Since the Democrats announced their 2012 convention will be held in Cincinnati, in my home state of Ohio (Albeit a good 350 km away from me), earlier this morning, I was reading up about the city on Freepedia. In particular, I was curious about the namesake of the planned convention venue, the Gerald N. Springer International Convention Center, informally known as just the Jerry Springer Center.
It turns out he was once a very promising Democratic politician in Cincinnati. Born in England to Jewish refugees from the Nazis, moved to the US with his parents as a young child, and became an adviser to Bobby Kennedy and a nationally known advocate for lowering the voting age to 18. After moving to Cincinnati, he ran for Congress in 1970 and got 45% of the vote against the incumbent in a heavily Republican district, then won election to the city council the next year. Just as quickly as his rise though, he fell, when police found in 1974 he wrote a check to pay for a prostitute across the river in Kentucky. While under investigation, he killed himself by driving his car into the Ohio River.
But what if he had lived? By all accounts, he was extremely charismatic and popular, and drew votes even from people who disagreed with him just because he was seen as a rare breed of honest and principled politician. He would have to either avoid the scandal or recover from it (The later would be difficult, but not impossible, especially for a smart and charismatic politician like he was. Think Senator Bill Clinton, who won reelection to a second, third, and just last year fourth term despite his sex scandal in the late 90s) if he wanted to get any further in politics, but apparently he is seen as something of a Kennedyesque figure in Cincinnati; a tragic figure who could've been much more.
Given that the death of a local politician, no matter how much potential he had, isn't likely to cause many butterflies, the Bingham Amendment still passes in 1976 due to the popularity of Henry Kissinger, paving the way for his election to the Presidency in 1980, so if Springer was successful, could he rise all the way to the top, maybe leading a progressive reaction to the conservative renaissance under Presidents Kissinger and Laxalt and preempting the Democratic Party's shift towards neoliberalism under President Tsongas?