Congress from the Inside

Observations from the Majority and the Minority

Sherrod Brown

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 1999
• ISBN:
  9781612772608
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Four decades of Democratic control of Congress abruptly came to an end with the 1994 elections, which propelled the Republican party to an unfamiliar role as the majority party in both houses of Congress. Second-term congressman from Ohio Sherrod Brown was thrust into this frenetic first 100 days which were very partisan and often very nasty. Congress from the Inside takes freshman Congressman Brown through the halls of the Capitol as he learns his job; depicts the inner-working and deal-making of Congress; shows how legislation is crafted; and visits the offices of other members and small meetings where much of the work of Congress is done. Brown's third term, still as a member of the minority party, exposes the strengths and weaknesses of Congress as an institution, its successes and failures, its diversity and its elitism. This account of the transition from a political majority status to minority status discloses the trauma felt by one party and the exhilaration experienced by the other as one era ended and a new one began.

PART I

Energy is the first quality of a statesman.

—Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

1

Election 1992: Getting There

Politics is show business for ugly people.

—Mike Turpin, Oklahoma attorney general

The only cats worth anything are the cats who take chances. Sometimes I play things I never heard myself.

—Thelonius Monk, jazz pianist

ELECTION NIGHT, as it always is for the winner, was a glorious night. Early in the evening, we knew we had won when the absentee ballots showed us with a substantial lead. Absentee voters, often business travelers and Florida vacationers, are more likely to vote Republican.

Two years earlier, the voters decided they did not want me in office. After eight years as an Ohio legislator and eight years as Ohio’s secretary of state, I was defeated in 1990 for a third term as secretary of state. As difficult as election night was in 1990—as difficult as it was telling my daughters Emily and Elizabeth that we were going to lose, as difficult as it was calling my opponent to congratulate him, and as difficult as it was to stand in front of family, friends, and a thousand Democrats and make a concession speech—nothing hit me as hard as the close of my last day in office. My daughters—Emily was nine, Elizabeth six—were with me as my chief deputy Wayne West and I left the office on that January day. The girls had grown up with me in this office, coming in on Saturdays, attending all kinds of office functions, even playing here in the evening from time to time. Wayne, my daughters, and I walked out of the office at about six o’clock. Wayne and I were talking, and as we approached the elevator, I looked back and didn’t see the girls. I walked back down the hall and reentered my office for the last time. Emily and Elizabeth were kissing the furniture good-bye, piece by piece.

Twelve months later, congressional redistricting and the retirement of two veteran northeast Ohio congressmen opened up a new congressional seat. Eight-term congressman Don Pease represented my home county of Richland, where I grew up and which I had represented in the Ohio House of Representatives for four terms, but I had not lived there for nine years because of my service as secretary of state in Columbus. The first redistricting plan kept Ohio’s Thirteenth District pretty much intact and included the cities of Lorain, Elyria, Sandusky, North Ridgeville, Brunswick, Ashland, Wadsworth, Avon Lake, Avon, Amherst, Vermilion, Oberlin, and my hometown of Mansfield. When the plan for the new seat seemed headed for approval, I shared with family, friends, and political supporters my intentions to run. I notified the newspapers of the date of my announcement, which would be made at the grade school I attended in Mansfield.

However, a newly revised plan, drawn by the Republicans—apparently with me in mind—took Mansfield out of the district and extended the district almost one hundred miles east, making it probably the most grotesquely gerrymandered district in Ohio. After the first plan had been tentatively approved, one veteran legislator stood up in the Republican caucus in Columbus and thundered, “We spent $4 million to beat that son of a bitch two years ago. Why are we drawing a district for him now?” Lorain County, by far the largest county in the district, was split for the first time in at least one hundred years. The Lorain County Democratic chairman, Victor Stewart, said, “We’ll need Houdini to represent the kind of district they came up with here.” Others referred to it as the “barbell district,” the “turnpike district,” and the “roadkill district.” One wag wryly commented that the district looked like “something my kid drew with an Etch-a-Sketch.”

I had less than a week to decide whether to run in the open seat, which for ten years had included my hometown, or the very Republican Fourth District seat, represented for a decade by Republican Mike Oxley, that now encompassed all of Mansfield. I met with Wayne West, campaign manager Sue Adams, and a couple of friends to discuss how difficult this race would be, based on the Republicans’ plan. I decided to run in the open Thirteenth District, knowing I would be called a carpetbagger and an opportunist. (On this I was not disappointed by either the newspapers or other candidates.)

The skills required to run a successful campaign are similar to those necessary for running a business or for being a successful entrepreneur. A candidate needs to raise substantial amounts of capital or campaign money, usually in excess of $500,000. He needs to hire staff and make wise use of volunteers. He must craft a cogent, clear message that is broad enough to appeal to tens of thousands of people. A candidate must budget carefully in order to be able to deliver that message to thousands of voters in a variety of ways—through the mail, on television, on radio, and through printed material distributed by volunteer speakers, canvassers, leafleteers. And he must be able to successfully sell the product—himself—to the public and to the media: one-on-one, at editorial board meetings, through speeches, and in literally hundreds of personal appearances.

