Rightank

Ken Blackwell, Ohio’s Secretary of State, is the leading Republican candidate for the 2006 gubernatorial race. Blackwell faces opposition in the Republican party ranks, against two liberal Republicans–Jim Petro and Betty Montgomery. As an Ohioian, I heartily and eagerly support Blackwell because he is a true conservative–an individual who abhors high taxes, believes in small government, and supports traditional morality (i.e. opposes same-sex marriage).

City Journal’s Steven Malanga discusses Blackwell’s run for the governorship and explains why this race has race-dividing Democrats and liberal Republicans worried:

Right now, Ken Blackwell stands at a pivotal point in American politics. He’s taken an early lead in the race for governor of a state that was key to reelecting George W. Bush and that may well be even more crucial in picking the next American president. Moreover, Blackwell has built his early lead not by tacking toward the center of this swing state but by running on an uncompromisingly conservative platform that’s won him grassroots support from both Christian groups and taxpayer organizations—a novel coalition that makes the old-boy network in his own Ohio GOP as uneasy as it makes the state’s Democrats, who have begun a “stop Blackwell” campaign.

Ken Blackwell has so many people worried because he represents a new political calculus with the power to shake up American politics. For Blackwell is a fiscal and cultural conservative, a true heir of the Reagan revolution, who happens to be black, with the proven power to attract votes from across a startlingly wide spectrum of the electorate. Born in the projects of Cincinnati to a meat-packer who preached the work ethic and a nurse who read to him from the Bible every evening, Blackwell has rejected the victimology of many black activists and opted for a different path, championing school choice, opposing abortion, and staunchly advocating low taxes as a road to prosperity. The 57-year-old is equally comfortable preaching that platform to the black urban voters of Cincinnati as to the white German Americans in Ohio’s rural counties or to the state’s business community.

Blackwell’s embrace of true conservatism is what makes his candidacy remarkable. In a state that has elected two liberal Republican senators (who can forget Voinovich’s crocodile tears in his unsuccessful fight against John Bolton’s nomination to the U.N. ambassadorship) and a not-so-conservative Republican Governor (Bob Taft), Blackwell’s election would turn the liberals upside down. Blackwell is more than Reagan’s heir, he is the embodiment of Reagan conservatism. From a national perspective, a Governor Blackwell might be a sign to liberal Republicans to either get rid of their socially destructive views or leave. Even more important, it would signal to true conservatives within the Republican Party that fiscal and social conservatism is the winning ticket. Grass roots support for state constitutional amendments protecting marriage evince this type of conservative victory. Blackwell exemplifies this dynamic:

[Blackwell’s] early lead in the 2006 gubernatorial race is as much a product of support for his cultural agenda from the state’s increasingly active religious organizations, an agenda that places him even further out of step with the Ohio GOP than his fiscal agenda. He strongly supported a 2004 ballot initiative defining marriage as between a man and a woman, vigorously opposed by most key state Republican figures and by some business groups, who clearly misread voter sentiment. The initiative, pundits say, sparked record turnout in the 2004 election, drawing out Christian voters and other cultural conservatives, who helped give President Bush a 119,000-vote margin in a state where the race seemed much tighter. The amendment had far broader appeal than the president did: it attracted half a million more votes in Ohio than Bush and won with a 62 to 38 percent margin.

After Blackwell wins the Republican primary, Democrats will scramble to bolster support for their candidate–the anti-conservative. As the Anti-Federalists fell, so will the anti-conservative Democratic candidate fall in Ohio. Ken Blackwell is a politician that true conservatives can bank on.