OH-Senate: Democratic Primary pending...my endorsement

Full Disclosure: I have met Sherrod Brown, the current Democratic representive from the Ohio 13th US House district (OH-13). In fact, before I ever met him, he mailed a short, handwritten note to me based on a Letter to the Editor that I had published in the Akron Beacon-Journal. However, he's not the only politician from Ohio that I've met. My family background being what it is (my grandfather having been a member of the State Assembly 60-plus years ago, among other things), I've met Democratic politicians from both Ohio and Connecticut. Representative Brown is the first that has contacted me personally without any prior contact from my end, and without being introduced to them through family connections.

In the last week, the race for US Senate in Ohio has gotten interesting. Before last week there were no Democrats who had declared themselves as candidates to oppose the weakened Republican incumbent, Mike DeWine, next November. But in fairly rapid succession last week there were two Democrats who expressed, through spokespeople, that they would be seeking the party's nomination.

The first announcement came on Monday afternoon. The candidate to announce was Paul Hackett. Mr. Hackett made a name for himself by losing a very close race in a special election to fill a vacancy in Ohio's 2nd US House district (OH-02). This district is a heavily Republican district; the previous representative (who was appointed by President Bush to the position of US Trade Representative earlier this year) regularly won his races by 2-to-1 margins, and the president won the district by about 20 percentage points. The close result in the special election had marked Mr. Hackett as a rising star for the Democratic Party in Ohio.

The second announcement came later in the week from a somewhat surprising source; Sherrod Brown, representative from OH-13 in Northern Ohio. Representative Brown has been in the Congress since 1993, after having served as Ohio Secretary of State from 1983 to 1991. During his 12 years in Washington, Representative Brown has become known as one of the strongest progressive voices on the House floor. He has been a leader on health care issues, pushing for a national Bill of Patients' Rights and for a rational plan to cut the cost of prescriptions, especially for seniors. He's even organized bus trips to Canada for Cleveland/Akron area seniors so that they can get their prescriptions at a lower cost than they would be able to get them in the United States.

Obviously, we have been given a choice between two strong candidates. Both have their own particular strengths and weaknesses. And before I get down to outlining these and making my endorsement, allow me to state that neither candidate has made a formal announcement, and with the filing deadlines still about 4 months off, anything can change at a moment's notice, and new candidates may enter the race. For example, Jerry Springer has been vacillating between this race and the Governor race for most of 2005, and has announced for neither.

Let's start with the candidates' strengths:

Mr. Hackett is an officer in the Marine Corps Reserves, and in that role has served a tour in Iraq running from last summer to early this year. He was only back in his home town outside of Cincinnati for a short time before filing to run in the special election, moved to do so by his disgust with the way in which the Bush Administration is conducting the war and conducting itself on the world stage. As a veteran of Iraq, his opposition to the current war would carry more weight than the opposition of senators such as John Kerry or Tom Harkin, who are veterans of the Vietnam War.

Also, Mr. Hackett is a supporter of a broad interpretation of the right to bear arms guaranteed in the Second Amendment. He is an avid sportsman, as many people in his district are. He opposes bans on guns and supports promotion of responsible gun ownership. This stance would shelter him from the usual NRA opposition, and would take an issue away from the GOP that they love to harp on.

Finally, Mr. Hackett is from southern Ohio. It's widely believed in some circles that the only way for Democrats to win state-wide in Ohio is to run a candidate from the southern portion of the state. And in some of the most recent head-of-ticket statewide races, the Democrats have lost behind candidates from northern Ohio (Eric Fingerhut for US Senate last year, Tim Hagan for Governor in 2002, Mary Ellen Brown for US Senate in 2000, and Lee Fisher for Governor in 1998). With Mr. Hackett being a centre-leaning Democrat from southern Ohio, it is believed that he would perform very well in the rural southern and western portions of the state.

