The Oberlin Review
<< Front page Commentary September 29, 2006

The Right Stuff: Choosing Ohio’s Next Senator

“On most issues, voters are where I am,” the Congressman assured himself.  Not so fast, Rep. Brown.

This November, the citizens of Ohio (including a significant number of students around the state) will elect a Senator to serve a six-year term in the nation’s most powerful legislative body. The voters have a choice between two men with starkly different worldviews and political styles.

On one side there is Sherrod Brown. Rep. Brown is currently a member of the House of Representatives from Ohio’s 13th congressional district. Notwithstanding his remarks, quoted above, Rep. Brown’s voting record inspires little confidence in any statewide embrace of his positions. That Rep. Brown is a skillful politician — and a populist — I do not dispute, but it seems a stretch to conclude that a majority of Ohioans truly share his stances on the issues.

Rep. Brown will have trouble for a number of reasons. First, he repeatedly used his vote in the House to support significant funding cuts for America’s intelligence agencies in the years leading up to Sept. 11, 2001. Rep. Brown cast such votes at least once a year from 1993 to 1999, including a 1998 vote against the entire intelligence appropriations bill.  This record paints the picture of a politician who is simply too weak on national security for the tastes of the “average voter.”

In addition, Rep. Brown can sometimes come off as a bit, well, hypocritical. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone decry Washington’s “culture of corruption” (for which, in Brown’s view, only Republicans are to be blamed) as fiercely as Sherrod Brown has. Yet the Congressman himself opposes one of the most significant measures of the reform package offered by leaders of the majority party earlier this year: the ban on privately-funded travel. Indeed, Rep. Brown is apparently quite fond of free travel. The non-partisan (yes, I really mean non-partisan) oversight group PoliticalMoneyLine ranks Rep. Brown 59th among 642 congressional officeholders over the past five years in order of the most privately-funded travel gifts accepted.

And if that is not convincing enough, Rep. Brown is just too liberal. National Journal, a first-rate, non-partisan news organization covering the U.S. Congress, annually rates members according to their voting records. The 2005 ratings reveal that Rep. Brown is more liberal than 84 percent of his House colleagues. On foreign policy issues, he is more liberal than a full 90 percent of the House. If anything is certain, it is that Sherrod Brown is no moderate. He is not a man of compromise, and a vote for Brown this November is a vote for partisan-gridlock-as-usual in Washington.

But thankfully Ohioans have another option: Mike DeWine. In contrast to his opponent’s extreme partisanship, Senator DeWine has proven himself to be a powerful force for compromise in Congress. In the same National Journal ratings for 2005, DeWine was ranked more liberal than 45 percent (and more conservative than 55 percent) of his colleagues — by no means an extremist one way or the other. And he certainly is not afraid to take stances in opposition to the Republican leadership or to the Administration, something he has done more often than almost any other GOP Senator.

The bottom line is that Senator DeWine is one of an increasingly rare breed in Congress these days: he is a political moderate. Ohioans are fortunate to have one of Washington’s few team players representing them in the Senate and would be foolish to reject him in favor of an extreme partisan like Sherrod Brown.

Rep. Brown, of course, will continue his attempts to portray Senator DeWine as a Republican hardliner, but I think he underestimates the voters. Ohioans will recognize (and resent) such obfuscation. As Mike DeWine puts it, “…in the end, George Bush is not on the ballot. Bob Taft is not on the ballot. John Kerry is not on the ballot. Mike DeWine and Sherrod Brown are on the ballot.”

This is your choice. Vote wisely.


 
 
   

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