and Jessica Wehrman
Washington Bureau
If Josh Mandel had awakened last Thursday in need of a razor, another goal could have been stricken from his ambitious list.
Since beginning his Republican quest for U.S. Senate several months after being sworn in as state treasurer in January 2011, Mandel has opened his standard stump speech by making light of the obvious: He looks like a kid.
“I try to keep my goals relatively simple,” Mandel told a Dayton Chamber of Commerce gathering a few weeks ago. “By the time I’m 35, I just hope to be shaving.”
Year 35 arrived and the goal went unrealized, a rarity in a young life with a clipboard of remarkable achievements — high-school quarterback, Ohio State University class president, law school grad, two-tour Marine Corps vet of the Iraqi war, Lyndhurst City Council member, state representative and state treasurer.
He also married the girl of his dreams.
Only a fool, then, would underestimate Mandel, the Jewish grandson of immigrants who braved World War II persecution in Poland and Italy, including Nazi death camps, and made good lives in Cleveland for their families. Certainly, Sherrod Brown is no fool.
The first-term incumbent Democratic senator has come to understand that a race against Mandel is a race for political survival. Aided by $18 million worth of withering television attack ads against Brown by outside groups, Mandel has defied even the doubters in his own party by making his race one of the more competitive U.S. Senate contests in the country.
He is “the most determined individual I have ever met,” said Barry Bennett, a Washington-based Republican consultant. “The one thing for sure, if you want Josh to do something, tell him he can’t, because he’ll figure out a way.”
Many in the GOP sniffed in disdain when Mandel made rumblings about running for the Senate just months after defeating incumbent Democratic state Treasurer Kevin Boyce in November 2010.He was considered too young and inexperienced to give Brown a real run.
And there was this: Mandel had made a public pledge to serve a full four-year term as treasurer.
But when no other Republican volunteered to take on Brown, Mandel “was willing to answer the call,” said Cuyahoga GOP Chairman Rob Frost, who first recruited him.
Bennett said he doesn’t blame Mandel for seizing the opportunity, but he acknowledged his greenness has been exposed in the campaign, manifested in continual media portrayals of him as a truth-stretching opportunist.
“If Josh were more experienced and had run statewide before, he’d undoubtedly be smoother, have a better relationship with the press,” Bennett said. “But I told him the chance to run in an open seat just doesn’t happen.”
Brown and other Democratic officials depict Mandel as a ruthlessly ambitious candidate who will say and do anything to win. They refer to a widely condemned TV ad he ran against Boyce, a devout Christian who is black, that used subtle images to imply that Boyce was a Muslim radical.
Mandel “is totally unworthy of serving in political office,” said former Gov. Ted Strickland. “I base that on the reprehensible campaign he ran against Kevin Boyce that I think was a racially and ethnically bigoted campaign. I have yet to hear him apologize to the public for that kind of campaign.”
In an interview, Mandel said he “learned from making a mistake” and after the election he met Boyce at a Bob Evans restaurant to apologize for the ad.
Where detractors perceive blind ambition, supporters see in Mandel a man who has been a force for good in the political arena and on the battlefield. And they see a natural leader who will not be outworked.
In his 2006 race for the Ohio House he knocked on 19,679 doors and wore out three pairs of shoes. He has put the same energy into this campaign, though he says he has no intention of making a career as a senator. If he wins on Nov. 6, he says, he will voluntarily limit himself to two six-year terms.
“He’s an amazingly hard worker,” said Phil Schwarz, of Chicago, who has known Mandel since first grade and who formed a lifelong bond with his quarterback at Beachwood High School. “You kind of knew he was going to be something special. He’s got a magnetic personality.”
His high school principal, Randy Boroff, describes Mandel as “sort of a quiet leader,” who thrived and was supported by the tight Beachwood community.
Mandel, whose father is a prosperous Cleveland lawyer and whose mother worked 23 years as a teacher’s aide in public schools, said he was inspired by the courage and patriotism of his grandparents to join a Marine Corps Reserve unit in Brook Park, shipping out for his first tour in Iraq shortly after graduating from OSU in 2000.
Dan Maynard, a native of Marion now living in Orlando, Fla., recalled Mandel as a platoon leader who stuck up for his comrades in boot camp at Parris Island, S.C. “He was a good guy right from the get-go,” Maynard said.
Mandel patrolled the streets of Haditha, on the Iraqi border with Syria. State Rep. Danny Bubp, a Navy Seal, was in Haditha at about the same time.
“He didn’t have to go to Iraq,” Bubp said. “You see guys in the reserves all the time trying to get out of it and he didn’t do that. He was in an austere environment. It was tough up in Haditha.”
While in law school at Case Western Reserve University, Mandel was engaged to a fellow student. After they broke up, he was invited in 2007 to a dinner party where a mutual friend seated him across the table from Ilana Shafran, who is three years older than he and an heir to the wealthy Ratner family. Seated with them was a 92-year-old man named Maury.
“Maury and I were hitting on Ilana and I ended up prevailing,” joked Mandel.
Six months later, he stunned her with news that he had volunteered for the surge in Iraq. Five days before shipping out he proposed as he and Shafran sat on a rock on Lake Erie’s Whiskey Island; they were married on Aug. 28, 2008, in Jerusalem.
For his second tour, Mandel served as an intelligence gatherer in Anbar province, then a hotbed for al-Qaida.
“There are a lot of men and women who did much more dangerous things than I did in Iraq and there are a lot of men and women I would classify as heroes,” Mandel said in describing his service. “I would not describe myself in that fashion. I did my small part for my country and the corps, and I was proud to have done that.”
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