The speeches and motions of the summer meeting of the Republican National Committee closely follow the nation's latest political reality check, a narrow win for the GOP candidate in a closely watched special congressional election in Ohio.

Republican Jean Schmidt edged Democrat Paul Hackett in the Tuesday balloting to fill the balance of the term of former U.S. Rep. Rob Portman, who resigned the Cincinnati-area seat this year to accept President Bush's nomination to be U.S. trade representative.

Schmidt's relatively narrow margin, 52 percent to 48 percent in a heavily Republican district carried by President Bush with successive landslide margins, was seized upon by Democrats as a harbinger of jeopardy for Republicans in next year's midterm congressional elections.

Hackett, an Iraq war veteran, tried to buttress his campaign with repeated attacks on Bush and efforts to tie Schmidt to Ohio Gov. Bob Taft, whose administration has been enmeshed in controversy spurred in part by the Toledo Blade's revelations about a rare-coin dealer's handling of state investment funds.

"There's no safe district," Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told The Associated Press. "You can run but you can't hide."

Republican officials attending a session of the RNC's rules committee yesterday insisted that the result was not a cause for alarm, but rather a reminder that the party apparatus needs to be on alert next year.

"My reaction is that a win is a win," said David Norcross, a Republican national committeeman from New Jersey who had just been installed as chairman of the RNC's rules committee. "We knew that danger lurked there; they had an attractive candidate. If we had not been prepared, if we had not been on our game, we might have lost. But we were prepared."

Other Republicans maintained that the particular factors influencing the Ohio contest made it an unreliable gauge for future election prospects.

"Tip O'Neill said all politics is local," said Jack Ryder of Tennessee, chairman of the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, cautioning against drawing broad conclusions from one contest.

While the Ohio race was the focus of national attention from both parties, voter turnout was roughly a third of that for last year's presidential election.

"Special elections are just that -- special. It's always harder to turn out your base," said Carol Jean Jordan, chairwoman of the Florida Republican Party. "It does show we can't take anything for granted."