Maria Leavey

Reprinted from the American Prospect.

On Friday March 10, the Prospect hosted the second in its series bringing together elected officials and a select group of journalists. The guest was Congressman Sherrod Brown, a Democrat who represents Ohio's 13th district, which includes suburban Cleveland and Akron. Brown is a candidate for U.S. Senate this year, running against Republican incumbent Mike DeWine. A recording of the event is available here.

Michael Tomasky: Congressman, thank you for coming.

Sherrod Brown: It's a pleasure to be here among allies and friends and people who generally see the country in an open-minded way, thank you for that. Maria [Leavey, the series coordinator], thank you for having me. I'm honored to be here.

Let me talk a little bit about Ohio and the kind of election I think this is going to be and the way I think progressive candidates should begin to approach campaigns like this. I will run a race that you will know from the moment you cover it is a progressive campaign. I never run from the term liberal, but I look at it…to me, there's a major distinction between the terms liberal and progressive and that's why I call myself a progressive. A liberal is someone who supports LIHEAP programs because indigent seniors need help with their home heating bills. A progressive is someone who supports LIHEAP programs to challenge the power companies, and who thinks that sometimes the energy companies are price gouging. A liberal is someone who wants a good Medicare prescription drug benefit, better than the one we have, that really helps seniors and subsidizes seniors' prescription drugs, but a progressive is someone who supports those same programs but also wants to challenge the power of the drug and insurance industries. And that's how you will see my campaign this year as it unfolds -- a very populist kind of campaign.

I was in a drugstore the other day -- we're doing a series of news conferences around the state on the Medicare Part D bill -- and a probably Republican, I would guess, pharmacist, certainly a conservative guy, said to the assembled group, reporters and others, the President and Congress might as well have handed a blank legal pad to the drug industry and said, “Here, write the bill.” And that's really the corruption that's so endemic in our political system now. In Ohio, you may know about the Thomas Noe coin scandal and the workers' compensation theft and all of that. That's repulsive enough to the voters, but it really needs to be seen in terms of what it means to injured workers and what it means to employers who have paid into that fund and have trouble competing because they have relatively high employee compensation rates. And so it's theft-- it's theft from the employer, it's theft from the injured worker.

On a national level, the fact that this Congress and the President have turned our public trust to the most privileged, well-heeled interest groups in the country tells the same story. The President said at the State of the Union address three years ago, we need a new Medicare Prescription Drug bill, and then the insurance companies and the drug companies write the legislations. Seniors are confused and their drug prices keep going up. That's the logical extension of that. The President said two years ago that he wanted an energy bill. The oil companies write the bill, push it through Congress, we end up with higher gasoline prices and devastatingly high home heating prices. Those are the results of corruption in issue after issue. Wall Street writes Social Security privatization laws; chemical companies write environmental laws; the drug companies write the Medicare drug bill, and on and on and on. That's where my campaign starts, where my campaign comes from. You're going to see huge amounts of independent expenditures coming from the drug industry, the insurance industry, the oil industry in Ohio.

I'm not going to miss many opportunities as this campaign goes on to point out whose side I'm on. Howard Metzenbaum ran his campaigns in the 1970s and 80s -- “He's On Our Side.” Voters don't look at conservative, liberal. I don't know if they often know what those terms mean. I think they are much more likely to look at which candidates are on their side. What's happened with the pension system, what's happening with people's health care -- it's pretty clear that this government, their party, is not on the side of those people who are hurt the most dramatically, the most devastatingly from all of these policies we've seen, particularly in the last five years.

Trade will be an issue. My campaign and my office have taken a different view of the United Arab Emirates Dubai Ports World issue, linking it to trade issues. If the United Arab Emirates trade agreement -- we are in the midst of negotiation -- if that had been completed and passed and approved by Congress and signed by the President prior to this contract, some trade experts believe that this contract couldn't have been cancelled because it would have been considered an unfair, illegal trade practice under international law. So I introduced legislation the first day back after the Dubai Ports issue came up that prior to entering into any kind of trade negotiation, that we do a comprehensive national security review, and then have a national security component in the negotiation and in the trade agreement itself. That's something that we will propose with the new Malaysia trade agreement because we've seen these trade agreements…they have no labor or environmental standards, all those issues you know about. We've seen these trade agreements outsource jobs; we want to make sure they don't outsource national security. I've sent a letter to the President asking that the Commission on Financial -- CFIUS I guess is how we say the acronym -- that CFIUS look at some other deals that it might have made with other countries -- that there are not negative national security implications.

