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Last Updated July 4, 2005
From its seven hills, Cincinnati, dubbed the Queen City of the West in the 19th century, looks down on the curves of the Ohio River. Ohio's first major metropolis and a heavily German beehive of riverboats and sausage factories, known in the 1850s as Porkopolis, this was the nation's fourth-largest city and a chief destination for slaves on the Underground Railroad at the outbreak of the Civil War, which has been memorialized at the new Freedom Center along the riverfront. Cincinnati has long given off an air of the recent past; Mark Twain said he'd like to be there for the apocalypse because everything in Cincinnati is 10 years behind. Growing slowly over many decades, Cincinnati has long-settled good looks and urbanity somehow consistent with its natural terrain: the bottomlands along the river, the hills and rolling terrain above. In the middle of Cincinnati is Mill Creek, lined with factories; on the hills to the west, above the restored Union Terminal with the children's, historic, and natural history museums, are the modest streetcar suburbs of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th. On Mount Adams and toward the northeast are set a string of affluent neighborhoods, with stately mansions like the William Howard Taft house, and the comfortable Tudors and colonials of the 20th century bourgeoisie--Reform Jewish as well as WASP and German. Families have lived for generations in the same neighborhoods, though typically not ethnic enclaves. Cincinnati was the site of great innovations: the first iron suspension bridge, in 1867, connecting Cincinnati to northern Kentucky and designed by John Roebling, who later built the Brooklyn Bridge; the first baseball team, the Red Stockings, in 1869; the country's leading Reform Jewish seminary, Hebrew Union College, in 1875. Cincinnati has not had the growth spurts of cities like Cleveland or Houston; it spawned not flashy but solid industries, America's biggest concentration of machine tool makers (now a fraction of its once-robust size), plus the Procter & Gamble soap business, with its twin-towered headquarters at the edge of downtown and its Ivorydale manufacturing facility, which has made soap since the 1880s. Downtown Cincinnati's spruced-up Fountain Square shows off well-maintained skyscrapers of the past plus a revival of museums and arts institutions; its first-class restaurants still attract a dressy clientele. Old ethnic neighborhoods on the west side, crowded with brick row houses on steep hills, keep their thick local accents and special local foods, from German sauerbrauten to Cincinnati chili in Price Hill and Camp Washington. Baseball's career hitting (and betting) leader Pete Rose grew up here, and many Catholic schools remain. Yet Cincinnati is not facing altogether good times. Crime has raged and there has been a flight to the suburbs; in the low-income Over-the-Rhine community (originally named because its residents crossed the canal that ran through downtown), riots broke out after a white police officer shot an unarmed young black man in 2001. The city's population declined 13% between 1990 and 2004. The 1st Congressional District of Ohio includes almost all of Cincinnati, except for parts of its affluent eastern edge, plus most of the middle-class suburbs that cling to the woody hills west of I-71 and south of I-275. It covers the southwest quarter of Butler County plus the western parts of Hamilton County all the way to the Indiana border, including North Bend, the home of President William Henry Harrison. Ancestrally Republican, Cincinnati was a German anti-slavery island in a Southern-stock pro-Confederate sea. City elections here were for years competitive between old-line Republicans and a combination of Democrats and Charterites (the latter started by Charles Taft, liberal brother of Senator Robert Taft Sr. and great-uncle of Governor Bob Taft). But with the recent population decline Cincinnati has become noticeably more Democratic, while the suburbs, which now cast more votes than the city, remain pretty heavily Republican. This leaves the 1st a closely divided district, one which George W. Bush carried with just 51% of the vote in 2000 and 2004. The congressman from the 1st District is Steve Chabot (pronounced SHAB-butt), a Republican first elected in 1994. Like so many of the local congressmen here over the decades, he grew up in Cincinnati and served on the city council; until recently, his home was around the corner from his mother's. He graduated from William and Mary, taught elementary school for a year, then graduated from Northern Kentucky law school and started a family law practice. In 1985, at 32, he was elected to the council, and in 1990 he was elected to the Hamilton County Commission. Chabot ran for Congress in odd circumstances. In 1992, first term Democrat Charles Luken (son of longtime incumbent Tom Luken) retired suddenly after the June primary; he later became mayor of Cincinnati. In the special primary to replace him, moderate Democratic Councilman David Mann defeated liberal state Senator William Bowen, by 416 votes, and won the general 51%-43%. In the House, Mann voted against the Clinton tax package and for NAFTA, which infuriated local unions; Bowen ran in the primary again in 1994 and this time Mann won by 667 votes. In the fall, Chabot backed the balanced budget amendment, strongly opposed abortion, and attacked Mann's support of Bill Clinton. Chabot won comfortably, 56%-44%. Chabot has a generally conservative voting record in the House, but he has been a maverick willing to split from his party and willing to take political risks for principle. He voted against the Appalachian Regional Commission, a $2 million study of light rail in the Cincinnati area and a bill containing $6 million for the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati; he argued that the city should solve problems with local resources and not depend on Washington. Despite a 5 a.m. phone call from George W. Bush, he was the only Ohio Republican to oppose the Medicare/prescription drug bill in November 2003. Most of his committee work has been on Judiciary. As chairman of the Constitution Subcommittee, perennially a forum for bitter ideological debate but little legislative action, he has been a House leader for a constitutional amendment to protect the rights of crime victims. In 2003 he helped to enact the partial-birth abortion ban by specifying its policy findings and narrowing its terms in an attempt to comply with Supreme Court decisions. He pushed measures to impose restrictions on minors who cross state lines to get an abortion and to make violence against an unborn child a crime. Chabot opposed the proposed constitutional amendment by Brian Baird to permit governors to fill House vacancies in the event of a national disaster. On the International Relations Committee, he is a founder of the Taiwan Caucus and he criticized the International Court of Justice advisory opinion on the legality of the Israeli security fence. In his first years in the House Chabot was a prime Democratic campaign target. In 1996 the AFL-CIO spent over $1 million, running nearly 2,000 television ads against him, but Chabot won 54%-43%. In 1998 Chabot was opposed by Cincinnati Mayor Roxanne Qualls. This was one of the hardest fought races in the country, and one of the most expensive. Qualls argued that Chabot's views were too conservative for the district; they disagreed on the partial-birth abortion ban and school vouchers. Chabot won 53%-47%. Redistricting made the district safer, and he won with 65% of the vote in 2002 and 60% in 2004.
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