Senator Sherrod Brown Knows How to Save the Soul of the Democratic Party – Yahoo Entertainment

Sherrod Brown has always defied easy categorization. A Yale graduate from a well-off family, he became a state representative in Ohio at the age of 21 and spent his free time in local union halls, absorbing the stories of auto and steelworkers. In the 1990s and 2000s, when Bill Clinton and the New Democrats preached the gospel of globalization, Brown, then a congressman, warned about the ugly consequences of free-trade deals like NAFTA jobs shipped overseas, factories abandoned, towns and cities hollowed out. During the Obama years, Brown, now in the U.S. Senate, pleaded with his party brethren not to abandon their working-class roots, only to watch Donald Trump win in 2016 with the help of the white working class on Browns home turf.

Brown, 67, is one of the last true progressive populists. He insists that Democrats should campaign through the eyes of workers and honor the dignity of work a message he used to win a decisive re-election victory in Ohio two years after Trump won the state. The pleas for him to run for president flooded in. It came on me so sudden, he recalls. I looked at who the cast of characters were, and I came from the right place with the right message and the right politics and the right history, perhaps.

But his heart wasnt in it.

I didnt have the ambition, he tells Rolling Stone during one of several long conversations this past winter and spring. One of the things about Ted Kennedy was his joy of life, his joy of service. I bring that to my campaigns; I bring that to this job. I dont think I couldve brought it to a presidential race, and fundamentally, that more than anything kept me out.

You could argue that Browns candor and modesty two qualities you dont often find in United States senators might be precisely what the country needs in a president right now. But Brown has found other ways to make himself heard. Last November, he published his third book, Desk 88, a hybrid of memoir and history that traces the lineage of progressive senators (Hugo Black, Bill Proxmire, Bobby Kennedy, and others) who sat at the same desk on the Senate floor now used by Brown. In February, he wrote a scathing op-ed for The New York Times about the power of fear and how it stopped Republicans from holding Trump accountable during his impeachment trial. (The piece also featured a sly reference to Lizzo. More on that later.)

And as the novel coronavirus pandemic swept the country, Brown blasted Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for the Senates sluggish response and foot-dragging in taking up the first of several major relief bills. A video of Brown tearing into McConnell received more than 1.5 million views and earned him comparisons to Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Who can say anything but this is a national crisis? Brown bellowed on the Senate floor. Were going to make our unwillingness to do anything contingent on some parliamentary trick? No.

Brown has a message for his fellow Democrats, too. If they want to win back not only the working-class voters they lost in 2016 but also mobilize the multiracial coalition they need to beat Trump, theyll need to rethink the American electorate altogether. Its a message that Brown will soon be sharing on behalf of former Vice President Joe Biden; this week, Brown voted (early) for Biden in Ohios primary and plans to help Bidens campaign later this year. Voters dont see politics as left or right, he says. This whole idea that independent voters are in the middle that theyre less liberal than Democrats and less conservative than Republicans is crap. People dont see themselves as conservative/liberal; people see themselves. And people see politicians as Whose side are you on?

What happened in that moment on the Senate floor during the coronavirus debate?[Democratic Sen. Dick] Durbin was impatiently, for all the right reasons, saying we needed to do this tonight. A Republican stood up and gave some parliamentary sleight-of-hand reason for the delay. And so I just took off on that. Why arent we doing this? Three, four, five days of delay when people are scared, when people are angry, when people are anxious about their future? They know theyre about to lose their job or theyve already lost it. They dont know if theyre going to be able to pay their rent. They dont know whats going to happen to their sister whos not feeling well but has to choose between going to work or taking a day without pay, or even worse, cant get a test for what she thinks might be the coronavirus.

More than 600 days ago, you raised the issue of Trump and John Bolton disbanding the pandemic team inside the National Security Council.I wrote the letter, I think, about a week after he disbanded it. The admiral in charge of this office had worked for [George W.] Bush, managing the international combating of malaria. Then he worked for Obama on a global-health-security office, where the function of the office was to surveil countries around the world for epidemics that might evolve into a pandemic.

One of the greatest things we do in our country, we send health care people around the world to help them with problems. We partly do it for our own interest, to keep it out of the country, but we do it for humanitarian reasons. The White House had nobody doing that. This guys job was to do that. If he had been there in November, he maybe sees this before the Chinese acknowledge it. Maybe it wouldve been the 10th of December, he wouldve had the wherewithal and gravitas and position to go to the president and say, Weve got to start preparing for this.

But for the rest of December, all of January, all of February, [Trump] didnt declare a health care emergency. Until March. All that time lost, more people get sick and more people die.

Should we listen to what the president says in the middle of this pandemic if hes going to say things that are wrong?We should listen to the public-health professionals. What Pence and Trump say moves some people, but theyre not reliable spokespeople to combat this pandemic, so I listen to the public-health professionals who have done this before. Theyve never seen something quite like this, but they are the best equipped to do it. What the president says is either misleading or wrong or outright lies or always for his political benefit. I just dont think any of us have time for that.

Tell me about the New York Times op-ed you published right after impeachment, where you said Republicans acquitted Trump out of fear. Theres a line in it I want to ask you about.If its the Lizzo line, it wasnt mine. The article was absolutely mine. Lizzo displaced the line Thou doth protest too much. When my wife [journalist Connie Schultz] read it, she thought that was too clich. Katie Mulhall Quintela in our office came up with Lizzo. [Ed. note: The line in question is, In the words of Lizzo: Truth hurts.]

Several people, unprompted, noted it in my circles: Sherrod Brown listens to Lizzo?Well, I do now. The article really started when I was just watching Republicans and listening to their fear. I remember going up to [Sen.] Patty Murray and saying, Im really struck by the fear on the other side. I just thought it was a story that needed to be told, because people ask all the time, How could Republicans not vote, for Gods sakes, for witnesses [to be called in the impeachment trial]? What are they thinking? And I said its really two things. They like what Trump gives them, and theyre scared to death. And fear does the business. And when fear does the business in a legislative body, the decision is almost always wrong for the country long term.

There was a line in the op-ed: For the stay-in-office-at-all-costs representatives and senators, fear is the motivator. When did staying in office at all costs become the be-all and end-all of ones existence here?Im not sure the assumption is right, When did it become? I mean, look I dont have much empathy for that attitude, but we all have it to a point. Everyone has some fear of losing their job. Its just much more unseemly if its a U.S. senator, because we can find something. The SEIU member in Cincinnati, if she gets some supervisor harassing her? She doesnt have a lot of options. I think politicians have always had that illness. Weve always voted in ways to keep our jobs that we probably shouldnt have. Ive never wanted to let fear do the business. I think I am even stronger in that view today than I was my first term. Partly that its OK if I lose, partly its the voters want authenticity, and partly because Ill sleep better.

There is now a trendy observation among the politically savvy that Ohio is a red state. It cannot be won by a Democrat apart from you, apparently. How do you respond to those who say Democrats should write off Ohio and campaign elsewhere?You dont write off a state thats voted for the winning candidate for president more times in the last 100 years than any state except maybe New Mexico. The state hasnt dramatically changed in the last 10 years; its just the politics of the country has changed.

We knew in my [2018] race we had to get one out of seven Trump voters. We knew it was mostly female Trump voters, and we did. And we did it with progressive populism, not the phony divide populism of Trump. Real populism is never anti-Semitic and never racist and never divisive. It brings people together. You campaign through the eyes of workers, and you govern through the eyes of workers. You do it in an inclusive way.

Ive had an F from the NRA my whole career. I was for marriage equality for 20, 25 years. I dont compromise on economic justice or civil-rights issues or womens issues ever.

Theres a multiracial coalition that your campaigns put together that I feel like is a model for someone running for president. A Democrat probably isnt going to beat Trump without building that kind of coalition. What are the lessons from your elections that you think have some broader applicability?I think you can do it and this isnt meant at any candidate you can do it by vilifying, demonizing, and attacking less. And I do plenty of that. I understand that, because you need to make contrasts. But [it should be] more about talking about workers and talking about peoples lives.

Whether you punch a clock or swipe a badge or work for tips or are raising kids or taking care of sick parents [Martin Luther] King said that no job is menial if it pays an adequate wage. And you illustrate that in part by stories.

I was at an AFL-CIO dinner in Cincinnati some years ago, and there was a table of middle-aged women, probably half white, the other half Latino and black. They were janitors. They had just signed their first union contract, SEIU, with downtown Cincinnati business owners. I sat down at that table next to a woman and said, Whats it like to have a union? She said, For the first time in 51 years, Ill have a paid, one-week vacation. You tell stories like that and you show what a union can mean and what issues of justice are all about. People respond to that. Thats a story Donald Trump could never match. For one thing, hes probably got all kinds of workers that hes contracted with that hes stiffed. I guess you do have to make the contrast and demonize from time to time.

Is there a misconception of what the working and middle classes look like? After the 2016 election there was a lot of hand-wringing about how Democrats failed to appeal to the white working class in the Midwest.Generally, when people say workers, maybe theyre thinking construction; theyre thinking maybe more of men than women. Theyre thinking not necessarily more white than people of color; I dont know if thats the case or not. But weve got to always speak expansively.

My wifes mother was a home-care worker. She died at 62. Her dad died at 69. Connie has said that they wore out their bodies so we didnt have to wear out ours.

I was at my high school reunion, I think my 40th. They had an easel with the pictures of kids who we know have died of the 400 in the class. And it was a pretty consequential number, and they were mostly low-income white and black kids. The other thing I remember: I sat across from a woman in my class. She worked at JP Morgan Chase as a bank teller for 30 years. She was making $30,000 a year. We ought to be thinking about them as workers.

Its a broad group of people that do most of the work in the day. Its the people that youre allowed to ignore. Its the food-service -worker; its the custodian in this building [the Hart Senate Office Building]. This building is way too white during the day, and its a whole lot of Latina and mostly women, not entirely, and black people that come in and clean up. Theres too much of that in society.

Your mom grew up in the segregated South, but ended up being a civil-rights activist, a progressive.In every way.

Your dad was from Ohio, a doctor, but a conservative, at least for a time.Till his kids changed him.

You and your two brothers all went to Ivy League schools. You went to Yale. But you go back to Ohio and become the defender of the worker and the dignity of the working class in Congress. How do I connect all those dots in your life?My dad always took care of people whether they could pay or not. I remember he had a thing of arrowheads in his office, a display of them. A patient had given them to him because they couldnt pay.

People would say to me in high school, Your dad spends time with us, he talks to us, he always finds a way to give us a bunch of pills that we dont have to pay for. He takes care of us. He had the reputation, and I didnt really know this growing up, as being the best diagnostician in town. I dont think it was science-based as much as it was listening-based. If you listen to somebody you can often tell whats wrong with them if youre a good doctor, without blood tests. Not that he didnt do those too.

My dad was a conservative, but only because he really didnt think about it. His dad was a conservative. Thats probably why. But then he changed. Nixon changed him, Agnew changed him. He changed in the Sixties, because he voted for Goldwater. How many people voted for Goldwater, then McGovern, right? Not very many. It was a small group.

You first got elected to the Ohio Legislature when you were 22?I was 21 when I got elected, turned 22 right after the election. Because I was young, I didnt need a lot of money to live on. The Legislature paid $17,500 in 1975; that was a living wage for sure. That was plenty of money to live on in Mansfield, and I didnt have another job; so when the Legislature wasnt in session, I would go and just hang out at the steelworkers hall and the UAW hall, and Id listen to workers talk.

That really did have a socializing effect on me. I heard what theyd say about scabs. I walked picket lines. It was a Republican county overall, but with a strong union presence. I guess thats where I learned politics more than anything.

How have the conversations in that steelworkers hall or that UAW hall changed in the years that youve been going there?I think there was a certainty in 1978 that My kidll have it better than I will. There was a certainty among the parents that their kids would have it better off, partly because they carried a union card, partly because there were economic opportunities abounding. They just all thought there was more opportunity than they think now. And thats because of bad trade agreements. Its because of terrible tax policy. Its because of elected officials that have not looked out for them, frankly.

Whose fault is that? Is it Democrats as much as Republicans?Of course not. But Democrats arent blameless. Democrats passing bad trade agreements, Democrats giving in to Republicans on tax issues. Most of us dont most of the time, but enough of us do enough of the time to get to a bad place.

One of my favorite Lincoln lines is when he was in the White House, his staff said, Stay in the White House and win the war and free the slaves and preserve the Union. Lincoln said, No, Ive got to go out and get my public-opinion bath.

Pope Francis said and my wife hates it when I use this one, but shes not here, so what the heck? but Pope Francis exhorted his parish priests to go out and smell like the flock, which has a different connotation, but it really is go out and be among the flock. I think that none of us does that enough. I think I do it more than most, but I dont do it nearly enough.

Speaking of history, where do you look in history to make sense of the moment were in now? [Note: This question was asked in mid-February, before the full-blown coronavirus crisis emerged.]Well, I start with this isnt the worst time in our countrys history, not even close. This is not the divisions of 1968, when a large swath of people couldnt vote because of their skin color. This isnt McCarthy, where people couldnt stand on street corners and criticize the government, or at least that part of the government. This isnt the Depression. Its not the Civil War. Its not Jim Crow. Its not those days, so thats good.

But Trump is the worst president in our history, and I also think if he has a second term, it could become one of the worst times it could reach the level of those periods or worse. That to me is whats at stake in 2020.

Did it surprise you to see Biden have such a good night [on Super Tuesday]? Or were those Biden is done narratives wrong?A little of both. Hes so well known. Hes very well-liked among voters and among party activists. Not necessarily their first choice, maybe. But personally, hes very well-liked. People all have seen his empathy, borne in part Im making too much of this, perhaps the same way Franklin Roosevelt had such empathy, because of his personal life. Few people have suffered as much as Joe Biden. People know that about him: that you either turn bitter from that tragedy or you grow and have great empathy. Thats the Joe Biden that people like. They know what theyre getting.

Was this the quote-unquote Democratic establishment lining up behind Joe Biden? Or is it Democratic voters finally saying, OK, we think Joe Biden is going to be our guy?I dont know what the Democratic establishment is. Its not a bunch of people in a back room that made all those people in South Carolina and made all those people in Texas and Minnesota and Massachusetts and Tennessee and North Carolina and Arkansas and Oklahoma vote for Biden. I know that some are going to characterize the Democratic establishment as pushing him over, but this was huge numbers of voters that made their decision.

What did you think seeing these stories that said you were going to be a white-knight savior of a divided Democratic Party?Im flattered, I guess, but the voters will work their will, and well have a nominee, and our nominee is going to beat Trump. Im confident of that, increasingly confident of that.

What is your theory for how this president won in 2016? And how does that inform the Democratic Party nominee defeating the president in 2020?First of all, he lied to people about protecting Social Security and Medicare. He sold people a phony populism to make them feel like he was on their side, and then he betrayed them. He uses racism and bigotry to divide people to distract from the fact that hes used the White House to enrich himself and his family. Populisms never racist. It doesnt push some people down to lift others up. We fight his phony populism with real populism that fights for all people. Thats what the whole dignity-of-work message is about. Thats where Trump has just missed it. It may have paid off for him in 16, but its not going to pay off for him again.

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Senator Sherrod Brown Knows How to Save the Soul of the Democratic Party - Yahoo Entertainment