Another thing I'm just going to throw on the table…I think you're going to see…I hope there's not another Supreme Court nominee in the next six months, eight months…I took a different approach to the Judge Alito nomination than almost anybody else in Congress. I generally agree with my party on the issues that the mainstream Democratic Party was critical of Judge Alito on, but I think where Democrats missed the issue was talking about Alito's record on workers rights, on employees, and in the workplace. Judge Alito consistently handed down decisions in opposition to overtime, in opposition to family medical leave, to mine safety, to several, I believe, to minimum wage -- I'm not sure on that one -- on several issues that affected age discrimination. He always sided with the boss against employees. It seemed to me to build a progressive movement and set the stage for a filibuster, if that's what should have and could have happened with Alito, you needed to bring the public in in much larger numbers. And you don't bring the public in only talking about choice and affirmative action and executive power. You need to bring the public in by talking about something that affects everybody. And Alito and Roberts and almost every appointee the Republicans have offered on any level -- I'm not a lawyer, I don't know this that well -- but almost every judge they've nominated has been someone who's pretty hostile to employees, who sides with employers, whether it's the unions or whether it's just the employee without a union -- more likely because they have even less power. We've seen that with judge after judge after judge. That's why it's so important that there be a voice in the Senate raising those issues. Probably I won't be a member of the Judiciary Committee, but I will raise those issues with every judge that President Bush, or any President, nominates, in terms of how they make decisions for workers.

Tomasky: I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the interplay among economic issues, social issues, and national security issues. Because you're best known for, and I think your platform is based on, economic issues. I'm sure you'll be attacked by DeWine on the other two sets of issues. I see where he's already talked about some intelligence votes you cast in the early 1990s, but in Ohio is it really that simple? Can a robust economic progressive platform counter national security and social issues among voters there?

Brown: Let me address each part. The social issues and the national security issues. Social issues first. John Glenn told me that soon after the ‘04 elections he got a call from the Chicago Tribune, and the Chicago Tribune asked him, George Bush carried the ten poorest counties in Ohio -- I believe all southeast Ohio counties -- what happened? And the answer to that is we as a party and John Kerry as a candidate let the social issues absolutely trump the economic issues. Democrats -- and I'm going back to economic issues for a second -- but Democrats assume that the voters know we're better on economic issues than the Republicans are, but we don't tell them that. Jules and I were just talking about how in Florida, where he spent the last week of the presidential race in 2004, I've been told from several elected officials that in Florida John Kerry didn't once mention the minimum wage. Minimum wage is on the ballot in Ohio this year; we're going to link minimum wage to our campaign and I'm urging other Democrats to do the same. I think you're going to see that throughout the state.

While that doesn't address the social issues, I think it does when you talk to people. Some people are going to vote abortion; some people are going to vote gay rights. But most voters when faced with “can I find my kid a job” -- Ohio's lost 200,000 manufacturing jobs, partly in small and mid-sized companies. The industries have just hollowed out these towns that they've left. People want to know, “Can my kid find a job? Can my kid go to college? Is my only option to send my kid to the military and send him to Iraq or somewhere else?” In talking about the minimum wage, I'm talking about health care -- in the end Democrats are talking about values in the sense of social justice. I wear this little pin on my lapel; it's a depiction of a canary in a bird cage. I've worn it for about five years. The miners used to take the canary down in the mines 100 years ago as you know, and if the canary died from lack of oxygen or from toxic gas, the mine workers got out of the mines quickly. The mine worker had no union strong enough to take care of him and no government that cared enough to help him. And you look at the progress in our country in these 100 years all across the board on social justice issues -- Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, family leave, auto safety, clean air, pure drinking water, IDEA, civil rights, prohibitions against child labor -- issue after issue that the progressives have fought for -- those are family value issues. The reason we've succeeded is because of labor unions, because of ethnic neighborhood organizations, all of that contributed to pushing the government against powerful interests.

On national security, I'm taking a back seat to nobody. We've clearly underfunded all the homeland security. We don't protect our chemical plants, our nuclear plants, our ports. This idea we had about connecting trade agreements to national security -- you're going to see more of that in my campaign and we're going to actually win on that issue, not just break even.

Ellen Ratner, Talk Radio News Service: Some of us old bats have been around since the days of Speaker Foley. And to be very honest with you, maybe not as bad as the Republicans around financial issues in terms of going for corporations, being bought off, but….What would you do to make sure that doesn't happen again? And how do you differentiate with Mike DeWine on other issues in terms of what he's saying these days?

