GLENN WINS FIGHT OF POLITICAL LIFE

NEWS

Glenn appeared elated but still angry by the tone of the campaign when he made his acceptance speech about 11 p.m.

"I hope tonight signaled the beginning of the end of the politics of sleaze and smear and character assassination," Glenn said.

The crowd cheered his victory and chanted, "No more sleaze. No more sleaze."

With 30 percent of the vote tallied, Glenn had 54 percent compared with 46 percent for DeWine.
Heavy turnout in the Democratic strongholds of northeast and northwest Ohio helped propel Glenn to victory. DeWine fared well in central and southwest Ohio.

The race is DeWine's only defeat in his 19-year political career.

He conceded defeat to Glenn in a 10:15 p.m. telephone call and told a subdued Republican crowd moments later, "We will be back."

Glenn's victory comes the same year as an angry electorate supported Ohio ballot issues for term limits by a ratio of more than 2 to 1. Glenn, 71, becomes the first in Ohio history to be elected to four consecutive Senate terms.

It came as the nation bounced out an older, incumbent president for a baby boomer promising change.

Democratic strategists said the pro-Glenn and pro-term limit votes show that DeWine - a conservative former congressman from Cedarville - simply was not regarded as a credible agent of change.

DeWine, 45, began the race an underdog.

With the aid of a top-notch campaign team, DeWine took on a formidable - although damaged opponent - with a vengeance.

He kept Glenn on the defensive with regularity, assailing him for unpaid debt from his 1984 presidential campaign and harping on his relationship with now-jailed savings and loan swindler Charles Keating.

The persistent attacks angered Glenn and initially caught him off guard. Glenn acted as if no one had ever talked about him that way before.

DeWine's strategy, coupled with voters' anti-incumbent mood, helped narrow the large gap between them. Polls taken one week before the election showed the race too close to call.

The closer it became, the angrier Glenn got. When Glenn got angry, he got better. Nothing, it seemed, made him angrier than DeWine's TV ads that featured a mechanical drum-playing astronaut, a spoof of the Energizer bunny. The ads spotlighted Glenn's presidential campaign debt and as a mechanical astronaut burst onto the screen, an announcer said, "Glenn keeps owing and owing and owing."

By dressing the bunny in a space suit, the DeWine campaign gave Glenn the opening needed to remind voters of one of America's proudest moments - 30 years ago, when the plumber's son from New Concord, Ohio, was the first American to orbit the Earth.

But DeWine kept coming and coming, appearing oblivious to the fact that his attacks on the aging hero weren't sitting well, even with some Republicans.

Still, DeWine ends the race in better shape than he started. Most Ohioans now know who he is.

DeWine, who remains lieutenant governor, ends with the distinction of being the only person to came close to unseating one of Ohio's most famous politicians.