On January 9, Washington Post political writer Ben Terris profiled conservative Sen. James Inhofe and described him as “the country’s most prominent climate-change denier.” A headline announced “Senate’s top climate-change denier is flying high.” Above that in italics was this Inhofe quote: “When you do things that people won’t do because it’s politically stupid, it’s good to have peace with it.”
Terris explained how liberals rip Inhofe apart as cartoonish:
This is how Democratic activists like to think of Inhofe: as a doddering caricature of conservative values who, given a platform such as the chairmanship of the Environment and Public Works Committee, will regularly supply punch lines to the opposition. They see him as an untethered radical off in a world apart even from his conservative colleagues; a Don Quixote with Jesus as Sancho Panza, on a quest to rein in overzealous lefties. Their hope is to use him as a foil.
Twenty days later, Terris is shamelessly profiling a liberal senator as terrific presidential material. The headline was “Why Isn’t He Feeling A Draft? Ohio’s Sherrod Brown was Elizabeth Warren before Warren was a Democratic rock star. But don’t bet on him being progressives’ standard-bearer in 2016.” Online it was "Why aren't progressives begging him to run for president?"
In this story, there was absolutely no space for Republicans to describe him as a untethered, crazy socialist that they could use as a left-wing foil. With his 100-percent score from NARAL Pro-Choice America, there was no mocking headline about being a "prominent baby-denier." No, Terris sold Brown’s personal qualities:
He’s an affable guy, appealing but not too slick, with smiling eyes and a good head of hair and a media-friendly feminist wife. [That would be liberal columnist Connie Schultz.]
And he was preaching economic mobility years before it became the central tenet of the nascent 2016 campaign.
By almost any standard, Sen. Sherrod Brown, 62, a former Eagle Scout with a voice like Tom Waits, is the kind of pol who should at this very moment be making the rounds of the Sunday shows, growling to packed audiences in Iowa and all the while insisting to major media outlets that he is not considering running for president at this time. Or at least you’d expect a bunch of liberal activists to be mounting a Draft Sherrod campaign. No?
Terris later tweeted that he’d apparently echoed radical lefty Ralph Nader!
Just got a call from Ralph Nader re: Sherrod Brown. "You took the words right out of my mouth." http://t.co/wOmqp3RsTW
— Ben Terris (@bterris) January 29, 2015
He's also echoing the leftist blog the Daily Kos.
Terris could only find progressives to quote about how Brown not running for president is a "missed opportunity." He couldn quote the Post's own George Will, who began a column like this: "With his chronically gravelly voice and relentlessly liberal agenda, Sherrod Brown seems to have stepped out of Les Miserables, hoarse from singing revolutionary anthems at the barricades." He only used Will this way:
Then, there’s the fact that — how to put this? — he’s an older white guy. Post columnist George Will wrote that if the senator’s name were “Sharon” Brown, he would be a grass-roots favorite, and there is something to that.
Terris can only lament what hasn't happened yet for his gravel-voiced "populist" hero:
As it stands, progressives may find themselves more than a little bummed out by the upcoming primary campaign. Warren keeps saying no, and neither Martin O’Malley, the banjo-playing former governor of Maryland, nor Bernard Sanders, the Brooklynite-turned-Socialist mayor-turned-independent senator from Vermont, seems to be gaining much traction. And yet the timing could not be better for a candidate with a populist economic agenda to challenge Hillary Rodham Clinton and her close ties to Wall Street: Both Democrats and Republicans seem to have decided that this election will focus primarily on the plight of the middle class....
Asked whether Brown should run for president, [Elizabeth] Warren would not take the bait. “Sherrod really has been a great leader for years,” she said. “He has been true on core issues that matter to hard-working families.”
