I'm afraid the same issues that dogged Schmidt now will still be around in 2006, if not even more magnified. The Taft/Householder scandals have hardly hit their peak. I think voters will be more angry with Taft in 2006 than they are now, as more about his scandals comes to light.
Householder and his team will be indicted before then. This will hurt Schmidt more than the Taft scandals. She's extremely close to Team Householder. I heard she's even the godmother to Brett Buerek's child. (Brett is a prime target of federal corruption probe.) When these two guys get indicted, Schmidt will have an even bigger target painted on her than she does now.
We need to take out Schmidt in the 2006 primary so that Hackett can't ride the Taft/Householder corruption to the final 4% of the vote he needs. Just replace her with *any* clean, anti-tax conservative. I don't care if it's a "name" like Tom Brinkman or a no-name like Jeff Morgan or Steve Austin. Clean conservative = Republican hold.
Nominate Schmidt again, and we just might blow that final 4%. And if she doesn't blow it, we're stuck with a compulsive taxaholic anyways. I don't want either of these tax-hiking crooks as my congressman. Just give us a clean conservative.
I've got bad news for you that I don't necessarily think is bad news for OH-02. I anticipate that Bush and Rove will back Jean Schmidt in the 2006. In fact I would be surprised if they didn't.
I also think that now that she is out of the Taft-driven mess in Columbus, she will move much closer to being an economic conservative than she was in Columbus.
Statewide, Ken Blackwell needs to win, win big, and clean House.
Hackett has been busy the past couple of days trashing any future chance he might have in the district. Maybe he thinks it's a way for him to move to the national stage (doubtful) In a couple of interviews, he's crossed into moonbat land, not backing off the SOB and chicken hawk remarks, and claiming that the Iraq situation is creating a lot of soldier-Democrats. Uh-huh.