Cover Story: Do or Die Time

Keeping up with Congressman Sherrod Brown isn’t easy. He walks fast, his torso swaying, his shoulders jolting forward.

He talks fast, too, and his raspy baritone voice can give the impression that he just pulled an all-nighter. The 52-year-old seems to have the pent-up energy of a college student.

Even seated, he remains in motion. When he’s not tooling away on his Blackberry, he’s on his cell phone. Or flipping the phone open and closed, putting it in his pocket, only to take it out again a few seconds later.

On long car rides through rural Ohio, reception is fleeting, so neither electronic gadget offers much distraction. But extended travels across the state are part of the necessary calculus if Brown is to have any chance of winning a hotly contested U.S. Senate seat, his first statewide race in 16 years.

So the quick-witted, hyperkinetic, excitable Brown whiles away the hours by talking.

A lot. The conversations can be manic, flitting in an instant from baseball — Brown possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of the sport — to weightier matters.

During one stretch of an August bus tour, a friendly exchange with a Columbus Dispatch reporter on baseball trivia shifts suddenly into a heated debate over the 2000 presidential election. The reporter doesn’t agree that Republicans stole it.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Brown nearly bellows, his body arched against the back of his seat, his arms folded across his chest. “You really believe they didn’t — you honestly believe they didn’t steal it?”

The reporter asks Brown if he’s still mad.

“Maybe I am angry,” he admits. “Maybe you’re right, I do get angry. You honestly as a journalist believe those bastards didn’t steal the election?”

The reporter tries to laugh it off. “We don’t know who won Florida,” he says.

“That’s the problem,” Brown shoots back, leaning forward now, pointing at his adversary. “They didn’t let it play itself out. Doesn’t that count as theft? That’s OK because they did it with good lawyers, not with a gun?”

The reporter moans and tries to finish his point. Brown won’t let up and cuts him off.

“You know, I think about what they did to my country,” he says, “and I actually care about that.”

In the upcoming mid-term election, Brown and the Democratic Party have an opportunity that would have been hard to imagine two years ago. His opponent, two-term incumbent Mike DeWine, is within striking distance, weighed down by corruption scandals among Ohio Republicans and by increasing voter unrest over job losses, stagnant wages and rising gas prices and health care costs.

And at the national level, the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate might be within reach. Democrats are salivating at the prospect of closing a 10-seat gap in the Senate, maybe even gaining a majority. And Brown’s race is one of six around the country receiving national Democratic largesse.

Brown gave up an almost certain re-election to an eighth term in the House to take this shot at the Senate. Neither he nor the party can afford to screw this up.

‘I just think I’m ready’
Sherrod Brown’s first chance to oust Mike DeWine came in 2000. Democratic party honchos called Brown into the Senate chamber, as he tells it, and told him he was their first choice. They promised ample financial support.

DeWine was vulnerable then, too. He’d been fairly invisible in his first six years, surfacing only to weigh in on then-President Bill Clinton’s possible impeachment. But Brown had been in the House of Representatives for eight years by then and was the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee on Health and the Environment.

If Democrats took over the House in 2000, as Brown believed then they would, he’d be in line to chair the committee. So he turned down the chance to run for the Senate. DeWine handily won reelection, and of course a Democratic House didn’t materialize.

Since announcing his plans to run this year — and challenging the candidacy of liberal darling Paul Hackett until Hackett bowed out — Brown has been asked many times, why now? The answer is so obvious that he seems to struggle to state it clearly.

“I’m ready now, I probably wasn’t ready then,” he says, then launches into how changing Ohio means changing the country. But he returns to his own state of mind.

“I just think I’m ready now,” he says. “I just think I’m ready.”

He falters slightly. “I just think I’m … I just think I’m ready. I don’t know.”

A better explanation lies in the paths Brown and DeWine have traveled and the way the political landscape has shifted beneath them.

DeWine is a moderate fiscal conservative in a party that’s tacked far to the right in recent years and at times has appeared ready to leave him behind. In 2005, when the Senate Republican leadership threatened to rewrite the rules to prevent Democrats from filibustering against judicial nominees, DeWine supported a compromise and earned the ire of many hardcore conservatives. They were already annoyed with him for opposing the state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage the year before.