Eight Democrats and six Republicans qualified for the Thirteenth Congressional District ballot. A half-dozen more attempted to run but were ruled off the ballot, in most cases for insufficient valid signatures on their petitions. Most of the other Democrats were qualified and articulate but not widely known or able to raise the substantial amount of money necessary for a campaign. My eight years as Ohio secretary of state and my experiences as an officeholder and as both a successful (six times) and unsuccessful candidate (once) helped me substantially. I spent approximately $150,000 and won the primary by almost 25 percent.

As we looked ahead to the general election, my eighty-one-year-old father was not thrilled. He told Akron Beacon Journal reporter Regina Brett, “I’m still working for him, that’s all I can say. But I’m not glad he’s back. I think it’s a hell of a way to make a living.”

Initially, the most daunting Republican was a very wealthy, former state legislator whose father owned the Cleveland Indians. He, too, moved into the district to run. My daughter Elizabeth worriedly commented on him and his political strength: “You’re running against the man who owns the Cleveland Indians. I think all the Cleveland Indians will vote for him.” My older daughter, Emily, presciently responded, “That’s okay. It’s not like there are that many of them.” And she was right; he lost the Republican primary to an heiress who had run for Congress and lost three times in a row, spending millions in the process.

Under the direction of my campaign manager and longtime friend, Sue Adams, we organized a 150-mile bicycle trip that took us through dozens of communities in every corner of the district. As Bill Clinton was traveling around and learning about the country by bus, our bicycle trip taught me much about the district and its people. It drew a great deal of media attention and generated an outpouring of grassroots support. Members from a bicycle club joined us in Medina; we played softball with elected officials and community leaders in Garrettsville; in Elyria my daughters did a rap song they had written; we ate breakfast with the county fair board in Lorain County; and we were greeted by a hundred Democrats as we ended our journey in Newton Falls. Almost every stop attracted a great deal of media attention—television at the kick-off at Lakeview Park on Lake Erie in Lorain, radio interviews at several stops, conversations with dailies and weeklies through most of the seven counties. My familiarity with the district from the bicycle trip, from my days as secretary of state, and from our intensive grassroots effort played a significant role in winning the election.

In contrast, my opponent lived in the far-eastern, less populous part of the district and was unfamiliar with most of it. Although she repeatedly labeled me “a carpetbagger, an opportunist, and a professional, career politician,” she had not, even by election day, learned much about the district she wanted to represent. At a debate at Oberlin College, the format allowed each candidate to question the other. I asked her to name the high schools in the two largest cities in the district. Her failure even to attempt to answer—or guess—had its effect on the audience.

A typical October campaign day started at 4:00 or 4:30 A.M. at the Lorain Ford plant meeting workers. After a couple of hours there, two volunteers and I would go to another plant gate where a later shift started. From there, after a quick breakfast (if we were lucky), I walked through fast-food restaurants going table to table meeting people as they ate. Midmorning usually found us at supermarkets and discount stores, where I stood out front and greeted voters. (More often than not, the manager would throw me out after an hour or so.) Back to restaurants between 11:30 and 1:30. In the afternoon I returned to campaign headquarters to call potential contributors and ask for some last-minute help to buy television time to counter my opponent’s ostensibly unlimited bank account. Later in the afternoon I would either go door to door for a few minutes, go back to a supermarket, or return to fast-food restaurants. In the evening, when there were not candidates’ nights (which were often attended by more candidates, their families, and their workers than by district voters), I would campaign at bowling alleys. When up to it, I’d stand outside movie theaters when the shows let out or return to headquarters for a late-night campaign meeting.

At one event, a middle-aged woman walked up to me and asked in a friendly voice, “You’re Sherrod Brown, aren’t you?” I nodded. “You look a lot better on TV than you do in person.” Thank you.

During the campaign we unveiled a seventeen-page economic plan and made some very specific first-term promises, promises I knew I could keep: I pledged to pay my own health care until Congress passed universal coverage; to hold regular town meetings and not travel on junkets at taxpayers’ expense; to turn back part of my office budget; to turn down any congressional pay raise; to fight for fair trade and an industrial policy; and to end the corporate deductibility for multimillion-dollar salaries. As it turned out, keeping those promises may have been the reason I was reelected two years later.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was perhaps the central issue of the campaign. Without major side agreements on the environment, worker safety, minimum wage, and guarantees of free elections, I opposed NAFTA. My opponent supported it unequivocally. During my first year in office, NAFTA was to occupy a huge portion of my legislative efforts and ongoing trade interest.

Although being outspent $860,000 to $480,000, we won by 46,000 votes, or 18 percent. And the major issues of health care, congressional reform, and the economy helped Bill Clinton carry the district by five thousand votes, about 2 percent. Interestingly, the Thirteenth District gave Ross Perot his fourth highest vote east of the Mississippi, well over 30 percent in many precincts.

