This weekend, Congressman Sherrod Brown officially launched his bid for the Democratic senatorial nomination in the state of Ohio. As a part of this push, Brown wanted to not only to address Ohio voters but also speak with the entire blogosphere. On Monday afternoon, Brown and I spoke over the telephone about a number of issues related both to the general election and the primary. You can listen to the call here (warning: a 15.5 megabyte mp3), or read the full interview here at MyDD.com. Towards the end of the interview, I asked Congressman Brown about his primary campaign against Paul Hackett and received an answer to the question many Hackett supporters have been asking.
Jonathan Singer: Let’s look at the primary, just briefly. This is the place where the blogosphere is very impassioned on one side or the other. Here’s the difficult question: Why did it take so long to make the decision to jump in the race?
Sherrod Brown: I was not working on any politician’s timetable when I made the decision to run. The first six months of the year, I devoted my entire professional life to the defeat of the Central American Free Trade Agreement. We lost by one vote – two votes, technically, one vote in reality (if one vote had switched it would have been defeated). It passed in the middle of the night only after the President cut all kinds of deals and made all kinds of promises to members, all kinds of pork, whatever they did.
Then during the next couple of months, I told Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer I could not say yes on their timetable. I needed more time. I had some family issues, which I’m not going to discuss, with my daughters and my wife, and just where we were in our personal lives at that time. And I was not able to make that decision, and told Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer I couldn’t by their timetable in August. If that meant they needed an answer, then the answer was no at that time.
By October, my one daughter had gotten married, my other two daughters were either back in school or back in work, and my wife’s work situation was such that we could go forward and make this race. And I plan to win.
Again, the full interview is available here, at MyDD, or alternatively here, on my blog Basie!.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.