Brown: He's not saying much. He was amazingly quiet on the ports deal, but he had the President raise a million dollars for him two weeks ago and the Vice President half-a-million two weeks before that. He doesn't want to get too close but then again he wants to get closer. That's part of his problem.

Let me tell you one real quick story. I saw a focus group one day that was talking about a politician who described himself as a moderate. You know, in focus groups each candidate will sort of describe themselves from their website or something, and this candidate said he was a moderate voice for Ohio's families. And one woman said, “You know, I don't want a moderate voice. I want a strong voice.” And everyone in this room, when you think “moderate,” you think middle-of-the-road, you think centrist, and I think the same. But people want someone who's on their side. Mike has been with the President on every major issue -- Iraq, Medicare, Social Security privatization, the energy bill, the tax cuts -- on issue after issue. He's gotten a little more to the center in the last year-and-a-half because he's facing a race in a state where things aren't in very good shape. But I think that the differentiation is easy. He sides with the drug companies and the energy companies. I think that we're going to see some outspoken, progressive new members of the Senate next year that have backbone, that are going to energize and give strength to others.

One of the things that happened right after the Iraq vote, the beginning of 2003…I started -- this story is going to take a little longer than I thought, I apologize -- John Quincy Adams, I read this book, John Quincy Adams, when he went back to Congress, the conservatives in Congress passed a rule: the issue of slavery could not be debated on the House floor. So what John Quincy Adams did, with the stature of a former President, is begin to generate letters from the Braintree Women's Garden Club, the Citizens Against Slavery of Quincy, Mass., and he started reading letters on the floor of the House about that, about slavery. And that was the way he got an end run around that rule. There was no debate about Iraq on the House floor in early 2003 before the attack, so I organized a group working with MoveOn to get letters from constituents in our states. Jan Schakowsky got involved, Lynn Woolsey got involved, Ted Strickland got involved. We began to get letters about this war from all over the country. We did consecutive five minutes for an hour often some nights. And I think that in the Senate…a bigger microphone, a larger constituency, a more big-eared press, if you will, that is willing to listen to those kinds of activities.

Amy Sullivan, The Washington Monthly: I just wanted to follow up on Mike's question and press you a little on that. This may be unfair, but I read your answer as saying that when social issues come up, we need to remind people that Democrats are really where they want to be on economics, and we just haven't told them that enough. And yet it seems that it's really not going to be just the DeWine campaign that's pushing social issues into the campaign, I don't have to tell you that Rob Parsley and other conservative religious leaders are really going to be speaking to voters. And I'm wondering whether there's a good way to address those concerns and not necessarily to be anti gay-marriage and anti-abortion, but to deal with those social and moral concerns head-on instead of a let's-move-the-discussion-back-to-economics way.

Brown: I don't write off his congregation. I write off him. I'm not afraid to talk about why my political views are what they are. I grew up in the Lutheran church with parents who put a premium on social justice and social values. The New Testament talks more about poverty than it does homosexuality. I will never proselytize -- it's not what I am or what I want to do -- but I don't mind talking about my faith. I'm not going to run from my vote against DOMA ten years ago; I'm not going to run from my NARAL 100 percent. I think there are ways of talking about choice. I trust the women of Ohio to make their own decisions. I think we could shift the debate some on abortion by talking about that, by talking about what we need to do with family planning, all of those issues. I don't think that dwelling on those issues gets us very far, but I think answering them does. I would like to see the media begin to ask people who are very strong anti-choice types, like candidates, who do you criminalize? Does a woman go to jail or does the doctor go to jail? If you think abortion is murder and you think it should be illegal, then who do you send to jail? I think we come back on them on some of those issues. I want this campaign to be fought on economic and national security issues. I'm not going to from social issues. I know that they probably hurt more than the help. In certain areas, they don't. We've got to turn the volume up, change the subject when we can and take it head-on when we have to.

Jules Witcover, Tribune Media: Congressman, would you like to see your campaign become a referendum on the war? And do you think it will? And, the second part, if we're headed for a civil war in Iraq, what position should the United States take?

