Turning OH-02 into Springfield (from the Simpsons)

This is the time when elections are won or lost, and when the smarter politicians usually button down and try to get out their most committed supporters. Unless you're in fear of losing, and you make mistakes like saying your district would be a great place to dump nuclear waste:

This doesn't happen every day: An incumbent member of Congress, in the middle of a re-election battle, says that storing nuclear waste shipments from around the world in her district may be a good idea.

U.S. Rep. Jean Schmidt does say that, and her support for studying the idea has become an issue in her re-election campaign, especially in rural Pike County, in the far eastern end of her sprawling Southern Ohio District, where the nuclear wastes would be stored.

"I'm not advocating for it one way or the other," Schmidt told The Enquirer. "I'm saying it is something we need to look at."

Schmidt said she sees potential to create "hundreds, maybe thousands of jobs" in an economically distressed part of the state, where double-digit unemployment rates are the norm.

Hundreds of jobs exposing oneself to nuclear radiation, that is. I don't advocate a NIMBY approach to problem-solving, but even I would give pause to having a nuclear waste dump next to my house.

Schmidt, you remember, called ex-Marine John Murtha a coward on the House floor last year, just a couple months after entering Congress by the skin of her teeth in a mostly Republican district after fending off Paul Hackett. This year Dr. Victoria Wulsin is in a dead heat, and with positions like this, Schmidt could be a one-and-done.