Bob McEwen

Bob McEwen

Robert D. McEwen was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from southern Ohio’s Sixth District. He was elected to Congress at the age of thirty to replace a retiring representative in 1980 and easily won re-election five times. He narrowly lost the 1992 general election to Democrat Ted Strickland. In 2005, he sought the Republican nomination for Congress in the Second District special election to replace Rob Portman, who beat him in 1993, and finished second to the winner in the general election.

About Bob McEwen in brief

Summary Bob McEwenRobert D. McEwen was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from southern Ohio’s Sixth District. He was elected to Congress at the age of thirty to replace a retiring representative in 1980 and easily won re-election five times. He narrowly lost the 1992 general election to Democrat Ted Strickland. In 2005, he sought the Republican nomination for Congress in the Second District special election to replace Rob Portman, who beat him in 1993, and finished second to the winner in the general election, Jean Schmidt. He is married to the former Elizabeth Boebinger and has four children: Meredith, Jonathan, Robert, and Elizabeth. In Congress, he was a staunch conservative, advocating a strong military. He also was a strong advocate for government works in his district — dams, roads, locks and the like much as Harsha had been — as McE Owen was on the House’s Public Works and Transportation Committee. A vehement anti-Communist, he visited Tbilisi in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia in 1991 to help tear down the hammer-and-sickle iconography of the Communist regime. When elected in 1980, the Sixth District consisted of parts of Clinton, Fayette, Greene, and Highland Counties and all of Madison County. The Sixth District redrew the boundaries following the 1980 Census following the 1997 reapportionment of the Ohio General Assembly. It had been in Republican hands since a 1959 special election. The district included all of Clinton and Fayette County and parts of Warren and Vinton County from 1983 to 1987.

It was described as a’safe Republican district’ in the Washington Post as it had been a Republican-safe district since 1959. In the House, he criticized government incompetence and charged corruption by the Democratic majority that ran the House in the 1980s. He advocated an anti-abortion stance, defending Second Amendment rights, and promising to limit taxes and government spending. He has a reputation as a man who thinks about politics every waking moment, claimed Congressional Quarterly, and is opposed to abortion, gun control and high taxes. He earned a Bachelor’s in Business Administration from the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida in 1972 and a Law degree from Ohio State University’s College of Law for one year from 1972 to 1973. In 1976, his plurality against Democrat L. James Matter was 14,816 votes, a number larger than the votes cast for Matter. He was re-elected to two more two-year terms in the 72nd House District representing southern Ohio. In 2008, he ran for the Republican Party’s nomination for Ohio’s Second District and lost to Jean Schmidt, a Republican who had served in the Ohio House for more than 20 years. In 2010, he lost a special election for the GOP nomination for the Ohio Second District, which included parts of Vinton and Warren counties. In 2011, he won the Republican party’s nomination to represent Ohio’s Third District. In 2012, he served as a vice president of a real estate company.