WSJ: Democrats Wager on a Long Shot

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The Wall Street Journal

July 10, 2006

Democrats Wager on a Long Shot

Kentucky Republican's Seat Joins Expanding Battlefield In the Fight for U.S. House
By DAVID ROGERS
July 10, 2006; Page A6

BARDSTOWN, Ky. -- "Dusty Bibles Lead to Dirty Lives" warns a church sign in nearby Hardin County. And forgetting your roots can be hell in Kentucky politics. That is the charge Democrats hope to make against Republican Rep. Ron Lewis, a Baptist minister born in a log cabin who won his seat in Congress in 1994 on a platform promising term limits. Twelve years later, that platform has faded and Mr. Lewis is the picture of the entrenched incumbent: earning $165,000 a year, sitting on a powerful House committee and controlling a campaign chest heavily funded by business and that has paid thousands to his wife, Kayi, for her work as a campaign worker.

The campaign payments to Mrs. Lewis stopped this year, but taxpayer money is paying for mass mailings and teleconferenced town-hall meetings that are more frequent than Mr. Lewis's speaking appearances on the House floor. When pressed by a caller to a local radio show, Mr. Lewis promises to be open to raising the federal minimum wage. But his voting record is mixed on the issue, and he has lent little help to lawmakers trying to extend the child-tax credit to minimum-wage workers whose income is so low they don't qualify.

"Ron Lewis has forgotten where he came from," says Democratic challenger Mike Weaver, a 67-year-old retired Army colonel and state legislator who laces his stump speeches with quotes from Gen. George Patton. " 'When everybody's thinking alike, somebody's not thinking,' " is a Patton line that Mr. Weaver borrows to describe the Republican lock on Washington. Mr. Lewis is part of that mind-set, Mr. Weaver says: "He's a very nice person who follows with loyalty to his party." If Democrats are to gain the 15 seats needed to control the House, they must widen the battlefield with long-shot sleeper races like this one. In a state with a high poverty rate, the Second District contest is between two men who struggled with poverty and now crystallize the debate over income inequality in the nation. And with U.S. troops in Iraq, war's hand is felt here in places like Bardstown, where four men from a local National Guard battery were killed in a single day in Vietnam decades ago.

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Mr. Lewis would argue he has done a great deal. In 2004, he helped engineer with Kentucky's senators a multibillion-dollar buyout of a Depression-era tobacco quota system that had become a burden to the state's growers. And his staff provides a list of items added to tax bills over the years to help local manufacturers and state interests. But his lack of visibility -- he speaks on the House floor only every other month -- hurts. A Taylor County farmer dismisses Mr. Lewis as a McConnell "puppet." One of the congressman's prized initiatives -- a bill to allow Congress to overrule Supreme Court decisions -- has yet to get a hearing from fellow Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee. And Mr. Weaver scoffs at Mr. Lewis's claim that he "saved" Fort Knox during Army base closings last year. "He was just there like all of us were" says Mr. Weaver, whose Army and legislative ties made him part of the same lobbying effort.

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