Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.

This is a sample of our recent bonus episode, usually only available to members.

These episodes are comprised of our crew of researchers, Amanda and myself, all getting together

for a roundtable discussion on topics that we find interesting.

So here's a few minutes for free so you can know what all the fuss is about.

Next up, we turn to former senator from Ohio, Sherrod Brown, who wrote a quite good op-ed

piece in the new republic.

Democrats must become the workers' party again.

And he's quite blunt, he says, to win the White House and governing majorities again, Democrats must

reckon with how far our party has strayed from our New Deal roots. In terms of both our philosophy toward the economy

and the makeup of our coalition, we cannot solve this problem without an honest assessment of who we

are. How we see ourselves as the Democratic Party, the Party of the People, the Party of the Working

Class, and the middle class no longer matches up with what most voters think.

He, I mean, so Sherrod Brown came into Congress in the early 90s.

So the fighting in NAFTA was the beginning of his political career representing Ohio, which was going to be incredibly hard hit by the ramifications of NAFTA.

And so he talks about leading the opposition to it, hoping that Bill Clinton would do the right

thing, having come into office. I actually didn't realize, you know, being 10 at the time, that Bill Clinton

didn't negotiate the NAFTA Accords. That came to him from George H.W. Bush, and he opted to

not try to renegotiate, which is, I mean, just as a metaphor, that's pretty interesting,

right? One party is kicked out of office. Another party comes into office, but they were so

aligned that Clinton came in thinking, like, no, I'll do exactly what the previous guy was going

to do.

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