Brown: I don't want my campaign to be a referendum on the war. I will remind people of my opposition to entering the war. That's not particularly relevant now. I will talk about the administration's failures, while I begged Bremer -- Administrator Bremer -- and Rumsfeld and Powell to provide body armor early in the war, even before it started, and remind voters what they've done, this administration….how inept and incompetent they've been in terms of prosecuting the war, and how callous they've been in terms of taking care of the soldiers when they're in the service, when they're overseas, and when they come home as injured soldiers and later as veterans, that's the discussion of the war. When I see Condoleeza Rice -- Condoleeza Rice says we can be there as long as ten more years. I know she's backed off that statement, but when our administration is saying that, when others in the administration are calling this the Long War, internally, when we don't deny that these military bases we're building in Iraq are staying, then there's more likely to be civil war, there's more likely to be a united opposition to our being there. That's why I think we need a winning exit strategy, to redeploy in the Middle East and set a timetable to get out, civil war or not. The longer we stay, the more acute the internal problems in Iraq are going to be. Most of the insurgents are local. They're not from other countries. Our soldiers in Iraq don't think we have much of a future there. I think it's time we set an exit strategy, and as soon as possible withdraw.

Witcover: Is it possible a civil war could be the exit strategy? What would force us out?

Brown: I think the administration will get out when they think they have to politically, and they may go that way. This was has been conducted so incompetently by the civilians and so valiantly by the soldiers. But I don't think that they…when Condoleeza Rice can't predict a Hamas victory of that size and they thought that we were going to be welcomed there…their ability to read the future in Iraq is so limited that I think many of their decisions have been political. Karl Rove's making way too many decisions in this White House about war and peace.

Witcover: Is it just up to the President to get in or out? We just saw what Congress can do on the Arab ports deal.

Brown: I think we're a long way from a party that's generally pretty disciplined. This Dubai Ports World response was clearly made out of political fear for a lot of Republicans. In fact, the leadership broke with the President so quickly they knew they had an issue that was going to hurt them in the polls. I'm not saying that none of them were genuinely concerned about the agreement, but I don't think that they think that about Iraq at this point.

Ari Berman, The Nation: One thing that hasn't come up so far is Paul Hackett, who obviously you've helped in the past. Hackett says he will campaign for you but at the same time he's leaking an opposition memo about you to the press; he's bashed you on right-wing radio, and he, generally speaking, seems more concerned with becoming a martyr than in helping Democrats get elected. Do you think that he will campaign for you in places like southern Ohio and how important a role do you think he can play in helping you win?

Brown: I hear what Paul says, that he will support me. I hope that he does. I hope that he campaigns extensively around the state. I have no idea what he's actually going to do. He's made a major contribution, especially in the special election last year, helping, with a lot of others, to make Iraq…helping people to understand more about the Iraq war. I hope he continues that kind of education for Ohioans.

Terence Samuel, AOL.com: Can you comment on how that scenario's played out and what it says about the party generally -- the Paul Hackett situation?

Brown: It says little about the party. It says that one candidate was thirty points behind in the polls and barely had enough money in the bank to meet his payroll, and had no endorsements, only had union and only about three elected officials that I know of and party leaders endorsements, and wasn't able to put together a big Senate race. A Senate race in a big state is a very extraordinarily complicated machinery to put together, and Paul had never been in a big race before. He'd been in a congressional race, which is a sprint, where he got huge help from outside his district, outside the state, including from me. I sent an organizer down there to put his get-out-the-vote operation together and raise money for him, and so did others. In the Senate race, he was way more on his own and he had to go from a city council seat, or a village council, in a town of four or five or six thousand to city council, I guess, to run for the Senate is a step that is very, very difficult and I think that he came up against reality. But it says nothing about the party. The party was not involved. I had my allies. Henry Waxman called some of his Los Angeles contributors for me and said “Sherrod Brown is the real progressive in this race; I hope you help him.” I had people around the country whom I knew doing that, who were progressives, but there was no party leader involvement…Dean or Reid. So, the reality was just politics.

Samuel: If I can ask you a little bit about machinery. Democrats keep talking about how favorable the environment is for them. They're up in practically every category except taxes and maybe national security and I think there's a sense that this thing is their's to lose. Except that in Ohio, we know the last time it looked really good and then at the end, everyone was walking around asking, “What happened?” Is there any acknowledgement that the other side is not going to roll over and play dead?

Brown: Oh, there's acknowledgement. Nobody I know thinks they're going to roll over and play dead. This is going to be a close race. The fact that I'm ahead in the polls says a lot about Republican weakness at this point. I haven't run statewide in 16 years. My district is in a media market that's one-third of the state, so I'm pretty well known in one-third of the state. My name recognition's not terrific anywhere else. I know a lot of people, but it's an absolute dogfight for everybody.

