Friday, Sep 5, 2008
Despite his conviction, his expulsion from the U.S. House and a really bad hairpiece, former Ohio Rep. Jim Traficant will find that some in Youngstown still love him.
Jul 25, 2002 | Congress' near-unanimous vote Tuesday night to expel nine-term Ohio congressman and convicted felon James Traficant was hardly a surprise to television viewers around the country who had glimpsed his bizarre defense against ethics charges in the past two weeks.
His references to "gastric emissions" and "Playboy bunnies" undoubtedly produced as many guffaws as his feral hairpiece and "Beam me up!" remarks on the floor of Congress regularly do. But the antics couldn't convince House colleagues to buy Traficant's argument that his recent federal conviction on bribery, corruption and racketeering charges was pure payback for his outspoken -- and at times outrageous -- views.
If Traficant's tale played as comedy to much of its national audience, the story takes on tragic overtones from the perspective of many in his northeastern Ohio district, where his fall from folk hero to felon mirrors Youngstown's calamitous descent from Steeltown U.S.A. to Crimetown U.S.A.
Traficant, only the second representative to be formally expelled from Congress since the Civil War, will be sentenced to up to seven years by a federal judge next week. But only the history of the once coal-rich Mahoning Valley and its fading fortunes can explain why some pundits predict that the Democrat-turned-Independent could net 20-some percent of the vote this fall for his old seat -- even if he runs from prison, as he has vowed to do.
During his 22 years in public office, he routinely garnered 70 percent or more of the local vote. His support is strongest among the over-50 population, according to Youngstown State University professor William Binning, chairman of the political science department. Not coincidentally, those are the same residents with the clearest memory of Youngstown's heyday as a steel-making giant.
While his stock has sunk since his indictment last year and conviction by a Cleveland jury in April, Traficant's maverick "up-yours" stance has long charmed Youngstowners whose falling out with the federal government began with the first steel mill closings in 1977, when the Carter administration refused to back a local plan for worker ownership of the plants.
"He represents a ... politics of resentment," notes YSU labor expert John Russo. "It's a resentment of the community for what happened to hard-working, salt-of-the-earth, good people who believed in the American dream."
A Youngstown native and high school football star, Traficant entered the political scene as sheriff in 1980. As 50,000 workers lost their jobs, unemployment reached 20 percent and the hardscrabble town became fed up with empty political promises, he cemented his position as a populist champion when he refused to foreclose on houses owned by laid-off steelworkers.
"I kind of feel a devotion to him," says Sandy Sayers, a law office clerk who grew up on the south side of Youngstown, where "black gold" once rested on every window sill and the sound of trains leaving the mills at night lulled residents to sleep. "He helped our community a lot. He's the only one that ever comes to fight for Youngstown when we have any problems," said Sayers, whose father and grandfather both worked in the mills. "I kind of feel that he's guilty of what he did, but show me one of them up there who aren't. I definitely think he was singled out."
It isn't the first time that Traficant's battles have become the community's. In 1983, when the government brought its first case against him, he became the first individual ever to beat federal racketeering charges without a lawyer: Despite taped evidence and a signed confession, he convinced a Cleveland jury that he had accepted a bribe only to carry out a one-man sting operation against local mobsters.
That defiance toward the U.S. Department of Justice only heightened his popularity, fueling his successful run for Congress a year later -- even as his mythic stature angered some in the business community. "He's personified and twisted the feeling that we've been left behind, that we've been victimized ... into a political culture that's incredibly self-destructive, and that's the tragedy," says Andrea Wood, publisher of the local Business Journal, who has covered Traficant since 1980, when she was a TV newscaster.
During his 18 years in Washington, he was noted for his disheveled suits and bell-bottoms, as well as his flippant one-minute speeches on the House floor. Often punctuated with the Star Trek catch phrase "Beam me up!," the statements, catalogued on his Web site, read like a mix of populist rhetoric and rap lyrics. In one such incantation in 1998, he riffed: "Does America now have two legal standards, one for you, one for me; one for he, one for she; one for generals, one for soldiers; one for presidents, one for residents?"
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