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Columbus Dispatch...
Treasurer Mandel
takes aim at Brown
Republicans eager for 2012 Senate race
Sunday, April 3, 2011 03:12 AM
By Joe Hallett
CLEVELAND - James Wert, finance chairman of the Cuyahoga County
Republican Party, ended his introduction of Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel
to 750 activists at the party’s annual dinner Wednesday night with this
plea: “Run, Josh, run.”
But Josh just ran; he’s been treasurer for only three months.
Even so, Mandel is planning to run again in 2012. He soon will create a
federal campaign committee for the U.S. Senate and begin doing one of
the things he does best: raise money.
After the Ohio GOP elected its bench in November, winning every
statewide office and picking up five seats amid the Republican takeover
of the U.S. House, some of the strongest potential challengers against
Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown of Avon are of a mind to stay put.
U.S. Rep. Pat Tiberi of Genoa Township said Friday that he won’t run,
and two others who are considering bids, Reps. Jim Jordan of Urbana and
Steve LaTourette of Geauga County, are leaning against it. Former state
Sen. Kevin Coughlin of Cuyahoga Falls is testing the waters, and former
GOP gubernatorial nominee J. Kenneth Blackwell also is interested.
Mandel, however, is the choice of GOP officialdom. Party leaders insist
that he is not a default candidate, pointing to a groundswell of
support for him, including last week’s launch of a “draft Josh”
movement by a coalition of Ohio conservative groups.
Although Mandel is only 33 and has little more than eight years in
elective office as a former member of the Lyndhurst City Council and
the Ohio House, party leaders say that the two-tour Marine veteran of
the Iraq war offers an appealing conservative contrast to Brown.
“Josh has statewide name ID, a great statewide grass-roots
organization, and he raises money prolifically,” said Cuyahoga County
GOP Chairman Rob Frost. “On the issues, what a contrast he is to the
liberalism of Sherrod Brown.”
Mandel, the top statewide executive-office vote-getter last year,
raised almost $5million en route to routing Democratic incumbent Kevin
Boyce.
Mandel was unavailable for comment, but a spokesman confirmed that he
will open a Senate campaign committee “very shortly.”
Ohio Democrats already are painting Mandel as an opportunist whose only
interest in the treasurer’s office is to use it as a stepping stone. If
he loses the Senate race, he will have two years left in his term.
John Green, director of the Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the
University of Akron, said the opportunist tag could nag Mandel.
“By Ohio standards, this would be moving awfully fast, to win one
statewide office and almost immediately turn around and run for
another,” Green said.
“He won’t have much of a record to run on, and that’s not to criticize
him; he just won’t have been in office that long. On the other hand,
opportunities to run for the U.S. Senate don’t come along that often.”
In an interview in his rented Italian Village apartment in Columbus,
Brown said that Ohioans know he has worked indefatigably for them and
will reward him with a second six-year term.
Brown has been ubiquitous across the state, visiting all 88 counties,
70 of them for at least a second time. He has convened more than 170
roundtables with business leaders, local politicians, academics and
citizens to discuss bringing jobs to the state.
Rated one of the Senate’s most-liberal members by National Journal
magazine, Brown said he thinks that Ohio voters eschew such labels and
instead “look at who’s on your side. Nobody fights for the middle class
more than I do, and nobody fights for workers more than I do.”
Brown has been a fixture in Ohio politics for almost four decades as a
former state representative, secretary of state and 14-year member of
the U.S. House. He has won three of his four statewide races, the
most-recent one his unseating of Republican Sen. Mike DeWine in 2006 by
12 percentage points.
David Leland, former chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party, compared
Brown to “a modern-day Howard Metzenbaum,” the late populist Democrat
who survived the Reagan revolution and all challengers to serve 18
consecutive years in the Senate until retiring in 1994.
“Sherrod fires people up; he’s fighting for the regular person, and I
think people in Ohio appreciate that,” Leland said. “That’s more
important than some Washington characterization as a liberal
politician.”
Brown is not so popular, said Brad Sinnott, chairman of the Franklin
County GOP Central Committee, that he can survive an onslaught: “Had
Sherrod Brown been a candidate for re-election in 2010, he wouldn’t
still be in the Senate.”
At this juncture, it seems unlikely that Republicans will enjoy as
favorable a political climate in 2012 as they did last year,
particularly with the actions of Gov. John Kasich and his GOP
legislative majority drawing the ire of many Ohioans.
“If the election were held today, there are voters who are angry at
Republicans - and not Republicans in Congress as much as the governor
and state legislators,” said Jennifer Duffy, senior editor for the
Washington-based Cook Political Report. “But who knows what the next 18
months will bring, especially for President (Barack) Obama.”
Considering Obama’s low job-approval ratings, Duffy said, “in 2006, you
saw ads that said Mike DeWine is George Bush. My guess is you will see
a lot of ads in 2012 that say Sherrod Brown is Barack Obama.”
Despite Brown’s incumbency and uncertainty over his eventual opponent,
the Cook Political Report rates the Senate race only as “leans
Democratic,” a reflection of Brown’s status as a top target of the GOP,
which has only 10 Senate seats to defend next year, compared with
Democrats’ 23.
“It’s a target-rich environment for Republicans,” Duffy said.
“Democrats know they are in a bit of a bad place.”
Still, she said, Brown’s race is a priority nationally for Democrats,
and he should have little trouble raising the $15 million he estimates
he will need.
Read it at the Columbus Dispatch
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