What happened last time…the editor of the Columbus Dispatch told me he thinks if the Bush-Kerry race had been for U.S. Senate in Ohio, Kerry would have won. But the race was for Commander-in-Chief; that was the difference. The gay marriage issue, maybe a little bit; a lot of things, maybe a little bit. But we also had a candidate who couldn't run strongly on populist issues. He couldn't talk about trade-- he had voted for PNTR, he had voted for NAFTA, voted for at least one or two, I think, versions of Fast Track. But I can talk about trade; I've written a book about trade. I care passionately about trade and I know how to talk about it. I know that trade issues work with white male, non-union, culturally conservative voters because they know how anxious trade issues have made them and their families. How not just the job loss but the threat of job loss has caused this stagnation of wages, has cost them their health care benefits, and givebacks at the bargaining table if they're lucky enough to be in a union. I also know that's why….I know the drug industry is going to spend a million dollars in Ohio. I bet everything I have they will spend at least a million dollars in independent expenditures against me and so will the oil companies. This is an important race to Karl Rove obviously. This is also about, to national Republicans and Democrats, it's also about 2008.

Jane Mayer, The New Yorker As you say, the Commander-In-Chief issue is insurmountable, or it was last time, for the Democrats. And, to get to the national security issues, I have a couple of questions. One, DeWine is carrying water for the White House on warrantless wiretapping and I was curious about whether any of those kind of civil liberties issues and the war on terrorism cut anywhere with your voters, whether they give Democrats any traction, or whether they're just arcane things that are only of interest in places like The New Yorker magazine. And second, I also wonder, is there some message that Democrats could have that is their equivalent of we're-on-your-side kinds of issues, a way of cutting into the national security issue. Is there some unified message the Democrats could have that could give them some power to fight back against the idea that we should all be scared and the Commander-In-Chief and the Defense Department are the only way to protect you?

Brown: I think the wiretap issue is more an issue of rule of law than Mike DeWine is saying. I think the New York Times…this is not my metaphor, I think I read it there…they said, you're going 70 in a 50 miles-per-hour speed zone and the cops pull you over and you're able to raise the speed limit to 75 and not have to get a ticket. And that's really what DeWine is doing with this wiretap. Now the President's done illegal things so let's just legalize them now. I think people fundamentally think that's not the way the Chief Executive should…

Mayer: Do they talk about it much though?

Brown: No, I don't expect that. I don't know how that issue's going to play out beyond what I just said, though we're probably going to do a mailing to subscribers of The New Yorker, The Nation, The American Prospect on wiretaps. I think we'll do well there.

Ratner: [unintelligible]….our embassy in Greece, we're tapping Greek officials all over the place. And they're just furious at the United States. And they're supposedly our ally. So I'm not so sure…the wiretapping could also feed into national security.

Brown: I did not know about that. I think people see this crowd in Washington as people who think they're above the law with an arrogance unseen in even typical high-ranking politicians. I think that hurts them. But overall on national security, to answer the second part of your question, I think the voters more and more understand the Iraq war is making them less safe -- speaking of less safe in two ways. One is what it's doing in the Middle East. Our continued presence with bases, with Condoleeza Rice saying maybe ten more years, with the fact that Iraq is in more turmoil than it was, coupled with the fact that we're spending a billion-and-a-half dollars a week in Iraq and not funding protection of our ports; we're not funding the inspections; we're not funding protection of chemical plants and nuclear power plants and water systems and all of that. Not funding first responders well enough. These are domestic issues that are all about national security and I'm going to be assertive about them.

Mark Schmitt, Prospect: Congressman, just to change the topic a little bit. Having come here in ‘92 I think -- my wife covered you at the time -- you probably have a good perspective on what happened in 1994 and a lot of that is expressed well in your books. So I wonder if you could compare and contrast the mood of ‘94 and ‘06 a little bit and give your perspective on the issue of whether the Democrats need a national message, a Contract With America type of thing, as opposed to candidates like yourself who can think and speak for yourself about the issues in your state. And I'm curious as to whether you put any effort into encouraging other candidates, either for the House or Senate, to graft your message and how you talk about reform and corruption in relation to economic and bread-and-butter issues. What are the kinds of efforts out there to help people do that?

