Friendly Fire
News: Are Democrats trying to shoot down Paul Hackett in Ohio?
October 11, 2005
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For a candidate who just lost a congressional race, Paul Hackett has been a popular guy this fall. The tough-talking Iraq combat veteran turned a special-election fight in Ohio’s Second District into this summer’s political sleeper hit, energizing Democrats and converting Republicans in the deep-red counties outside Cincinnati and pulling 48 percent of the vote in a district where John Kerry got a mere 36 percent. Soon the national party came courting: Hackett met several times with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Sen. Chuck Schumer, chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), both of whom encouraged him to run for the seat of Ohio’s senior senator, Republican Mike DeWine, in ’06. Hackett said he would—after been told by Ohio Congressman Sherrod Brown that he wasn’t planning to run—and on October 3 he publicly threw his hat in the ring.
Then, last week, his phone rang again. It was Sherrod Brown calling to tell Hackett he’d changed his mind: he was running after all. Then Schumer called, and this time he wasn’t delivering a pep talk. Hackett got the distinct sense that he was being asked to make way for the party insider. “Schumer didn’t tell me anything definitive,” he says. “But I’m not a dumb ass, and I know what he wanted me to do.”
DSCC spokesman Phil Singer insists that “We didn’t play any role in bringing Brown in. We were as surprised as anyone else when he decided to reconsider.” Putting a positive spin on the contest, Singer notes that “six months ago, reporters were writing off the state” for Democrats. “Now we’ve got two excellent candidates who would be good senators and can beat Mike DeWine in 2006.”
Hackett, who says he’s still considering his options, is less sanguine—and less diplomatic. “The Democratic Party is like an addict,” he says. “They’re addicted to failure. I want to help the party. The question is, how do you help someone that doesn’t want help?”
Brown dismisses the controversy his decision has sparked as a “tempest in a teapot.” He insists that “nobody recruited me to run against Paul Hackett.” And though Hackett says Brown told him point-blank that he wasn’t running, Brown maintains that he was simply wrestling with whether to run because of family considerations. “If your readers or others can’t understand that, then so be it, but my family comes first,” the congressman says. “Paul Hackett is a decent man, he served his country,” he adds, “but no one is entitled to a Senate nomination.”
The liberal blogosphere, which played a critical role in raising money and awareness for Hackett’s summer campaign, has been fractured by the dustup. Brown, who led the fight against CAFTA in the House and voted against the Iraq war, is a progressive who has long cultivated netroots support. This has prompted a crossfire between bloggers, with at least one former Hackett supporter, who is also a paid consultant to the Brown campaign, being accused of “looking for a payday” by boosting Brown.
All this has political observers buzzing in a state that has often been a bellwether for national elections. The Cleveland Plain Dealer said that Ohio’s Senate race “could become one of the most exciting and closely watched elections in the nation in 2006.”
Hackett is not so sure, though. Though Brown says he wouldn’t be giving up a safe congressional seat unless he knew he could beat DeWine, the veteran counters, “To me, a race between two professional politicians is a no-brainer win for DeWine. You’re not gonna throw out a sitting senator in a Republican state with a very liberal Democratic longstanding US congressman.” If Democrats want to start winning races, he adds, they might need a dose of boot-camp discipline: “How come this doesn’t happen in the Republican Party? It’s because they sit down guys like Sherrod and put him in a corner and make him wear the dunce cap.”
David Goodman is a contributing writer for Mother Jones and the coauthor, with his sister, Amy Goodman, of the New York Times bestseller The Exception to the Rulers, which is now in paperback.
