By Brian Howey
INDIANAPOLIS – When I called Brad Ellsworth on Tuesday he abruptly answered the phone and joked, “It was a whole lot simpler when I just picked up the phone at the sheriff’s office and it was 5 o’clock in the morning.”
But this was U.S. Rep. Brad Ellsworth, now the Democratic U.S. Senate nominee, running in one of the more intense and controversial political environments ever. Republicans are already taking aim at him over the health reforms and the variety of bailouts, most, ironically, that were initiated under Republican President George W. Bush.
So how is Ellsworth going to navigate these twisted issues? Health care, for instance? “I’ve had mixed reaction,” the former Vanderburgh sheriff said. “I have had no less than hundreds of meetings and thousands of phone calls and correspondence going back and forth. I’ve got to tell you it was a diverse response: people who were all for it, people who were all against it. And so that became my goal to dissect it and make the best decision I could on what I felt was best for the state and the country.”
He recalled his first congressional campaign when people were telling him something had to be done. “It was a good first step. It’s not perfect. There will be tweaks; there will be fixes as we go along. I would have liked to have seen something more incremental. When you have something that big, it becomes ripe for misinformation and when people get misinformation they get scared. As more people dissect this they are more satisfied.”
Ellsworth participated in a 5,000 person tele-townhall sponsored by the AARP and found seniors warming up. “Early on they were talking about death camps and panels, but now they are talking about closing the donut hole and pre-existing conditions and things that it will do.”
How about the auto bailout that Bush proposed but Republican Dan Coats has opposed? “What I started to do was calling people back home,” Ellsworth said. “Probably the most convincing call I made was to Toyota, which has a plant in my district at Princeton. They said we had to do this. I asked them why and they said you have to understand that their suppliers were also the suppliers to GM and Chrysler and if they went out of business in an abrupt manner, and the suppliers went down, they would go down also. That was pretty convincing.”
Ellsworth likens it to a “Thelma & Louise” going over the cliff scenario versus “putting a parachute on the back of the car and floating down in a slower, orderly manner.”
“They still went into bankruptcy, they formulated that and then they came back up. GM has paid back their loans,” Ellsworth said of GM and Chrysler. “I don’t think there’s any question that it saved jobs. Toyota is getting ready to call back.”
And the stimulus? Ellsworth traveled to Elkhart with President Obama in February 2009 and supported it. “This country was on the verge of a depression. Everybody agreed we needed to do something. Nobody wanted to spend that much money. But look at what it did. A third of that – and most people don’t bring this up, they talk about the $780 billion – were tax cuts that went right back to American citizens. I have no problem giving tax cuts back to businesses. A third of it was propping up the states, including Indiana. It was keeping uninsured benefits, health care benefits. A third was projects.”
And TARP, the Wall Street bailout? “Again, we have to put this in context,” Ellsworth said. “This was when President Bush came to Congress and said the economy was going off the cliff and we had to do something to prop it up. That’s pretty convincing. My constituents had all their 401Ks, all of their investments, in peril.”
Ellsworth said he called people in the “financial world” from Evansville and Terre Haute. “I trust those people. I didn’t call one soul on Wall Street. When small businesses couldn’t get loans, I was getting calls every day. They were locked up, frozen up, and that was costing jobs.”
He bucked President Obama on Cap-and-Trade. “The President called me and said, ‘Can you vote with us?’ I said, ‘Absolutely not. It penalizes us.’”
Ellsworth has taken some flak for running as a sheriff. He doesn’t dismiss his congressional career, but he sees his police skills as an asset in the bizarre world we call Washington. “I never asked anybody what their politics was when I was sheriff,” Ellsworth explained. “I just went out and tried to resolve their problems. I didn’t take everything at face value. I separated people and interviewed them separately. I tried to get to the real story. If I had someone who came in and gave me one side of the story, I’d go find someone on the other side. It’s like an investigation. It’s trying to get down to the truth and make a decision.”
Yes, decisions. Tough, complicated decisions.
The columnist publishes at www.howeypolitics.com