Brown: I don't know what I think about the national message. I think we absolutely…I worry about doing this…I'm not in the middle of helping to craft a national message. That's not my mission, that's not my role. I don't even know which side I'm rooting for, but I do know that in Ohio I've been working for several months…before I got into this race, I was working with Strickland and with others running for Congress about not an Ohio-specific, but an Ohio-statewide message so that we we're all talking off the same page. And that's one of the things I've said to other Democrats during the state party meeting on endorsements -- that I hope all Democrats are saying on November 7th, vote for the minimum wage and while you're there, vote for Strickland for Governor, vote for Bruner for Secretary of State, and Brown for Senate. I think that's part of it. I think there's been a lot of cooperation already between Strickland and me. Typically, Jules knows this from covering so many campaigns over the years, typically the Governor and the Senate candidate don't much like each other in a state because of competing forces and egos and ambitions and all. Strickland and I have a terrific relationship. We're very good friends. I think you'll see some synergism that way -- he from the south, I from the north. He's a little more conservative, but very much an economic populist running for a very different kind of office, understanding all that.

But I think on a national message, Democrats -- whether it's a national message or more localized by state -- we've got to point out their corruption and what it means to people, both in terms of morals and values and in terms of economics. Costs money out of their pockets, but we also have to be very assertive about what we're going to do instead. Whether that's a national message or not, I think we have to say what our plans are instead. Every time I lead the opposition to a trade agreement, I talk about what kind of trade agreement we should pass instead. It doesn't get much media coverage because it's not going anywhere and nobody much cares, but I think that's an obligation we have and I think in the campaign you're going to see a lot more of that. Every time…when I criticize the Medicare bill, I say here's what we should do instead. When I criticize them on an energy bill -- here's what we should do instead. When I criticize them on Iraq -- here's what we should do instead.

Matthew Yglesias, Prospect: Back at the beginning of your presentation, you suggested that you thought there were ways to link trade issues to security issues beyond just the Dubai port deal. And I was wondering if you could elaborate a little bit on how you think that would go.

Brown: It's not as well thought out yet, but I see signs of potential. Back about six or seven years ago, Boeing wanted to sell a number of planes to the Chinese. The Chinese said yes under two conditions: one is that you assemble some of them in China. Fair enough, and Boeing said yes. And the other is that you begin to give us some of your aerospace technology. And Boeing said yes. What that did was two things: it meant that the Boeing executives who made the decision did very well because they got a huge sales order. But it also meant that ten years from now, ten years from then, the Chinese probably wouldn't need Boeing anymore because they will have developed their own industry because of the technology transfer. By then the executives will have landed softly on their golden parachutes, but Boeing, the company, will be undermined long-term, something most corporate executives don't think much about, and our country's national security may be undermined.

I want to look at some of these CFIUS's decisions; I want to look more at what we've done with China overall. I'm going to talk about what the decline in the steel industry means in terms of national security, in weapons development, and manufacture. And I want to talk about a lot of the arms transfers, arms sales that have taken place, and the sort of corporatization of our national policy.

I did a series of meetings at home right after the attack on Iraq in April, May, 2003, with families of people who had soldiers there -- they didn't have enough water, they didn't have enough body armor, all the things that you know about. And one woman told me that her husband had taken a pay cut. He was making $3,000 a month at home; he was making $2,200 in the service driving a truck between Kuwait City and the Iraq border. And next to him was a guy also driving a truck -- same route, same truck, same everything -- for Brown and Root, subsidiary of Halliburton, making $7,000 a month. This privatization of the military -- thinking about what it does, certainly in terms of dollars but also in morale. We have outsourced so much of our military to the private sector that it has national security implications. So we're going to explore all that. That was a bit of a rambling answer, but you're going to see more.

Michael Scherer, Salon: There's a Republican hope that by November the corruption theme, if it's still around, won't be moving votes. It'll be jobs, it'll be national security, it'll be whatever other Dubai-ports thing pops up. Ohio's sort of corruption-heavy right now. Are you confident it will continue to be a theme come November and that it will do what Democrats are hoping right now it will do?

Brown: I think it's much more likely to grow than shrink, the corruption issue. But I think that because, again -- it's not the corruption per se that's so scandalous; it's how it affects people's lives. This Medicare bill, energy prices, workers compensation, workers being denied coverage, workers not getting the support they need. All of those things are policies growing out of the corruption. Jack Abramoff -- he's a logical extension of all of this. This Medicare bill was no surprise. Of course seniors are confused. Of course seniors aren't getting much out of the bill when the drug companies and insurance companies write the bill. Billy Tauzin gets a two-million dollar a year job with PhRMA after he leaves Congress. Of course the policy is wrongheaded. I don't see anything changing about that. I think we're just going to find more things out.

