Payback's a bitch

[whometense]

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/07/24/blackwell/

The votes don't add up

Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, accused of suppressing votes during the 2004 election, faces daunting polls of his own in his race for governor.

By Walter Shapiro


July 24, 2006 | COLUMBUS, Ohio -- The devastating poll results for Republican Ken Blackwell in Sunday's Columbus Dispatch -- showing him 20 points behind his Democratic rival in his bid to become the most conservative big-state governor in modern times -- would try the faith of any candidate. Instead, Blackwell spoke passionately for more than a half-hour Sunday morning to the congregation at the Pentecostal Potter's House Church of God as he testified to his Christian faith and to his belief in a thin permeable membrane separating pulpit and politics...

...After the service, I sat with Blackwell in the worship hall to discuss the seeming valley of death of his gubernatorial campaign. It takes a formidable talent for blarney for Blackwell to put a smile-button face on a poll that shows him trailing five-term Democratic Rep. Ted Strickland by 47 percent to 27 percent with a 2 percent margin of error. Even more devastating is the degree to which Blackwell's fire-breathing conservatism appears to be repelling moderate voters: Independents are breaking for Strickland better than 3-to-1.

"This poll hasn't told us anything that Fred Steeper's polls haven't told us going in," said Blackwell, referring to the handiwork of his own pollster. "And that is that the environment is not necessarily favorable and Ted is pretty much a blank slate. So his strategy is to make this race between him and Bob Taft ; between him and the war in Iraq; between him and George Bush. Anything but him and me."

Then Blackwell went on to claim -- even though most private statewide polls are reputedly in line with the Dispatch's lopsided numbers -- that Steeper's latest survey has him only 9 to 11 points behind. It is an iron law of politics that things are really bad when a candidate has to doggedly insist against evidence to the contrary that he is only 11 points behind...