Brown fosters image of friend to ‘the little guy’

Toledo Blade

Every fighter has a story - crime-fighters, prizefighters, even self-styled fighters for the middle class.

Sherrod Brown's story is missing something. Or maybe it's backwards. Here's the rub:

Ask Mr. Brown, the Democratic congressman riding a blue-collar steam engine through Ohio's U.S. Senate race this fall, who taught him about social justice. I don't know, he says. My dad was good to his patients. My mom said respect your elders, whatever race or class. They could have joined a country club but didn't.

Ask Mr. Brown, who wears a miner's caged canary where most politicians pin an American flag, when he first toured a coal shaft or a steel plant. I don't know, he says. After I got into politics, probably. I used to lunch with steelworkers on legislative breaks.

But ask Democrats or Republicans what occupies Mr. Brown in the U.S. House, what he'd focus on in the Senate, and they all say the same thing: International trade. Health care. Working family issues.

"Everything that he does," says U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone (D., N.J.), one of Mr. Brown's closest political allies, "is always out of concern for the little guy and fighting the bad corporate interests."

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10/23/2006 / Permalink / Sherrod Press, (all tags)