Representative Brown, as I have pointed out, was a two-term Secretary of State. As a result, he has experience running state-wide, and winning. He is also spearheading a movement called "Reform Ohio Now" (see link on the sidebar, if you're viewing this on the site), which has placed four elections-reform issues on the ballot next month; expansion of absentee voting availability, campaign finance reform, districting reform, and establishment of a state board of elections to assume the elections-oversight functions of the Secretary of State. As a result, he'll be campaigning state-wide in support of these issues.

Representative Brown also has a strong record in the US House. He has been a solid supporter of progressive issues. He recently led the fight against the Central American Free Trade Agreement (expansion of NAFTA to Central America; this is called CAFTA). He has also stood out on the health issues I previously outlined, and voted against the war-powers resolution for the Second Iraq War. He is currently the ranking Democrat on the Commerce Committee and the Health Care Issues Subcommittee; placing him highly among the House's Democratic leadership.

And now the weaknesses:

Representative Brown was very unreliable on the matter of whether or not he would seek this office. During the summer he strongly stated that he wasn't going to seek the Senate seat, but would instead seek to retain his OH-13 seat. While there are many indications that he was thinking of reversing that decision prior to last Monday's announcement by the Hackett camp, a spokesperson from his office denied that he had reversed himself, though reserved the right to do so, on Monday morning. This gives the appearance that Rep. Brown only decided to get in the race after Mr. Hackett's spokesman announced his intent. This was after Rep. Brown had assured Mr. Hackett that he wasn't interested in the race. Many in the Hackett camp feel that Rep. Brown's reversal is an exercise in ego, and that Rep. Brown is trying to upstage a rising star. And since Rep. Brown is in a "safe district" and has accumulated so much seniority in the House, he shouldn't run and "risk" these things.

Also, Rep. Brown's progressive reputation may not play well with the religious conservatives in Ohio. He is a supporter of gay rights, and has spoken in favour of same-sex "civil unions", prefering that solution to "marriage" rights for gays and lesbians. Some believe that his opposition to the war in Iraq and his support of gun-control measures such as the Brady Bill could help to brand him as a "northern liberal", which would mark him as anathema to most rural voters.

Finally, some have pointed out Rep. Brown's one state-wide loss; his attempt at a third term as Secretary of State against Robert Taft, III; the present-day governor of Ohio, is under a cloud of corruption and ethics investigations as he closes out his last term as governor. Some have said that if he couldn't beat Taft in a state-wide race, albeit fifteen years in the past, how can he possibly hope to defeat a more-popular DeWine?

Mr. Hackett, on the other hand, has his own set of issues. First of all is his opposition to the war in Iraq. It isn't so much a problem that he opposes the war itself, given that he is a veteran and has some authority to speak on the issue in some way. Rather, it is some of comments he made in regards to the conduct of the war, and the people in the government who have supported the war; the kindest of these being the use of the term "chickenhawk" in reference to the president, vice-president and various Pentagon officials.

Another of his issues is his lack of experience. While some may see his "outside of the beltway" perspective as an advantage, it's probably not such an advantage when it comes to Senate races. There are only two Senate seats from each state, and you really want someone who knows how to deal with the culture of the Congress in those seats. Few people with no state or federal government experience get elected directly to the US Senate. And yes, I'm counting Hillary Clinton as having that experience, given her eight years as the First Lady and her lobbying on behalf of President Clinton's national health-care proposal in 1993.

Also, Mr. Hackett has yet to win a race that extends beyond the county level. Sure, he ran a competitive race in a district that is usually not competitive, but moral victories don't count. And if Ohio is so strongly conservative that a progressive Democrat doesn't stand a chance, and a couple of centre-left Democratic presidential candidates can't take the state, why would Mr. Hackett be any better able to win? He hasn't even run a state-wide race. Does he know how to organize a state-wide race? Does he have the stamina to do it?

