Columbia College Today

Liz Brown ’07 and Mike Nadler ’07 have been politially active at Columbia

Photo: Josie Swindler ’07

When Liz Brown ’07 was growing up and went to stay at her dad’s house every other weekend, she could count on spaghetti dinners and pancake breakfasts - with hundreds of her father’s constituents.

As the daughter of newly elected senator and longtime congressional representative Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Brown is used to feeling ordinary in what she knows are out-of-the-ordinary circumstances. She’s one of a select group, politicians’ children, whose name-recognition precedes them. (“Fortunately, my last name is Brown,” she says.)

Students such as Brown, the especially private Meghan McCain ’07 and Mike Nadler ’07 (whose father is Rep. Jerrold Nadler ’69, D-N.Y.) work to define themselves as individuals while supporting, and sometimes stumping for, their famous parents. At the same time, they’ve managed to avoid being made a liability. There are no Barbaras or Jennas here.

McCain, the student most likely to spend future Thanksgivings in the White House, declined to be interviewed for this article. The art history major has deftly deflected political attention while at Columbia, keeping her name out of on- and off-campus papers.

Neither Brown nor Nadler remembers much about the 1992 race that propelled their fathers into Congress for the first time. The biggest change for 7-year-old Nadler, he recalls, was moving into a new apartment.

But they’ve grown into their roles. Nadler has become a particularly political figure at Columbia and is president of the College Democrats. He worked on his first campaign just after eighth grade, four years before he could vote.

At Columbia, Nadler’s been faced with some touchy subjects. He’s helped send groups of Democrats to campaign in Ohio in 2006 and in Virginia’s governor’s race in 2005. He’s been integral to the protests of John Ashcroft and Minuteman Project founder Jim Gilchrist, in addition to bringing Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) to speak on campus and writing several editorials for Spectator.

Before all this, though, Nadler used to get aggravated that when he and his father went for walks on the Upper West Side, where the younger Nadler was born and raised, people would stop his father on the street and his father would talk to all of them. Since then, he’s come to appreciate the perks, such as attending the White House party for the Yankees after a World Series win. Nadler is especially fond of the handwritten congratulatory note he received from Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) for winning the College Democrats presidency last spring. It’s not framed yet, he says, but it will be.

So far, Nadler has followed his father’s footsteps to Columbia and in campaigns, and hopes to go to law school, as his father did. But does he have political aspirations? After a long pause, he says, “No, but . ”

Brown, on the other hand, says her father will be the family’s sole politician. She came to Columbia on her “journey of anti-Granville,” referring to the population-5,000 Republican town where she grew up in central Ohio, though she didn’t get here right away. Brown spent a year in Philadelphia working for the service organization City Year and says her father’s instincts as a public servant have rubbed off on her. “He’s my hero in a lot of ways,” she says. “In almost every way.”

Growing up, Brown usually lived with her mother, outside her father’s district, so she missed much of the hate speech and hoopla. And when she talked to him on the phone every night, it didn’t matter to her if he was in Washington, D.C., or Lorain, Ohio. He managed to stay so involved in her life, she says, that her fourth grade teacher didn’t realize her parents were divorced, much less that her father lived two-and-a-half hours away. But this year, his Senate campaign made him, and her, more high profile. She had a 15-minute conversation with Sen. Barack Obama ’83 and hung out with The O.C. star Adam Brody.

In 2004, Brown organized with the Columbia Democrats to send about 65 members to Ohio to canvass for her father and to knock on doors to encourage historically underrepresented citizens to vote, and she spent last summer as a full-time spokeswoman for the Ohio Democratic Party. Previously, Brown attended events as her father’s daughter, but 2006 marked the time when she began appearing as his representative. At one point, she gave 20 speeches across three days at places such as the Morgan County Hog Roast.

After that, Brown is relishing the work on her thesis about Toni Morrison and Jorge Luis Borges, her staff writer position at Spectator’s magazine, The Eye, and her “Mass Media and American Politics” class - the first political science course she’s taken at Columbia. “It’s not relevant to my major,” she says, “but it’s relevant to my life.”

In an age when bloggers target children of the rich and famous, Nadler and Brown aren’t worried. In fact, they can’t imagine why anyone would want to read about them. And even though no one told them to, they keep a low profile. As Brown says, “Who knows what I’ll want to do 20 years down the line?”

Josie Swindler ’07 is majoring in American studies. A Spectator and Blue & White alum, this is her first article for CCT.

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