Tomasky: I want to ask a question about money. You haven't had to raise a great deal in awhile and you have to raise, you told me last week, $15 million, and that's a lot of money. And I just wondered what you've learned so far in trying to raise this money, or what your observations would be about how money affects what the Democratic Party -- not you -- but what the Democratic Party can and can't say, whether it's corporate money or Hollywood money or rich liberals who want you to talk about civil liberties more than you should on a campaign trail. How does that big money affect the party, do you think?

Brown: It's a good question. First, it takes campaigns away from what they should be. I really do believe -- I've been doing this for 31 years -- I do believe campaigns are great learning experiences. The stories I've told today came mostly from the campaign trail, in the relatively small windows I get to do that, because most of my time is spent on the phone asking wealthy people for money. I don't know how that's going to be fixed -- the system is just sick in terms of the number of dollars you have to raise. It certainly has a conservatizing influence on the politics of this country.

We need to do fundamental changes in everything, from fairer redistricting, competitive redistricting, television and radio donating some time in exchange for their licenses, some serious time for candidates. And some rules about ads. And, I'm not a lawyer, especially a constitutional lawyer on how we do the First Amendment stuff with the independent money in campaigns…it's pretty troubling. I love Saturdays and Sundays because those days I actually get to campaign like I used to. During the week I'm calling people in their offices mostly, not that I'm not out a lot during the week too, but I'm on the phone all the time raising money. And it's just not the way to run campaigns.

Schmitt: I want to follow up on that. Just ask your view of what happened with the failure of the Reform Ohio Now initiatives last year in an atmosphere of total outrage, Governor at 12 percent popularity, you've got a package of some of the things you just talked about, and they get crushed. What do you think the story is here?

Brown: Two major problems: they were written to be nonpartisan by a group of Democrats who weren't part of the party structure, although they were activists. And so it never got the support of the Democratic structure. Yet as soon as they were introduced, as soon as it was imminent they were going to be on the ballot, the Republicans as a machine came out against them. And Democrats didn't rise to the occasion because a lot of Democrats were unhappy with the way they were written. The Democratic chair in Cleveland did ads against them. He was against one of them, but he -- I don't know if he did ads against all four or just the one.

The first problem was that. The second problem was that there were four issues. You can't do four issues. It's way too complicated. I remember during the Clinton health plan in ‘93, at a town meeting I couldn't explain it in under five minutes. And I just knew, I've been around politics long enough to know that you can't win if you can't explain it in under about a minute. And these four issues were just all over the place. If we had done just redistricting, I think we could have passed it. But we had a weaker state party then than we have now…our new chairman -- I think we're going to see some very good things happen.

David Grossman, PoliticsTV.com: You've obviously made trade issues a centerpiece of your campaign. What do you think should be a sort of overarching progressive message when it comes to globalization writ large that's going to really resonate with voters in Ohio?

Brown: I rarely talk about trade standing alone. I think it needs to be part of a whole jobs picture. No more new trade agreements with the model we have. My first year in Congress, the first year I ran, we had a $38 billion trade deficit; last year it was $721 billion. From 38 to 721. China -- 1992 was, I believe, barely double digits; now it's $200 billion. Put that aside for a moment. No more new trade agreements on this model. Go back and look at other trade agreements with an eye to labor standards, environmental standards, all of that. I know we're not going to bring back steel mills to Ohio,. but I also know we're still the third largest manufacturing state in the country, and a whole lot of those are 20, 50, 100 employees, often non-union, often family-owned, usually Republican ownership, all of that.

We need to pay attention to the manufacturing we have, not pass in response to WTO findings, not a pass a bill that encourages more outsourcing. Instead, we should reward domestic manufacturing. Education's a major, major component of this. Employer-based health care, we've got to -- not in this campaign because I don't we can get a solution that quickly -- but we've got to look at what employer-based health care does to our competitiveness, what it does in terms of our competitiveness internationally and what it does domestically. When Costco pays health care almost all its employees and Wal-Mart doesn't for a lot of its employees and the state picks up the cost. There's a study in Ohio: both McDonalds and Wal-Mart, they're the two leaders, have 12,000 children who are on state Medicaid whose parents work at each of them, each one -- 12,000 whose parents work at those stores. That's all part of a jobs-manufacturing plan.

I think unique to Ohio, which is maybe less interesting to all of you, is Ohio doesn't use what we have. We don't use our extraordinary healthcare institutions in northeast Ohio well; we're the first or second state in the country in food processing -- we don't use that well for energy production, for all kinds of job creation. We can do better.