My analysis and endorsement:

Taking the positives and the negatives into account, I have come to a number of conclusions. The Hackett supporters have really rubbed me the wrong way. So much of the rhetoric that I hear from them sounds like sour grapes. I've even seen some write that they would abandon the Senate race if Mr. Hackett were to lose the primary. I haven't seen similar sentiments from the Brown supporters, but that does not mean that it's not there. However, the overly-emotional response from the Hackett camp has really turned me off. I don't expect the candidates to tear each other apart in the way that the Hackett supporters seem to assume they will. I think that both candidates want to have a clean "fight" and have the best man win, and be strong enough to take out DeWine in November.

While I love the showing that Mr. Hackett had in the special election in August, he didn't win; plain and simple. I'd much prefer that he prove himself as a campaigner before handing him such a big campaign to run. And make no mistake about it, the US Senate seats are huge races. Seven media markets, 11 million people to represent. And the only issue he really has an advantage over Rep. Brown on, in rural Ohio, is gun-control. His position on gay rights isn't known, and short of him coming out strongly against, which would kill him in the primary, he would suffer against DeWine for that. He is also tepidly pro-life, meaning that he throws out the same qualifications that usually gets a Republican labeled "pro-choice" (rape, incest, mother's health); more of an abortion "centrist" than anything else. Senator DeWine, on the other hand, was a leader on the "partial-birth" (late-term) abortion ban.

As a result, the arguments that the Hackett camp uses to support their argument that their candidate is more viable rely on the proposition that the only way to beat a Republican in Ohio is to be more like the Republicans. And really, Hackett isn't much more like the Republicans than Brown is, and he certainly isn't enough like them to make the voters who want a conservative Republican vote for him instead. So it comes down to the independent voters and the Democratic base.

Many of the issues that are currently resonating with independent voters are economic, national security and health-care related. On those issues Rep. Brown has demostrated leadership in the House. He has opposed selling out the American labourer by campaigning against CAFTA. He opposed stretching US military forces too thin by getting into the war in Iraq and relying on our Reserve forces to do the job rather than protecting the homeland. He has been a leader on patients'-rights and national health care issues in the House. He'll be able to speak on these issues with authority on the campaign trail, while Mr. Hackett will still be learning about them.

The argument about Rep. Brown giving up his "safe seat" falls flat with me. If his seat is so "safe" then it should be won by any Democrat running for it. Thus, the seat isn't in danger of being lost to Republicans if Rep. Brown leaves it behind in favour of the US Senate seat. In a best case scenario, with Hackett as the nominee, whether unopposed or in a primary against Rep. Brown, the Democrats hold all of their current seats, with the possible exception of the OH-06 seat (being vacated by Ted Strickland, who is running for Governor -- yet nobody yelped when he joined that race after Columbus Mayor Michael Coleman declared for it), and pick up the Senate seat. If Hackett were to decide to forego the Senate race, and instead were to challenge for the OH-02 seat once again, the best-case would have the Democrats possibly taking the OH-02 seat, which would then offset the loss of OH-06, or be a net gain, while Rep. Brown wins the Senate seat.

So, lets break this down. The Democrats currently have two of the four seats that I've discussed, OH-06 and OH-13. Of those, OH-13 is supposed to be "safe". If Rep. Brown were to reverse himself again and run for his House seat, it would gain the party nothing, as the seat is "safe", meanwhile OH-02 remains with the Republicans, OH-06 could shift over to the Republicans, and the Senate seat could shift to the Democrats. That's a net wash, with the Democrats hold only two of the four seats. If Mr. Hackett were to be the one to withdraw and run for the OH-02 seat again, the OH-13 seat is "safe" and would remain in Democratic hands, while Mr. Hackett could defeat the incumbent in OH-02 in a return match-up, and Rep. Brown could win the Senate seat. Assuming the loss of OH-06, that would leave the Democrats with a net gain of one of the four seats in question, but with the potential to hold all four; something that won't happen without Mr. Hackett running in OH-02.

Therefore, the Democrats have the most to gain with the candidate who has the strongest background and the experience to hit the ground running in the Senate; Rep. Sherrod Brown.