Brown entered Congress in 1993 with fists raised for a looming fight against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and free-traders in his own party, including then-President Clinton. Since then he hasn’t so much as flinched from the anti-war, pro-labor, pro-choice, pro-gay philosophies he brought with him.

But trade has become Brown’s signature issue, and his grasp of its complexities has gained notice. He was anointed liaison in trade policy fights by House minority leaders Dick Gephardt and Nancy Pelosi, and in 2004 he wrote a book, The Myths of Free Trade: Why American Trade Policy Has Failed.

Last year, Brown fought tooth and nail against the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), which basically creates a free-trade zone between the U.S. and six countries. For months, Brown worked to lock in Democrat “no” votes and find Republican allies. But his efforts were no match for a Republican machine, led by Tom DeLay, that kept voting open well past midnight to allow more time for arm-twisting.

CAFTA passed by one vote in the House and 10 in the Senate — a sharp contrast to the overwhelming support NAFTA had received 10 years before.

The narrowing vote margins reflect voters’ growing unease over the economy. Brown always earns applause when he talks about how the globalization tide hasn’t lifted all boats.

Without labor and environmental standards, he explains, trade agreements promote the outsourcing of American jobs. The tectonic shifts in manufacturing have hit Ohio especially hard.

But free trade agreements aren’t the sole culprits behind American job losses. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, since 2001 Ohio has lost a total of 200,000 jobs. A 2004 study by Policy Matters Ohio estimated that about 50,000 of those losses were trade-related.

So Brown steps carefully. He’s been called a “demagogue on trade” and a “protectionist,” and he wants to make his point clearly.

“I know we’re not going to bring back steel mills to Ohio,” he told a group of editors in March.

He says he wants to renegotiate past trade agreements with environmental and labor standards in mind and make an even playing field for American industries. He also wants to offer tax incentives to small businesses “rather than (provide) tax benefits for large companies that outsource.” He expects such measures to help resuscitate the manufacturing sector and spur new industries like renewable energy in Ohio.

He can go on for hours — but, unfortunately for him, it’s better that he doesn’t. Trade is a complicated topic, not easily reduced to slogans, and can be a hard sell in “enemy territory” — the large swaths of Ohio, mostly rural areas, that John Kerry lost to President Bush in 2004.

Milking cows, starting a career
At a rally in August, Tom Petty’s “Stand My Ground” blasts from loudspeakers as a slate of Democratic candidates heads for a bandshell rigged with mics. Democratic congressman and gubernatorial candidate Ted Strickland tells the audience that he’s one of the few House members to have ever milked a cow. Brown interrupts to note that, growing up, he too milked cows.

Strickland is a pro-gun ordained minister who plays well in Ohio’s more conservative southern counties. It’s no coincidence that the staunchly liberal Brown is making many appearances with Strickland this campaign season.

Brown’s father, Charles, was a prominent family physician in Mansfield, a mostly white town in northern Ohio whose stability suffered after the Westinghouse and Ohio Brass Co. plants closed. But the Browns never wanted for much, says Sherrod’s mother, Emily.

Charles bought a house in town and kept the old family homestead as a dairy farm. He hired others to manage it, but in the summer Sherrod and his two older brothers worked there, too.

All three boys had paper routes, and Sundays meant church and Sunday school. Young Sherrod also got piano lessons but never practiced, Emily recalls. Instead, he taught himself guitar.

A Georgia native, Emily schooled her boys early about the burgeoning civil rights movement. When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, a 15-year-old Sherrod was deeply shaken, Emily recalls. He participated in racial dialogues she organized and helped his high school start an elective course on black studies.

He went on to become president of his high school class. In 1970, he rallied Mansfield for its first Earth Day procession.

The following year, Charles and Emily sent Brown off to Yale and paid his tuition in full. Brown focused on Russian studies — because of a cool professor who got him interested in Eastern Europe, he says — and started dabbling in liberal politics. He worked on the 1972 presidential campaign of George McGovern, who spoke against the Vietnam War, and favored reductions in defense spending and a higher minimum wage.

Ohio Democratic Party leaders recruited Brown right out of Yale to run for state representative. He served eight years in the state legislature and another eight as Secretary of State.

His 1990 reelection loss to future Gov. Bob Taft sidetracked his career. Brown taught at Ohio State University — he’d received a master’s degree in education from the university in 1981 — then worked with the Polish Ministry of Education to help rid its curriculum of Marxist-Leninist courses following the fall of the country’s communist government in 1989.

By 1992 Brown had returned to politics, beating a well-financed Republican to win the 13th Congressional District, which includes western and southern suburbs of Cleveland.

Homosexuality vs. poverty
After 14 years in that seat, cultivating statewide name recognition has been one of Brown’s top concerns. When Brown learns about a New York Times piece on health care, he turns to his press secretary.

“I should have been mentioned in it,” he says. “That should happen once we get more visible.”

His other priority has been working with fellow Ohio Democrats to fine-tune a statewide message. He’s been trying to figure out how to talk “new” New Deal economics — a Democratic strength — in places where voters are down and out but still usually vote Republican.

“I’m urging my party to put minimum wage front and center,” Brown told a Toledo Jobs with Justice roundtable in February. “I want Democratic candidates across the board to talk about minimum wage during the election, as a motivator to get people out to vote.”

He’s also been holding press conferences with area doctors, pharmacists and senior citizens to highlight what he sees as a meltdown of the new Medicare law.

“The drug bill was written fundamentally for the drug companies,” Brown explained during a long car ride to a reporter in the back seat. “It’s like someone said, ‘Give the drug companies a yellow legal pad and pen and have them write the bill.’ ”

Brown then spun around to his press secretary. “That’s a good line to use,” he said.

The “legal pad” quip has surfaced in Brown’s speeches many times since.

To a gathering of Lucas County Young Democrats, Brown said, “I hesitate to use this word, but the more I think about it, I’ll probably start using ‘criminal’ to describe the Medicare bill.”

Sometimes he’s even engaged Republicans on their own turf — the so-called value issues. As he told a political science class at Bowling Green University in February, the religious right would rather spend time on abortion, gay marriage and concealed weapons, but “these don’t affect people’s lives and aren’t issues you and your parents care about.”

In March, Solon Democrats heard Brown venture into the realm of religion.

“We should be willing to talk about our faith,” Brown said. “I believe what I do because of how I was raised.”

In recent months, however, he’s left the social issues alone. (“I answer when I’m asked,” he explains in an interview. “I think voters are most concerned about opportunities for their kids and concerned about their aging parents.”)

Lately he discusses the fixations of the religious only with fellow travelers on the campaign trail.

A sticky August afternoon finds Brown on a three-day bus tour, dubbed Turn Around Ohio, with much of the Democratic statewide ticket. The mission is to get the candidates — and their shared pocketbook platform — exposure in rural southern counties.

That the right continues to focus on abortion and gay marriage leaves Brown incredulous.

“Did you know that homosexuality is talked about a lot more in the Bible than poverty?” he wisecracks to Richard Cordray, the Democratic candidate for State Treasurer.

“Actually, it says poverty is the cause of homosexuality,” Cordray replies, drawing laughter from everyone on the bus.

‘I stand for this’
With reading glasses on, Brown pores over the New York Times op-ed page. Thomas Frank has a guest column on how Republicans are looking to conquer — not destroy — New Deal institutions like Social Security and Medicare. Brown takes off his glasses and looks up at the other Democrats on the bus.

“That’s really what they are,” Brown says about Republicans. “They want the Medicare law. They don’t want to repeal Medicare, they just want to turn Medicare into a private cash machine for their friends. If they were ideological conservatives, they’d want to repeal Medicare, repeal Social Security. Instead they want to turn them into federal profit centers, dwarfing what these guys in Ohio have done.”

Phrases like “these guys” and “this crowd” have turned up frequently in Brown’s recent speeches. “If you look at what this crowd in Columbus, and this crowd in Washington, has done to the middle class, has done to working families, has done to people who play by the rules and work hard, it’s simply outrageous,” he says at one stop.

Brown goes back to his paper, but the column has him riled. He turns back to Cordray, and the two continue about the Republicans’ “arrogance” and “self-serving” policies.

Generally, however, the mood on the bus is light and friendly. The candidates seem to genuinely enjoy each other’s company, and of course it helps that most are leading in the polls, or at least in contention. Brown tends to address the other men by their last names and rarely passes on an opportunity to poke fun at one of them, or at himself.

“It’s like being known to have lost an election to Bob Taft,” Brown says at one point, making an analogy to a just-mentioned baseball defeat. “It’s a great applause line when I say I’ve only lost one election — to Bob Taft. How embarrassing is that?”

It’s dark as the campaign bus nears Columbus. A group of reporters discusses an upcoming Ohio visit by Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) in support of DeWine. Brown turns to his communications director.

“We know about this, right?”

She nods.

“Good. We’ve got our people on it?”

(Shortly after McCain’s visit, Brown’s camp issued a press release titled, “McCain Agrees with Sherrod Brown on Issues That Matter for Ohio Families.”)

One thing that seems to turn the on-the-go Brown silent is talk of DeWine. As a reporter tells Brown what he and DeWine have in common, Brown leans forward and tries to complete the reporter’s thought.

“We’re both policy wonks,” he says.

No, the reporter replies — both are hard workers.

“Is DeWine a hard worker?” Brown asks, sounding surprised. “He works the crowd? He hasn’t been out that much, that I’ve seen…”

Earlier this year, polls showed Brown behind DeWine by several percentage points. That balance shifted in July, with numerous polls putting Brown consistently in the lead by 2 percentage points or more. As of last week, the two were neck and neck — thanks in no small part to a $3.7 million campaign treasury, more than triple what he raised while running for the U.S. House but still far behind DeWine’s reelection war chest of $7.7 million.

So there’s reason for Brown to be slightly circumspect. Democrats know all too well how quickly fortunes can change in the final days before an election and how stealth campaigns by the religious right emphasize socially conservative issues and generate voter turnout.

GOP campaign mastermind Karl Rove proved this strategy in 2002 and again in 2004, and Ohio is home to two such pet projects that have promised to register a half a million voters by November. And according to a Washington Post article in May, Rove flew to Ohio and advised DeWine to pummel Brown’s record on taxes, military spending and social issues.

Brown says high-ranking Democrats and campaign consultants have told him that to win all he has to do is simply be “a little to DeWine’s left.” He refuses to capitulate.

“I’m gonna make the distinction,” he says. “(DeWine) stands for this, I stand for this.”

DeWine voted for the Iraq War and the Patriot Act, and Brown wants voters to know that he didn’t.

‘It’s really class warfare’
As the specter of social conservatives looms and questions about the economy rise, Brown isn’t shy about why he thinks he can win where Kerry didn’t.

“Kerry couldn’t be a populist,” he says.

Brown’s brand of populism comes from an almost pedantic zeal for fairness. He refused the congressional health insurance plan (and paid his own way), vowing only to sign on after Congress approved universal health care coverage for all Americans.

He now jokes that he might not have done this if he’d known that universal health care was such a remote possibility.

In early 2003, appalled at the lack of congressional debate over the Iraq war, Brown began to collect constituents’ letters on the matter to read on the House floor — an idea he got after reading about a similar tactic used by John Quincy Adams.

When he has the campaign stage to himself, Brown often opens with an anecdote that elicits more furrowed brows than cheers: the canary in a cage. Generations ago, he explains, miners died by the thousands every year. There were no mine safety laws, no unions for mine workers. A caged canary was the only protection they had. If it died, they knew the air was toxic.

Today, after decades of work by the labor movement and progressive government, Americans enjoy long life expectancies, safe drinking water and civil rights protections for the disabled, Brown says. Not to mention Social Security, Medicare and other safety-net programs.

But in recent years tax cuts have gone to the highest percentage of the wealthy. CEO pay has quadrupled while workers’ pay has stagnated.

“It’s really class warfare is what it is,” Brown says.

The canary “signifies that the struggle continues,” according to a leaflet Brown hands out every chance he gets. It’s a wonkish tendency that appears in his political messages too, where his oratorical style can command more logical outrage than gut-wrenching passion.

Policy wonk or not, Brown knows how to work the campaign trail. He shakes hands and listens with suit jacket off, sleeves rolled up, hand on his chin.

In the middle of what will turn out to be a 15-hour day, Brown’s communications director talks about his significant “fatigue factor” as she tries to get him out of an early morning engagement the next day.

And Brown always finds the men in war veteran or union hats and shirts. He makes a point to talk with them at length, ask about their lives. Then he singles them out in his speech. Like with Walter and his wife in August. Brown calls them to his side.

“They’ve been married 56 years,” Brown says, “and he’s been a plumber and a pipe fitters union member for about that same amount of time, about 50 years.”

The crowd hollers.

This article appears in Sep 27 – Oct 3, 2006.