Sunday, December 12, 1999
Republican leadership hit by a little revolution
BY HOWARD WILKINSON
The Cincinnati Enquirer
So you thought Republicans in Hamilton County were an orderly bunch, an army that marches lockstep over whatever cliff the party leadership points it toward, smiling all the way? Well, guess again.
The Hamilton County Republican Party, a political machine that has held county government in a vise-grip for the better part of the century, started coming apart like a cheap suit this past week.
Abortion foes and the anti-tax crowd are in full rebellion, running candidates against the party's anointed in solidly Republican Ohio House districts. Solid, bedrock Republican foot soldiers in places like Anderson and Sycamore townships are acting like Chechen rebels, tired of being treated like potted plants by the party leadership downtown.
Some Republicans are even trying to talk two Democrats — Dusty Rhodes and Jerry Luebbers — into running for Hamilton County commissioner.
Are these truly the end times?
The internal dissension in the party — dissension that had been percolating just below the surface for years — bubbled over this week, and the party chairman, H.C. Buck Niehoff, was sitting in the hot seat when it happened.
So Mr. Niehoff is out, and Ohio Treasurer Joe Deters, the former county prosecutor, has stepped in to become the new party chairman, volunteering to cart off the dead and wounded and take a head count of the survivors.
A lot of people seem to want to blame the meltdown at GOP headquarters on Mr. Niehoff, who, a year ago, came from the rather antiseptic world of party fund raising to the rough-and-tumble of running a political party.
Mr. Niehoff, first of all, is a very nice fellow, someone you would enjoy pulling up a chair with at the Mercantile Library and chatting with about a new book you like.
As a political party chairman, though, we always had an impression that he was something of an E.T. character, his spaceship marooned on a plan et of talking apes who would lie, cheat, scheme and generally behave badly in order to get what they wanted.
Politicians, that is.
Mr. Niehoff never seemed to understand such creatures. When he cooked up ideas like an endorsement process to weed out a small army of potential Ohio House candidates so the party could avoid bloody primary battles, he did not seem to understand that there would be people who, for ideological reasons or personal political agendas, just would not play along.
So it blew up in his face.
This came after an episode last summer where the party tried to get Democrat Paul Booth kicked off the Cincinnati council ballot and managed only to turn him into St. Paul of Oakley. This also followed a council election where the GOP missed what might be its last chance to win a majority.
All on Mr. Niehoff's watch.
Some say he was not tough enough, but there is no rule that says you have to be a jerk to be a political party leader. Mr. Niehoff's predecessors, Mike Allen and Gene Ruehlmann, are nice fellows, too. You would be hard-pressed to find a better gentleman than Gene Ruehlmann, but under the velvet glove was an iron fist. You did not mess with Gene.
Mr. Niehoff, we think, would rather not deal with it.
But the problems in the Hamilton County Republican Party go a lot deeper than any individual or any hare-brained scheme hatched at party headquarters.
What really has the Republican rank-and-file's blood boiling is a party that, for decades now, seems to back every tax increase that comes along and fields candidates who don't sound very conservative and who consort with known Democrats.
The party in Hamilton County, it seems, has had two guiding principles:
1. Keep the business people happy, because they write the checks.
2. Find our idiot nephews county jobs so our sisters will get off our backs.
Not much of a platform for a bunch of conservatives to run on.
E-mail at hwilkinson@enquirer.com
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