Michael Douglas
| Retired opinion editor
Ordinarily, Sherrod Brown would have attended the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last month. He had been a regular going back decades. So, when he chose to stay home in Ohio, political tongues commenced wagging.
As election-year politicking, the choice made sense. Brown faces an extraordinarily tough battle in seeking a fourth six-year term in the U.S. Senate. He is running in a deepening red state carried twice by Donald Trump.
At one point, Brown quipped about finding more Ohioans here than in Chicago. Analysts cited political reality: The senator benefits from a campaign that minimizes the national partisan clash, something harder to achieve against the backdrop of a convention.
Yet, in another way, his choice rang true. Brown belongs here. He has developed a strong, even unique, connection with Ohioans, continuously visiting towns and cities across the state, often convening small groups, and then really listening to those around the table.
Even some Republicans admit: He has been everywhere!
Brown likes to say he wins because “voters in Ohio know that I’m on their side.” This constant presence is part of how they know.
Political types long have cited authenticity as a key to electoral success. They note that voters have a keen instinct for fakery. In that way, Brown passes the test. He comes across as the real thing, and that response stems largely from what has been his focus since the outset of his long public career — the plight of working- and middle-class Ohioans facing dramatic changes in the economic landscape.
No question, I have disagreed with Brown over how to navigate this difficult transition, especially on questions of trade. Even today, I do not share his opposition to the purchase of U.S. Steel by Nippon Steel. The merger represents an opportunity for overdue and necessary investment in an aging domestic steel industry. If anything, Japan seems a most complementary foreign investor.
Still, Brown has put his focus where it belongs, and he has been at the lead in doing so. The problem goes to the corrosive effect of income inequality — those at the highest rungs seeing their bank accounts swell as those in the middle and below have struggled with stagnant incomes.
Ohio once ranked among the highest states for household median income. Now, it lands deep in the bottom half.
What deserves emphasis is that pursuing a better course involves more than trade or the ownership of U.S. Steel. It requires action on an array of fronts, and Brown has been there. Consider his leadership in rescuing the pensions of hundreds of thousands of union workers and retirees. He has been an ardent supporter of unions, knowing organized labor bolsters incomes and improves lives.
Brown has touted advanced manufacturing, including legislation that secured the big investment Intel has launched in central Ohio and the sustainable polymer hub in the works here in Akron. He understands the value in an expanded child tax credit, as a tool for reducing child poverty and helping to raise families.
This hardly exhausts all Brown has done. It does begin to highlight the contrast with his current opponent, Bernie Moreno, a Cleveland businessman, best known for his car dealerships.
In short, Moreno has an authenticity deficit. He is another of the many Republicans who cudgeled Trump and now eagerly kiss the ring. He champions border security, yet he echoes other Republicans in opposing a bipartisan border security bill (supported by Brown) that conservatives played the lead in writing.
The Moreno family has its own immigration success story, though hardly the up-from-little tale the candidate has suggested. Moreno once backed a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Now he favors mass deportation — without explaining credibly how such a huge and disruptive task would be accomplished. He lately has joined the fear-mongering and race-baiting about legal Haitian immigrants, who have helped revive Springfield.
His team has aired an ad claiming that Brown joined in permitting undocumented immigrants to tap Social Security and other federal programs. Not true.
Moreno purchased a car dealership under favorable terms advanced by Mercedes-Benz to promote minority ownership. Yet today he lambastes the concept of diversity, equality and inclusion.
Most recently, it turns out he did not receive the master’s degree in business administration from Michigan that had surfaced at times in his biography.
No wonder a strategist for Matt Dolan during the Republican primary described Moreno as “an ideological shape-shifter.” In JD Vance, Ohio already has such a political type in the Senate.
There’s an old-fashioned idea in elections about voters applying a simple measure: Which candidate has done more to earn my vote? In this race, it should matter that Sherrod Brown has been the steady and authentic advocate for Ohio.
Michael Douglas was the Beacon Journal editorial page editor from 1999 to 2019. He can be reached at mddouglasmm@gmail.com.
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Publish date : 2024-09-21 23:02:00
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