DEMOCRATIC DISSIDENTS
Campbell Brown and Kirsten Powers take on the leftist establishment.
Democrats are known for many things, but chief among them is the relentless determination to maintain a rigid progressive orthodoxy within their ranks. Bucking that orthodoxy requires character and conviction because those who do can expect a certain level of contempt directed their way from their oh-so-tolerant brethren. Campbell Brown and Kirsten Powers are two women who have demonstrated a willingness to take positions decidedly at odds with the progressive establishment.
Brown’s Democratic roots can be traced back to her father, Louisiana Democratic State Senator and Secretary of State James H. Brown Jr. Although James Brown is Presbyterian, Campbell was raised as a Roman Catholic, which she remained until converting to Judaism following her marriage to Republican strategist and Fox News analyst, Dan Senor.
Brown worked her way up through the ranks of television reporting, winning an Emmy award for her reporting on Hurricane Katrina while working at NBC. She followed an 11 year career at that network with a stint at CNN. She began in 2008 as an anchor for CNN's "Election Center,” renamed "Campbell Brown: No Bias, No Bull” and ultimately “Campbell Brown.” During the 2008 election cycle, she engaged in a controversial interview with John McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds, questioning Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin's executive bona fides. That interview earned her accusations of bias from the McCain campaign, who accused her of going “over the line.” In 2010 CNN released her from her contract due to low ratings.
Brown moved on to writing opinion pieces that indicated such bias was a figment of John McCain’s imagination. In 2012 she penned two pieces for the New York Times. In one, she insisted a “paternalistic” Barack Obama should stop “condescending to women.” In the other she criticized Planned Parenthood’s self-destructive strategy of embracing “blind partisanship” that was costing the organization supporters. In 2013 she urged Daily Beast readers to keep the shooting in Newton, CT off the “culture war battlefield. Yet it was a piece for the Wall Street Journal that same year indicating where she was going with her post-TV career: Brown began challenging the left’s cherished nexus between the Democratic Party and the unionized education establishment, taking the New York City teachers unions to task for protecting sexual predators.
Ever since, she’s remained on the offensive regarding public school reform. She began with the Partnership for Educational Justice (PEJ), a non-profit watchdog group "committed to reclaiming the promise of public education for all students.” It took on NYC’s mishandling of sexual predator cases, pressuring city mayoral candidates to sign a pledge to reform the system, and spending $100,000 on an ad wondering whether candidates who declined to do so had "the guts to stand up to the teachers' unions.”
That earned her scorn from leftist publication Mother Jones, which cited Brown for a ”conflict of interest” because her husband was a board member of Students First, founded by former Washington, DC, schools chancellor Michelle Rhee. Education unions despise Rhee because she advocates for charter schools, and because her nonpartisan organization advocated for too many Republican candidates during the 2012 election and used a Republican consulting firm to produce the aforementioned ad.
In 2014 Brown upped the reform ante, filing a lawsuit challenging New York City’s tenure laws. And despite the insinuations of Mother Jones, PEJ’s chairman is Democratic lawyer David Boies, who represented Al Gore during the 2000 election dispute.
Earlier this year Brown illuminated her rationale for pursuing that suit. “There’s a monopoly controlling public Democratic Dissidents | Frontpage Mag: