Who is Sherrod Brown?

By Christopher Hayes, In These Times. Posted December 2, 2005.

There are two small but revealing items affixed to Ohio's 13th District congressman Sherrod Brown. On his lapel, he wears not an American flag, but a pin of a yellow bird in a cage. On a Thursday morning in October, as we leave his office to walk to the Capitol for a committee meeting, Brown hands me a bookmark-sized slip of paper that explains: "The canary represents the struggle for economic and social justice." It recounts how miners once took canaries into the mines so that when the birds died, they knew the air was too toxic to breathe. "Miners were forced to provide for their own protection. No mine safety laws. No trade unions able to help. No real support from their government. … It has been a 100-year battle between the privileged and the rest of us."

Clipped to Brown's belt is a small blue pedometer, one of a pair worn by him and his wife Connie Schultz, a Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He walks, or perhaps more accurately, stalks all over Capitol Hill, leading with his chest pitched forward just slightly in a gait that is halfway between a bounce and a prowl. "He never takes the elevator," his spokesperson Joanna Kuebler tells me as we wait for Brown to emerge from a meeting with a group of scientists advocating for nuclear disarmament. When it's time for a vote on the Hill, he eschews the underground subway that whisks members from their office buildings to the Capitol.

Handsome, with a slightly weathered face, curly hair and a deep, warm voice, Brown is universally described as "down to earth." In person he's as unposed as any politician I've ever met. "Those are the columns my wife wrote that won the Pulitzer," he says, dumping a pile of papers into the lap of Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, who's waiting for the underground shuttle as we trot past. "He's a Republican," Brown whispers as we walk away, "but I like him. How could I not? He represents Cooperstown."

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."

Hackett, whom many bloggers treat like the local boy made good, and who was recently the subject of a glowing profile in Mother Jones titled "The Democrat Who Fought," provides the blogosphere an opportunity to prove, unequivocally, its own influence. "The reason to support Hackett over Brown is simple," wrote Beyerstein, "if Hackett wins (and he can win), the progressive blogosphere makes history."

Blog opinion on the race is by no means uniform. Many support Brown, but it's a strange feature of the blogosphere that a newcomer to politics like Hackett is widely considered a known quantity, while Brown, who's spent his entire adult life in public office, is a mystery. One skeptical blogger on the Web site Swing State Project summed up his reservations with a post titled: "Who is Sherrod Brown?"

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."

Christopher Hayes is a contributing editor of In These Times and the Chicago editor of Just Cause magazine.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »