People you want to meet

Brown and wife, Connie Shultz, in downtown Cleveland.

In These Times Features > November 21, 2005

Who is Sherrod Brown?
An unabashed progressive takes aim at a Senate seat in Ohio
By Christopher Hayes
http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article_two/2406/

There are two small but revealing items affixed to Ohio’s 13th District congressman Sherrod Brown. On his lapel, he wears not an American flag, but a pin of a yellow bird in a cage. On a Thursday morning in October, as we leave his office to walk to the Capitol for a committee meeting, Brown hands me a bookmark-sized slip of paper that explains: “The canary represents the struggle for economic and social justice.” It recounts how miners once took canaries into the mines so that when the birds died, they knew the air was too toxic to breathe. “Miners were forced to provide for their own protection. No mine safety laws. No trade unions able to help. No real support from their government. … It has been a 100-year battle between the privileged and the rest of us.”

Clipped to Brown’s belt is a small blue pedometer, one of a pair worn by him and his wife Connie Schultz, a Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He walks, or perhaps more accurately, stalks all over Capitol Hill, leading with his chest pitched forward just slightly in a gait that is halfway between a bounce and a prowl. “He never takes the elevator,” his spokesperson Joanna Kuebler tells me as we wait for Brown to emerge from a meeting with a group of scientists advocating for nuclear disarmament. When it’s time for a vote on the Hill, he eschews the underground subway that whisks members from their office buildings to the Capitol.

Handsome, with a slightly weathered face, curly hair and a deep, warm voice, Brown is universally described as “down to earth.” In person he’s as unposed as any politician I’ve ever met. “Those are the columns my wife wrote that won the Pulitzer,” he says, dumping a pile of papers into the lap of Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, who’s waiting for the underground shuttle as we trot past. “He’s a Republican,” Brown whispers as we walk away, “but I like him. How could I not? He represents Cooperstown.”

[SNIP]http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article_two/2406/