistently conservative, anti-tax, and what he considers to be "pro-family" -- sometimes even more so than the Republican congressional leadership that took over Capitol Hill when he was first elected in the GOP landslide of 1994.
In the past week, Mr. Chabot angered House Speaker Newt Gingrich when he became one of the 64 House Republicans -- U.S. Rep. Rob Portman of Terrace Park in the neighboring 2nd District was another -- who voted against the $520 billion budget deal worked out between the Clinton administration and GOP congressional leaders.
While Mr. Chabot said he favored major portions of the budget -- including the hiring of 100,000 new teachers -- he objected to the "pork" that was jammed into the bill. He also complained it dipped into the federal budget surplus to the tune of $20 billion for a variety of spending programs.
"I just can't support that," Mr. Chabot said. "I don't think that's why people sent us here four years ago."
For Mr. Chabot, locked in a tight re-election battle against Cincinnati Mayor Roxanne Qualls, voting against the bill was a huge political gamble.
After all, the spending plan included a lot for Cincinnati -- a portion of the money to spent on hiring teachers, $1.8 million for study of a light-rail system for Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky, and $500,000 for the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center to be built on Cincinnati's riverfront.
The Qualls campaign has already jumped on Mr. Chabot's opposition to the bill, with the Democratic candidate calling the Republican congressman's vote "shortsighted."
But, for Mr. Chabot, the vote was consistent with his belief that the federal government should be spending less and sending more back to the taxpayers in the form of tax cuts.
Last month, Mr. Chabot voted for a House Republican plan that would have taken about $80 billion of the projected federal budget surplus over the next five years and sent it back to taxpayers. The bill is going nowhere, because there is not enough support in the GOP-controlled Senate, but Mr. Chabot's campaign pointed to the vote as evidence of his belief that working families "should keep more of what they earn."
The Qualls campaign hit him for that vote, too, saying all the projected $1.5 trillion in budget surpluses should be saved until the Social Security system is fixed. Mr. Chabot argued the $1.4 trillion the House Republicans did set aside was more than enough to guarantee Social Security's solvency.
Ms. Qualls accused Mr. Chabot of contradicting himself on the budget surplus, opposing a $20 billion "raid" on the surplus for spending programs, but supporting using $80 billion for tax cuts, which she says is, in effect, "new spending."
To Mr. Chabot, the equation was simple: one equaled "pork;" the other, tax relief for working families.
Despite his solid conservative credentials, Mr. Chabot has developed a reputation for working with individual House Democrats on specific pieces of legislation. He has co-sponsored bills with liberal Democrats Joseph Kennedy of Massachusetts, Major Owens of Brooklyn, N.Y., and Zoe Lofgren of California.
"He is as straight a shooter as I have ever met on Capitol Hill," said John Kasich, the Columbus Republican who chairs the House Budget Committee. "He is a genuinely decent human being.
"When he tells you something, you can believe it. You don't have to worry about some hidden agenda. He is what he is."
One of the things he is now is a congressman who is a member of the House Judiciary Committee, the panel that will take up the possible impeachment of President Clinton. Being part of what is only the third presidential impeachment inquiry in the nation's history is a long way from Mr. Chabot's roots as a storefront lawyer in Westwood.
As a conservative Republican, he has never been a fan of Mr. Clinton, either personally or politically. But as a committee member, Mr. Chabot has walked a tightrope. He won't prejudge the case, but is clear he does not approve of the president's behavior.
"I think (Mr. Clinton's) behavior was reprehensible," Mr. Chabot said recently. "People say to me all the time, "What do we say to our kids about this?'
"It's hard to explain to your children, how a president could behave this way. Perjury, abuse of office, witness tampering, obstruction of justice. These are all very serious charges."
Sometimes, when Mr. Chabot is talking about his Judiciary Committee job, it becomes clear even he has a hard time imagining sometimes how far he has come since he was the lanky 20-year-old in the wedding suit beaming on the cover of his campaign literature.
"I never thought I'd find myself in the position of judging a president on all of this."