Witcover: What's the status of ballot security in Ohio, and are you concerned about it in terms of your election?

Brown: I'm concerned about it for the Democrats overall and in my own race. The state party, Strickland's campaign, and my campaign are already talking about it, getting people involved who helped in the ‘04 effort to make sure that votes are counted fairly. There's going to be early voting in Ohio this year. I'm not sure about the law yet, but I believe thirty days out anyone can vote absentee. Well, it's not really absentee anymore -- early voting. I think that's going to help with this. But I think we need to look very carefully about what happened before and what can happen this time.

Berman: Just to sort of summarize. You talked a lot about what you'd do differently, but how are you going to respond when Republicans go on the air with ads that say you're to the left of Dennis Kucinich with your voting record, when they throw liberal-liberal-liberal at you? Are you going to say I'm not really liberal, I'm progressive? I mean, how are you going to respond to that kind of attack that you know they're going to throw against you?

Brown: I think talking about how mainstream I am on economic issues and national security issues and values issues. Talk about the Medicare bill, whose side are you on. Talk about drug prices, home heating prices. I'm absolutely in the mainstream of every major issue in this country, I believe. They can put labels on it, but I don't think they work. I don't think voters listen to that kind of thing. I remember I was talking to Howard Metzenbaum either right before or right after he beat Voinovich, and his slogan was “He's On Our Side,” as I said earlier. And one-third of Metzenbaum voters identified Metzenbaum as conservative because he was on their side and they were conservatives themselves. They thought he was. So think this obsession -- I mean, I have it, we all have it that cover this, who practice this, who pay attention to this -- this continuum of right, left, liberal, moderate, very liberal, conservative, very conservative, whatever. I don't think those labels connect with a huge swath of voters. They connect with the activists; they connect with the newspapers; they connect with academics, but I don't think they do with swing voters.

Samuel: You have a mixed marriage -- you're married to a reporter. Can you talk a little about how that works in a campaign?

Brown: I don't know; I'll find out. My wife's a woman named Connie Schultz, who's a columnist for the Plain-Dealer. We actually met when she -- I was just talking to Jane about this -- she did a series -- she was a Pulitzer finalist three years ago -- she did a series on a guy who was wrongfully incarcerated, got out through DNA, for rape. She spent a year with the guy, followed him around, trying to get a job, all that. She then wrote a six-piece series in the Plain-Dealer. This was 13 years after the rape had been committed; he'd been in prison 12 years. On the last day of the series, the real rapist was reading it in the homeless shelter in Cleveland; he went to the courthouse and turned himself in. And then, right after that my mother read that series; I didn't read it; I didn't know who she was -- I was in the middle of a campaign, it was ‘02. Then after being turned down twice by her editor, she was given a column. Or maybe three times by her editor, saying “You don't have it in you to write a column -- and he still has never acknowledged he was wrong -- she got a column. I started reading her column and I emailed her and said, “You write like Barbara Kingsolver,” knowing that was the greatest suck-up line of all time to say to a woman. And we met and we decided to get married about eight or nine months later. She then, as many of you know, won the Pulitzer last year for commentary -- first Plain-Dealer reporter ever to win a Pulitzer Prize.

Ratner: And the editor never congratulated her.

Brown: Close. Well, I don't want to get into that, but you're close. And it wasn't the editor, it was the publisher, Ellen. But close enough -- you know too much. But anyway, she has taken a leave from the paper. She has a book coming out in April from Random House. It's going to be called Life Happens. It's her columns with a lot of other things with it. And Random House is about to sign her to a contract to write about this race, which will take a different kind of view. And her editors at the Plain-Dealer, from which she's taken a leave, are very interested in this, as you might guess.

Mayer: What kind of access does she have? What kind of ground rules? Seriously, are some things going to be off-the-record?

Brown: She'll always be respectful. She's not going to make me look bad -- she might make me look bad, I shouldn't say that. I don't know. She's talking to her editors about how to do this. She's going to write a lot about the coverage of the campaign. She's in all strategy meetings because she's very, very smart and she has a perspective that nobody else in the campaign has as a journalist. She's an extraordinary observer of human beings, as all you learn to be in this business. She's very good-- I'll make a speech and she'll watch the audience and tell me things I might not have seen. She's also going to be very active campaigning for me. She's a very good speaker. She's already done some speaking. She's going to go on a book tour in April with this book and she will sell more books in her first three days than I sold in two years of both my books combined, but then she's a really good writer. I never really thought about what the ground rules are but she'll figure it out.