Martin Gottlieb is a retired editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News and the author of “Campaigns Don’t Count: How the Media Get American Politics All Wrong.“
After reaching his pinnacle of success with the chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee and serving briefly, Rep. Mike Turner has been fired for being insufficiently MAGA.
The seeds of both his rise and his fall can be seen in his early years. But I certainly wouldn’t have predicted the fall.
I was present at the creation. His first candidacy was for mayor of Dayton in 1993. I was on the editorial board of the Dayton Daily News.
We met him when he showed up for a mass interview with all the mayoral candidates. There were six or eight.
He was the only Republican running in an officially non-partisan race. The party organization had declined to put up a candidate, saying that the city was hopelessly Democratic. I wrote a column denouncing that decision. I said the Republicans had an obligation to participate. And I said that an attractive, moderate Republican with a record of civic engagement could win, because the Democratic incumbent was politically weak.
Mayor Mike Turner was reasonable and moderate. Mostly
Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, questions Ambassador Kurt Volker, former special envoy to Ukraine, and Tim Morrison, a former official at the National Security Council, as they testify before the House Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Nov. 19, 2019, during a public impeachment hearing of President Donald Trump’s efforts to tie U.S. aid for Ukraine to investigations of his political opponents.
In the mass interview, we asked all the candidates why they were running. Turner said roughly, well, Martin wrote a column saying the Republicans should put up a candidate of a certain type, and I couldn’t name anybody else who fit that bill.
Now, of course, I’m not responsible for his choice of politics as a career. At most, I might have played a small role in determining the timing of his first race, but I kind of doubt it.
Ultimately, our left-of-center editorial board got behind him aggressively in his mayoral race.
We didn’t see ideology as a big factor in local affairs. Governance was about competence, ethics, energy, pragmatism.
Turner was clearly the most articulate and impressive of the candidates. He had as many on-paper qualifications as anybody. He seemed reasonable and moderate. He said that in college he had supported Democrat Gary Hart’s run for president.
He won.
The view was widespread that the newspaper played a major role in that. In office for two terms, he did check all those boxes above: competence, etc.
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He was very hands-on, so detail oriented that he would often lose me in discussions of policy. He had an abrasive side. There was substantial friction with the otherwise Democratic city commission. The tensions reflected not ideology but mainly the charge that the Democrats had gotten in the habit of running the city government as their own little possession.
The first time an ideologically divisive issue arose, it was gay rights. Turner took a combative conservative position, disappointing some of us. But it must be said that times were different, and some presumed liberals on the commission and elsewhere agreed with him.
Turner lost his race for for a third term as mayor in 2001.
Urban Republican Mike Turner goes to Washington
*NUS Congressman Tony Hall (Dem.- Ohio) is greeted by Debert Perry, (in ball cap) a Vinton County Commissioner, and Irv Starr, of Vinton County, in green shirt which reads hunger hurts, after he got off the a renovated bus from Miami Valley Regional Transit Tuesday in McArthur, Ohio. This was bus was donated to the people in Vinton County as a transportation option. The county has a high unemployment rate and this will provide transportation for those who don’t have a car or who can’t drive. The county hopes to setup a mini- transit authority. The bus is a 40 foot GMC and it can hold 43passengers.
When Turner ran for Congress in 2002, it was for a seat being vacated by Democratic Rep. Tony Hall after many years.
We endorsed Turner, seeing him as an “urban Republican.” We knew he’d vote with the Republicans nearly all the time, but we thought there would be occasional exceptions and that he’d be useful in shaping legislation with the needs and circumstances of cities in mind.
Ironically, given how his career developed, Turner once floated to me the idea that members of the House of Representatives should stay out of foreign policy, leaving it to the Senate.
The context was Tony Hall’s deep involvement in international humanitarian problems such as famines. But it was probably inevitable that the representative of Wright Patterson Air Force Base would get into foreign policy.
In that realm, Turner has been a traditional Republican. He fairly regularly criticizes the Democrats. But he’s been an internationalist and has often found major common ground across party lines.
On domestic issues, he has cast an occasional Democratic-looking vote, in support of minimum wage increases, for example.
He joined a group of relatively moderate House Republicans called the Main Street Caucus. He got involved in non-partisan causes, like the battle against rape in the military. And he tended to the interests of his district, focusing relentlessly on Wright-Patt. He pursued the identity of “moderate.” We’re talking moderate conservative, of course.
Mike Turner is no maverick
At a certain stage, Turner’s district became solidly Republican as the result of redistricting.
He seemed to become more conservative with time. He was combatively anti-Obama, a reliable vote against that president’s controversial initiatives, starting with the big bailouts in the wake of the economy’s collapse of 2008.
In the Trump years he has not been a maverick.
He voted against Trump’s first impeachment. He went on Fox (not a place he once seemed suited to) to claim that a certain obscure development had destroyed the case for impeachment. However, he did criticize the phone call that got Trump impeached as “not okay,” putting him at odds with the fellow who thought it was “perfect.”
In the second impeachment, Turner took refuge in the claim that the process was inappropriately rushed (because Trump was leaving office). He voted no.
Turner supported Trump in enough controversies that in 2022, when Turner was contemplating a run for the Senate, he put together a video that included Trump saying nice things about him.
It seems odd to give Turner credit for voting to confirm the results of the 2020 presidential election; he was just doing his job. But that was a defining moment as to his position in the Republican Party. Two-thirds of House Republicans voted the other way.
From the perspective of a few years ago, it also seems strange to give Turner much credit for supporting Ukraine. Why wouldn’t anybody support Ukraine? It’s not as if Americans are paying a major price for that war. We’re not sending troops, and we’re not really sending much money. We’re sending war materiel that American workers and companies are being paid to produce. The money is going to Americans. Yes, it’s an expense for the government, but come on: most of the opponents of it want to increase defense spending.
Mike Turner is a little to old-school
Turner’s rise in Congress did not come swiftly.
He’s been there 22 years; only 13 members of the House have been there over 20. He should be chairman of something big. Over the years, he failed to get some choice assignments he sought, perhaps in part because he was too moderate. He finally got his shot two years ago on Intel.
So this has to hurt.
The balancing act that got him elected Republican mayor of a hugely Democratic city twice, that got him elected to represent Tony Hall’s old district, that kept either Republicans or Democrats from challenging him powerfully for re-election, and that might have hindered him in his congressional climb, that balancing finally ran into a Republican ethic that sees balance as old-school.
Turner’s calling card as chairman has been “bipartisanship.” Talk about old-school. For that to work for him, Trump had to lose in 2024. And even then there’d be a problem in the House.
Martin Gottlieb is retired after 27 years as an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News. He is the author of two books including, “Lincoln’s Northern Nemesis: The War Opposition and Exile of Ohio’s Clement Vallandigham.”
Turner is not the kind of guy you picture dying politically over a principle.
And he was always eager to be on the team. But his commitment to Ukraine grew naturally out of his general foreign policy views and connections and his knowledge of the situation. And he didn’t run the Intel committee as Trump would have, driven by hostility to the Intel community. On those subjects – as on the 2020 election – his views were too much like common sense for the rest of the Republican Party now.
Martin Gottlieb is a retired editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News and the author of “Campaigns Don’t Count: How the Media Get American Politics All Wrong.“
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Was this Ohio Republican too bipartisan for Trump? | Opinion