The morning after the election, I was up at 4:00 A.M. at the plant gates thanking voters, many of whom did not know who won because they had gone to bed at nine or ten o’clock. At a morning breakfast, I celebrated with the people I care about the most—my parents, my brothers Bob and Charlie, my daughters, and my niece Tara.

Election day 1992 was over. So now began the next campaign—the campaign for a congressional career. Four major tasks face a newly elected member of Congress: hiring a staff, attending the new-member training seminars, learning about the institution and its players, and campaigning for committee assignments. How the member-elect handles these duties can set the tone not only for the first term but for an entire career.

Soon after the election, newly elected members are handed a 350-page book entitled Setting Course: A Congressional Management Guide. In early December, incoming members are first invited to Washington, and then to Harvard, for two weeks of training and issue seminars. Few of us, frankly, knew much about the rules and procedures of the House. Most of us were significantly more conversant with issues, although exposure to some of America’s premier public policy experts showed us how much we still needed to learn. Training—lectures, small seminars, role playing, and hand-outs—helps; but, like most jobs, you don’t really learn it until you start doing it.

The new member quickly realizes that he is on his own. One veteran said, “Congress is like 435 separate corporations.” From running for political office to running a government office, he is in charge—hiring staffs in Washington and back in the district, budgeting, deciding what issues are important for him and his district. He is running a small business with a $900,000 budget and sixteen or seventeen employees, and his constituents are his customers.

Each week every congressional office receives literally hundreds of letters, dozens of individual problems and complaints, sometimes more than a thousand postcards, petitions with hundreds of signatures, and multitudinous invitations. A member who tries to answer personally all these letters, petitions, and postcards, we were counseled, may be neglecting other legislative business. Conversely, any member, we were told, who does not delegate large amounts of his legislative research or who tries to read every line of every bill—especially outside his committee jurisdiction—cannot do justice to his other work.

Don’t overreach on issues, we were told. Dozens of issues are interesting, provocative, important to the district, and challenging. Members who get involved in too many issues are usually effective in none of them. Become conversant on all issues, we were counseled. Be versatile, but pick only two or three to specialize in. As a member gains knowledge and skill about an issue, others will look to him for advice in that area. And, of course, in Congress knowledge is influence.

Much of what we learned centered around the collegiality of the House of Representatives. Get to know people in Congress; think of the membership in terms of spheres. Work with congressmen and congresswomen from your class, from your state, from your region, on your committees, even with those members whose offices are located nearby. Although the seniority system is very much in place, Congress is in many ways a merit system. Lyndon Johnson used to talk about “show-horses and work-horses.” Members of Congress, especially those in powerful positions, notice who does the work; who sits through often excruciatingly boring, interminable committee hearings; who is willing to participate day after day in the less-than-glamorous work of the House.

Learn the rules of the House, and learn the reasons for them, we were told. And don’t be a perpetual motion machine. As Tip O’Neill said, “The horse that runs fast early fades first.” And we were cautioned to move slowly on hiring staff. A full staff is not necessary in the first couple of months because the legislative cycle is not yet in full swing. “Don’t hire the mayor’s son,” we were told repeatedly; that is, do not hire someone that you cannot politically afford to fire.

There are assorted political landmines awaiting new members during the transition period and the first weeks on the job. One is the temptation to talk—and talk and talk—to national media. If the Los Angeles Times or Wall Street Journal or Washington Post writes something complimentary about the new member, the small number of people in the district who read it may applaud. A critical article in a national publication may get wide circulation in the district. Much the same can be said about two newspapers, Roll Call, a private, semi-weekly, and The Hill, a weekly, which write sometimes substantive, sometimes gossipy stories about members and staff. Congress must be the only workplace in America covered by two full-blown newspapers. All in all, it is much better for members of Congress, especially freshmen, to spend their time with local papers.

A more comical landmine exploded (without serious injury, fortunately) in the face of several incoming members in the early part of the 103d Congress. A reporter from Spy, a political humor magazine, for want of a better term, posed as a radio reporter and interviewed a handful of new members of Congress.

Spy: Bill Clinton has proposed lifting the ban on gays in the military. As your state’s first openly gay congressman, do you support his position?

A Midwestern Democrat: As my state’s first openly gay congressman? Who’re you talking about?

Spy: Uh, the story in USA Today about—

Democrat: Who is this? This isn’t me.

Spy: It’s not you?

Democrat: No, no, no.

Spy: Is there another freshman who, uh—

Democrat: If that’s true, that’s something that’s up at the other end of the state.

Spy then asked a series of questions about Fredonia, which, to the consternation of several freshmen, is not a country but in fact a fictional nation created by the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup.

Spy: What should we be doing to stop the ethnic cleansing in Fredonia?

A Midwestern Republican: I think anything we can do to use the good offices of the United States government to assist stopping the killing over there we should do.

Another Midweste...