Cleveland PD endorses Sherrod Brown D-OH

Sherrod Brown has earned a second term in the Senate: editorial


http://www.cleveland.com/opinion/index.ssf/2012/10/sherrod_brown_has_earned_a_sec.html#incart_river_default



Ohio voters should re-elect Sen. Sherrod Brown because he has represented them well in Washington for the last six years. Granted, the Democrat -- whom this page did not endorse six years ago -- is often overly partisan and stands to the left of most voters in this middle-of-the-road state.

But Brown is a tireless worker and cheerleader for Ohio, its people and their interests. He's a good listener and a creative lawmaker -- valuable traits in a senator and positive reasons to vote for Brown.

There's another powerful reason to vote for Brown -- a negative one: Electing his Republican opponent, Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel, would reward one of the nastiest campaigns ever waged in this state. It would reward a candidate who hasn't moved beyond partisan slogans and careful sound bites. It would reward ambition untethered to substance.

No one runs for the U.S. Senate without a healthy ego or considerable ambition. But raw desire must be balanced by a willingness to study issues and to do the hard work of governing. Mandel shows little interest in either. He's simply not ready for the Senate.

A bit of historical perspective: We preferred the steady if unspectacular incumbent Mike DeWine to Brown in 2006. But we never doubted that Brown would be a "bright, articulate, edgy and energetic" advocate for Ohio. He has been that -- and more.

As anyone might expect who has followed Brown's long career -- Mandel, 35, likes to point out that his opponent first ran for office when Richard Nixon was president -- Brown has been a loyal Democrat in the Senate. When Brown, 60, does go rogue, it is usually because he wants to push the president or his party further left on issues such as health care or taxes. Predictably, Brown has maintained his professed suspicion of trade agreements, opposing even a deal with South Korea that the Obama administration renegotiated and that the United Auto Workers supported.

His often gleeful partisanship has earned Brown the ire of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Club for Growth and other conservative groups. That explains an $18 million flood of outside money aimed at defeating him.

But any focus on a small set of votes -- that in today's Washington almost always reflects party lines -- misses a lot that Ohioans should value about Brown's Senate tenure:
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His pragmatic support for an infrastructure bank, for advanced manufacturing research, for balanced environmental policies in a state with huge energy resources and needs. His bipartisan work to improve bus safety features after the 2007 accident that killed five Bluffton University baseball players. His efforts to play matchmaker between European aerospace giant Airbus and hundreds of Ohio parts makers. His ongoing work to replace crop support payments with an insurance program that aids only farmers who are hurting -- an idea hatched while listening to Ohio growers after he was assigned to the Agriculture Committee.

We wish Brown would round off his partisan edges and take off his ideological blinders on trade and entitlement reform. With the fiscal cliff approaching, Washington needs compromise, not confrontation. Brown should amp up his pragmatic side in a second term.

Mandel talks about changing the culture of Washington, but his meteoric rise from Lyndhurst city councilman to state legislator to treasurer to Senate hopeful -- as he morphed from relative moderate to hard-line conservative -- offers little evidence that he knows how. He recently proposed term limits as a cure for what ails Washington; the Ohio General Assembly is testimony to what a fallacy that is.

But what really belies Mandel's claim to reformer status is his tacit acceptance of the destructive game played by his outside allies. Mandel says he can't do anything about the onslaught of negative ads, and technically, he's right. They are independent expenditures. But if he had at any point told their makers to take their cash elsewhere or publicly decried the ads' overwhelming negativism, he would have far more credibility.

Mandel served his country nobly as a Marine. Perhaps if he stayed in a job long enough to learn it, he could become a talented public servant as well. As it is, he is no match for Sherrod Brown, who deserves six more years.
Related topics: 2012-endorsements, josh-mandel, mike-dewine, ohio-general-assembly, sherrod-brown, u.s.-senate