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"A comprehensive, collaborative elections resource."
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Who is Sherrod Brown?
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| Parent(s) |
Candidate
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| Contributor | RP |
| Last Edited | RP Nov 21, 2005 04:21pm |
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| Category | Profile |
| Media | Analysis Magazine - In These Times |
| News Date | Monday, November 21, 2005 10:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Brown, a huge baseball fan and an avid athlete, will to need to marshal every last bit of his considerable energy in the next year as he seeks to be become the first Democratic senator from the state of Ohio since John Glenn retired in 1998. He faces a primary challenge from Iraq war veteran and Internet darling Paul Hackett; if he wins the primary, he’ll face Republican incumbent Mike DeWine, a senator with some of the lowest approval ratings in the country, but a seat that the Republicans will zealously defend. With Ohio still the nation’s premier political battlefield, the race will be one of next year’s most-watched campaigns: If a bedrock economic populist like Brown can win in a red state, it will explode the post-Clinton conventional wisdom that anything resembling “class warfare” is a non-starter for the Democrats.
But Brown’s decision to enter the race after first saying he wouldn’t prompted paroxysms of recrimination and anger in the blogosphere. “Brown’s indecision created an ugly and totally unnecessary scene,” wrote blogger Lindsay Beyerstein, one of Hackett’s most prominent online supporters. “If he’d declared in the first place, Hackett probably wouldn’t have challenged him for the nomination. Now, there’s probably going to be a nasty little primary and lasting bad blood amongst Ohio Democrats. These are very real costs that Brown chose to inflict on his party.”
Brown lacks the national profile of colleagues like Dennis Kucinich and Bernie Sanders, but for the duration of his six-and-a-half terms in office, he has been one of Congress’s most stalwart progressives. “I’ve known him for many years,” says Sanders. “What’s very clear is that Sherrod Brown knows which side of the struggle he is on.” And when Brown’s friend John Ryan, executive secretary of the Cleveland AFL-CIO, says, “Sherrod Brown is one of us,” he means it in the literal, familial sense. Brown’s older daughter Emily is a union organizer for SEIU. When I met Brown, Emily had just lost a union election in a New Jersey nursing home. “She was crushed,” Brown told me. “I mean, it’s horrible. Have you ever sat and watched an election? They count the votes publicly and you can tell within 15 votes what’s going to happen, and the workers are scared. … It’s pretty depressing for the organizer but it’s more depressing for the workers.” |
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