Josh Mandel is a 33-year-old veteran of the Iraq War, where he served two tours while a U.S. Marine. Mandel is a graduate of the Ohio State University and Case Western Reserve Law School. He served two terms in the Ohio legislature. Mandel is also the treasurer of the state of Ohio, having garnered more than 2 million votes last November. He is married to a beautiful wife whom he wed in Jerusalem in 2008. He is Jewish. He is a Republican.
Mandel has almost inexhaustible energy, a voracious appetite for news and history, and is a compelling stump speaker. His Web site is JoshMandel.com. Josh Mandel is Sen. Sherrod Brown’s worst nightmare.
Brown is a Democratic senator from Ohio who spent the past three days climbing out of the hole he dug on the Senate floor when he asked his colleagues in the world’s greatest deliberative body if they knew that “some of the worst governments that we’ve ever had, do you know one of the first things they did?”
“They went after unions,” Brown exclaimed. “Hitler didn’t want unions, Stalin didn’t want unions, Mubarak didn’t want independent unions.”
You get the point, don’t you? Everyone who thinks we need to trim the deals that public employee unions have racked up across the United States — the pension spiking, the early retirement, the 100 percent covered cost of health care — all those people share a lot in common with Hitler and Stalin.
And Mubarak. Don’t forget Mubarak.
Brown is an off-the-rack lefty, a tired, worn-out recycler of standard-issue liberal canards, a Yalie who after a brief career as a college professor started drawing a government paycheck when he was first elected to the Ohio state legislature in 1975.
Brown beat the incumbent Republican Sen. Mike DeWine in 2006 when anti-Iraq War sentiment led to a wipeout of GOP officeholders across the country.
Brown has apologized — sort of, in the not-really-sorry sort of way that Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., did when in 2005 he invoked Hitler or Stalin as useful guides to the techniques of interrogation used by the American military at Guantanamo Bay.
The new era of civility memo didn’t get to Brown, and the idea of his triggering the deranged on the Left to violence isn’t being shopped by the MSNBC talking heads because it doesn’t fit the template they have been pushing.
But Brown’s idiocy will not be forgotten in 20 months when the Buckeye State gets a chance to reconsider the wisdom of sending one of the most liberal members of the United States Senate back to D.C.
Many people are hoping Mandel decides to take on Brown. The high-belted crowd of the old guard of political reporters, the folks who dismiss Twitter as useless, say Mandel is too young and that his win as treasurer is too recent.
The voters of Ohio won’t give a second thought to sending a serious man with a very young face to represent them in complicated times.
The first Republican Jewish Iraq War veteran state treasurer who is also an alum of the Ohio State University up against a clueless, hard-left Yalie spewing Hitler comparisons who has been in elective office for 36 years — well, that would make a very interesting race.
If Mandel does run he will amass an enormous set of contributions from across the country and an extraordinary amount of national press coverage. Sherrod “Did I mention Hitler” Brown will be slogging uphill carrying the burden of Obama’s so-called “stimulus,” trillion-dollar deficits and demands for massive tax increases.
Run, Josh, run.
Examiner Columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com.
