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)

Brown could make name for himself with Senate win

Cleveland Plain Dealer

It isn't easy for a die-hard Democrat like Sherrod Brown to get his way in Congress.

When Republicans call the shots, bills introduced by Democrats get fast-tracked to a Dumpster. When Republicans have the votes, trade agreements opposed by Democrats are fast-tracked into law.

...Brown, of Avon, has still managed to pass legislation by teaming with Republicans who agree with him on particular issues, like fighting bioterrorism, researching birth defects, reducing errors in hospitals and closing loopholes that let brand-name companies block generic drugs.

Brown worked on the bills - but Republicans got credit because they set the agenda.

"That's the way you have to do it if you're in the minority," Brown said.

...But groups that monitor health care say he has played a key legislative role as top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on health.

"Sherrod Brown has been extraordinarily effective in articulating helpful measures that would significantly improve the lives of children, seniors, people with disabilities and families generally," says Ron Pollack, executive director of the nonprofit, nonpartisan health care advocacy group Families USA.

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10/03/2006 / Permalink / Sherrod Press, (all tags)

Brown: Passionate about causes, persistent about change

The Democratic candidate has a casual style that belies an 'aggressive' approach to campaigning.

Dayton Daily News.

Call it Brown's great political skill: There is something about him — be it his raspy voice, unshined shoes or slightly wrinkled suit coat — that seems to quash formality and invite others to follow along.

It's a knack that has quelled a few potentially romantic dinners out with his wife of two years, Connie Schultz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer on leave from the paper.

The two will invariably go to a restaurant, where Schultz will ask the waitress whether she gets to keep her tips — a subject Schultz has written about. Then Brown will ask about the waitress' life, and the stories are often the stuff of heartbreak: Two jobs, long hours, no health insurance, living paycheck to paycheck.

"You believe it so deeply we can't even have a fun dinner out," Schultz teases him.

Schultz says this is the man she married. She recounts how her husband called her in tears the night that the House passed the bill creating Medicare Part D: He'd seen a poor, elderly black woman at a bus stop, and choked up, she said, "because of what Congress had done to her."

To hear Brown tell it, this year's race for the U.S. Senate is far more than a pitched battle between two longtime Ohio lawmakers on opposite ends of the aisle.

He portrays it as a battle against a Republican Party that has ignored the middle-class, bowed to big industry and forgotten the little guy. It's a David and Goliath-type battle, according to Brown, and the fast-talking and often irreverent 14-year-congressman paints himself as the fighter for the little guy, the David in this scenario.

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10/01/2006 / Permalink / Sherrod Press, (all tags)

The Test Case Race

American Prospect

In Ohio, Sherrod Brown is running for the Senate as Thomas Frank’s dream candidate. Can economic populism vanquish culture and terror in a red state? 

Brown’s is a populism of substance rather than style. He doesn’t do photo ops in duck blinds. That comes as a relief on a miserable summer day in Cincinnati, during the worst of a brutal heat wave. Instead of standing in 100-degree heat clutching a gun, Brown is in the air-conditioned lounge of a local nursing home doing yet another news conference -- this one on the failings of the 2003 Medicare prescription-drug law. Four TV crews are here to film the horror stories. One Medicare recipient admits that she’s taking dangerously low doses of her meds because they’re still unaffordable. A son tells how a private insurer forced his elderly mother into an overpriced drug plan. Brown, who looks more like a genial Rotary Club member than a liberal firebrand, listens intently to each story.

It’s hard to find a less jaded member of Congress than the 53-year-old Brown. Instead of going on golf junkets to Scotland, he travels to slums in Central America to meet with impoverished factory workers. Trade has been Brown’s signature issue in Congress -- he wrote a 2004 book called Myths of Free Trade: Why American Trade Policy Has Failed, and he led the fight last year in the House to stop the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), coming within just two votes of blocking it. Brown has also been one of the most passionate congressional opponents of the Iraq War, taking to the floor of the House before the war began to read letters from veterans opposing it.

The conventional wisdom holds that jumping from House to Senate requires less passion and more moderation. But Brown rejects the “Republican-lite” strategy. Some argue that “Mike DeWine’s here so I just have to be here,” he says, placing his hands so close together there’s no daylight between them. “But I’m going to make a sharp contrast between DeWine and me. ... I’m going to say he’s been against [raising] the minimum wage, I’m for it. He was for the war in Iraq, I’m against it. ... We’ll make the contrast on the energy bill, on stem cells, on issue after issue.”

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09/21/2006 / Permalink / 2006, Sherrod Press, (all tags)

What Can Sherrod Brown Do for the Democrats?

The Nation

Brown does not give up on blue-collar voters in forgotten cities like his hometown of Mansfield. With his Kennedyesque looks and Clintonesque memory for facts and figures--not just on hot-button issues but on projects like his successful fight to dramatically increase US support for international programs to combat tuberculosis--he moves easily through the political and social scenes of New York and Los Angeles, where he must raise money for a campaign that could cost $20 million. But he is, first and foremost, an Ohio boy. The son of a small-town doctor who grew up working summers on a family farm, he has spent his adult life representing automaking towns like Mansfield. Elected to the state legislature at 22 and as Secretary of State at 29, Brown in the early 1980s seemed destined to replace one of Ohio's Democratic senators, Howard Metzenbaum or John Glenn. Instead, his political career was derailed in 1990, when he lost the state post to Republican Bob Taft--now Ohio's scandal-plagued lame-duck governor--in a brutal election that saw state and national GOP operatives pour millions into an attack campaign intended to stop Brown in his tracks.

