The campaign against Sherrod Brown

Maybe the Plain Dealer thinks they need to "prove" that having his wife on their staff doesn't mean they show favoritism to Senator Sherrod Brown in any way, because they ran a real piece of non-news garbage yesterday.

http://www.cleveland.com/open/index.ssf/2010/11/with_gop_knock_at_sherro...

"With GOP knock at Sherrod Brown, Ohio's next U.S. senate race has begun"

Basically, all the article did was recycle a GOP press release attacking Brown for supporting Harry Reid for majority leader of the Senate. The PD tried to spin it as news by claiming it was some kind of big salvo in the 2012 Senate race, for which theGOP doesn't even have a candidate yet. It was really nothing more than a boilerplate attack — and it was almost completely false. The correct place to run this would have been in their PolitiFact feature.

The article said,
"Brown today voted to keep Harry Reid as Senate majority leader ... for the NRSC, today's vote served up an excuse to begin attacking Brown.
"By supporting a big-spending, tax-hiking, pro-ObamaCare liberal like Harry Reid, Sen. Brown once again demonstrated that Ohioans cannot trust him to represent their best interests and values in Washington," NRSC press secretary Amber Marchand said in a statement e-mailed to reporters. "Sherrod Brown's lockstep support for his party bosses' job-killing agenda in Washington puts him squarely at odds with his state's voters, and that's why Ohioans will no doubt elect a fiscally responsible leader as their next U.S. Senator in 2012."

Amber Marchand's nose must be ten feet long because virtually everything she said about Reid was a lie, factless talking points Republicans use in place of thoughtful engagement.

But here's my issue. Of course, no matter what you call it, the Republicans will be working to damage Brown, to hang on him the tag of a reckless, big-spending liberal. So he needs to be working now to strongly position himself as a defender of working people and to damage the GOP as reckless, big spending (through tax cuts for the wealthy) reactionaries. The form letter I referred to in my last post is a really half-hearted stab at doing that. That needs to improve. I KNOW that Sherrod has been a defender of working people — almost obsessive so. But Republicans have managed to get to the point where they can spew such empty talking points and refuse to tell voters what they will do in office, and yet still get elected. This put Sherrod Brown in a lot of danger. He needs to go into 2012 without baggage.

He's got baggage. He's coated with toxins left over from this year's Democratic Senate primary, and he should not be pooh-poohing this as unimportant. It killed Ted Strickland's political career and it could kill his.

Unfortunately, right before the May 2 primary election, Brown released a statement smearing Jennifer Brunner by telling a lie about her: that she had run a negative primary campaign.

This was especially outraging to many grassroots activists because Lee Fisher HAD been running a negative campaign. In the several weeks prior to Sherrod's statement, Fisher had sent out e-mails lying about her directive on change-of-party forms (even earning a shout-out from Republican state chair Kevin DeWine) and distorting her record on financial reform. And a year earlier, it was Fisher's campaign who fed the media crap about Jennifer's husband and her son — the former untrue, the latter neither illegal or unethical but just embarrassing to her son. A reporter acknowledged it came from Fisher supporters. And if Fisher himself did not OK this, he needed to make an unequivocal statement that families were off limits and chastise his supporters.

He said nothing.

This may all sound like water down the drain, but I've learned that it isn't. I wasn't active in politics then so it was new to me to hear so many people still so angry about how Mary Boyle was treated. Sherrod's big lie about Jennifer Brunner is hanging out there, and people are still seething about it. They will continue to seethe as Fisher disappears from the political scene, and Jennifer Brunner's star most likely rises.

Sherrod backed the wrong horse, and he did so awkwardly and for a bad reason. He needs to apologize. People are willing to believe he wasn't following the race and was fed bad information. He needs to say so. Otherwise some of the most dedicated Democratic activists will continue to seethe, and they won't work that hard or that enthusiastically for his re-election. That's what happened to Ted Strickland. And it could happen to Sherrod Brown.