Brown goes low
Sherrod Brown, along with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, of Minnesota, may, may represent the Democratic Party’s best hope of defeating President Donald Trump in 2020.
Mr. Brown is a populist who seems more mainstream than some who flirt with the socialist label, or redistributist or statist policies. He’s reliably liberal and always has been. But he wins in Ohio where Democrats generally have become totally noncompetitive. They have fallen even further behind in the legislature, where the GOP has a supermajority in both houses and they lost out in 2018 not only on the governorship but all the constitutional state offices, like attorney general and secretary of state.
Yet Mr. Brown won Ohio by some 351,000 votes.
Maybe one reason is that he does not condescend to voters. Another might be that he dares to say that he wants results for as many as he can help now rather than pie in the sky for all that will apply at some future date. For instance, he favors Medicare at 55, as opposed to another attempted overhaul of the health insurance system, or the elimination of private insurance.
He also declined to jump abroad the “Green New Deal” bandwagon.
Sherrod Brown’s appeal is that he seems real, authentic if you will, and he is not a clone of 15 other candidates. He is the only one, for example, talking about the devastation of small town America by the global economy.
So it was disappointing when Mr. Brown felt compelled, while testing the waters in Iowa a few days ago, to call the president a racist. This seemed more like Mr. Brown getting his ticket punched by the left than saying or doing anything constructive.
Labeling someone a racist is the ultimate name to call — the ad hominem argument that trumps almost all other epithets. But it is not a true argument at all and it accomplishes nothing. It demeans the namer as well as the named and it demeans actual race hatred.
Moreover, as Sen. Cory Booker has said, who are any of us to judge the heart of another?
Mr. Brown likes parts of Mr. Trump’s aggressive trade policy. He said so running for re-election in Ohio. (He notably did
not call the president a racist in that campaign. Mr. Brown is no fool. Mr. Trump carried Ohio in 2016 by 476,920 votes.)
Mr. Brown may also like Mr. Trump’s proposals on prison reform and ending AIDS. Any honest liberal would. Let him feel free to agree with the president when he actually does agree. It’s refreshing coming from a Democrat. And let him blast away at Trump policies that he believes undermine workers.
For instance, Mr. Brown says the new tax code actually encourages automobile companies to move to Mexico. Let him hit this, and all of his issues, hard. That is his power in this race.
Let Sherrod Brown run as the real tribune of the tradesman and factory worker and the original critic of free trade. Let him leave the judging of souls to God.
Ohio senator should stick with issues that define him.