Chelmsford, Mass.
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. “We just had more bums,” he says in his Boston accent, speaking almost as quickly as he does bluntly. “People are fed up with Washington, D.C.”
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. Ogonowski believes that voters’ frustration with a “broken Congress” will propel him to victory in the October 16 special election. Yet, the odds are stacked against him: A paltry 14 percent of voters in the district are registered Republicans.
The race should have been a cakewalk for his Democratic opponent, Niki Tsongas, the widow of Massachusetts senator and 1992 presidential candidate Paul Tsongas. But Ogonowski is just 10 points behind in the latest SurveyUSA poll. 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.
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. (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.”) 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.
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.”
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.” If history is any guide, 5th District voters take issue with an elite politician linked to attacks on the troops. The last time a Republican won this congressional seat was 1972, when Paul Cronin upset John Kerry’s first run for elective office. 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.”
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. 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.” Tsongas endorses a bill that calls for all the troops to be withdrawn within 270 days of its passage. 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.”
“The kind of situation you are presuming” is the intentionally vague Washington way of saying “genocide.” This verbal tic pops up again and again when she’s asked about illegal immigration, the other big issue in the race. Tsongas favors a “pathway to citizenship” and supports “strong border security,” but she thinks a “virtual fence” might do the trick. What about a real fence made of steel or concrete? “I’d look at it,” she says. “I’d have to be very sure that it actually was going to be effective.”
Ogonowski passionately supports a border fence and opposes amnesty for illegal immigrants. He says amnesty is an affront to local voters, most of whose ancestors immigrated before the advent of the welfare state. “My great-grandmother came here in 1904, legally, with four kids–she was a widow,” says Ogonowski. “[Illegal immigrants] use our hospitals, they don’t pay taxes, they’re a drain on our society.” 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.”
Ogonowski is just as passionate of a campaigner. He’s lost 40 pounds thanks to his relentless schedule of door-to-door hand-shaking and walking in parades. 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.
Can Ogonowski’s dogged campaigning and unvarnished personality overcome Tsongas’s name recognition and war chest in a heavily Democratic district? “No,” says David King, a Harvard political science professor who focuses on Congress. “This election is all about turnout.” King also thinks it’s foolish to draw any national conclusions from this special election, saying, “This isn’t a referendum on Bush, period. This isn’t a referendum on Pelosi, period.”
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.
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. 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. 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.
Someone just like Jim Ogonowski.
John McCormack is an editorial assistant at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