But Brown proved resilient. When a northern Ohio Congressional seat opened in 1992, he beat a well-funded Republican foe by running far ahead of the national Democratic ticket and arrived in Congress in time to vote against NAFTA. Representing a blue-collar district that was home to thousands of auto- and steelworkers, the Yale-educated Brown became their champion--not just in the House but in the streets of Seattle, where he marched in 1999 with Ohio unionists protesting the World Trade Organization. With Brown, workers come first, says John Ryan, longtime head of Cleveland's North Shore Federation of Labor, who recalls the Democrat's willingness "to take on the President of his own party by denying President Clinton fast-track authority" to negotiate trade agreements. Brown's tactical skills and his knowledge of the issues, which were recognized by House minority leaders Dick Gephardt and Nancy Pelosi when they made him point man in trade-policy fights with Democratic and Republican administrations, guaranteed that he would emerge in the Senate as one of his party's most effective spokesmen on economic issues.

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09/15/2006 / Permalink / Economy, Sherrod Press, (all tags)

Democrats, and Republicans, agree that Senate hopeful not your average ‘centrist’

Brown not running from his record

From Toledo Blade:

Just under five months before the November election, two things are clear about Ohio's pivotal U.S. Senate race:
Sherrod Brown is not the sort of centrist Democrat that seems to be all the rage this year.

Both Mr. Brown and his opponents are happy about that.

Most of the Democratic candidates in the handful of red and purple-state races that figure to dictate control of the U.S. Senate this fall have embraced the "centrist" label and platform; some, such as Pennsylvania's Bob Casey, boast conservative stances on abortion or other social issues.

Mr. Brown carries a more populist - Republicans derisively say "liberal" - banner in his Ohio battle with GOP incumbent Mike DeWine. He wants troops out of Iraq this year. He denounces America's free trade pacts. He criticizes Mr. DeWine's votes to repeal the estate tax and make some of President Bush's tax cuts permanent.

When Republicans rip his votes against certain military or intelligence spending, or his opposition to a federal constitutional same-sex marriage ban, Mr. Brown dismisses them with a "yeah, so?" shrug.

...Mr. Brown calls those Republicans "out of touch" and insists frequently that his views are "right in line with the public's," including on social issues such as gay marriage - he opposed the statewide ban that voters approved in 2004 - and abortion rights, which he supports.

"I voted against the Iraq war," Mr. Brown said. "I'm proud of that vote.... I'm proud of my vote against the prescription bill the drug companies wrote, against the energy bill the oil companies wrote."

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06/11/2006 / Permalink / 2006, Sherrod Press, (all tags)

Columbus Dispatch Endorses Brown for Democratic Primary

From Columbus Dispatch:

For U.S. Senate
DeWine, Brown are best choices in Republican, Democratic primary races

...Sherrod Brown, of Avon, has represented Ohio's 13 th Congressional District since 1992. Considered a liberal for his support of abortion rights, a higher minimum wage, universal health care and his vote against U.S. intervention in Iraq, Brown refers to himself as a progressive.

His major issues include fair trade and the loss of U.S. jobs that results from globalization, developing alternative energy sources, improving the health-care coverage available to Americans, and his dissatisfaction with the Medicare drug-benefit bill enacted three years ago.

Brown would like to use a Senate seat to push for development of energy technologies such as clean coal and biomass and to encourage conservation, in part by setting higher fueleconomy standards for cars.

In health care, he favors legalizing the importation of lowerpriced prescription drugs from other countries and empowering the Medicare program to negotiate lower bulkpurchase rates for drugs. He would consider forcing drug companies that fail to make their drugs affordable to license other companies to manufacture them.

Brown has held public office virtually nonstop since graduating from Yale University. He was elected to statewide office, as Ohio's secretary of state, at age 29.

He's articulate and committed to his vision for improving Ohio and the nation. A DeWine-Brown race will be good for Ohio.

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04/24/2006 / Permalink / Sherrod Press, (all tags)

With Brown, Dems have a contender for U.S. Senate

From Youngstown Vindicator:

HOW WE SEE IT

U.S. Rep. Sherrod Brown, D-Avon, could easily have prefaced his answers to questions about health care, energy, global trade, job creation and education with the self-serving phrase, "I told you so."

That's because during his seven terms in the House, Brown has consistently issued public warnings about the negative economic impact of Congress' refusal to deal with the ever-increasing cost of health care and prescription drugs, the nation's trade policies that have undermined America's manufacturing might, and the impending crisis with Social Security and Medicare.

But instead of patting himself on the back, Brown, former Ohio secretary of state and state representative, chose to provide Vindicator writers with thoughtful analyses of the problems confronting the nation, in general, and the state of Ohio, in particular, and to discuss solutions he has formulated during his long tenure in public office.

We endorse Brown for Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate because we believe his presence on the general election ballot will ensure intelligent discussion on the issues with the Republican nominee.

04/20/2006 / Permalink / Sherrod Press, (all tags)