Brown faces strong challenger in 1st District

CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) _ It's been three decades since a Democrat won in South Carolina's coastal 1st Congressional District and if that doesn't change this Election Day, it won't be for lack of trying.

Democrat Linda Ketner, 58, a management consultant and activist whose father founded the Food Lion grocery store chain, is challenging four-term Republican U.S. Rep. Henry Brown in what has long been considered a district solidly in GOP hands.

Ketner has raised and spent more than Brown, though that includes a $700,000 loan to her own campaign, enabling her to air a barrage of television ads in the district that reaches from south of Charleston along the coast to the North Carolina state line.

"She's running what appears to be the first viable campaign against Brown since he was first elected," said Jack Riley, a political scientist at Coastal Carolina University who says Ketner still has an uphill fight.

The latest Federal Election Commission reports show Brown with a big edge in cash on hand — $1.2 million to Ketner's $200,000 — entering the campaign's closing days. By the end of September, combined spending in the race had approached $2 million.

Brown, 72, a retired vice president of Piggly Wiggly Carolina Inc. who served in the state House of Representatives from 1985 through 2000, said energy is the biggest issue in the race and the nation needs to develop more of its own resources.

"If we can have a stable energy policy it would put people back to work, make us less dependent on foreign oil and we wouldn't be sending $700 billion dollars a year to foreigners, some of whom don't like us very much," he said.

"Every other country uses their energy as an economic stimulus," Brown added. "We use ours as an environmental liability."

Ketner, who is making her first run for office, said the main issue is the financial crisis brought on by "bipartisan incompetence and corruption in Washington."

Congress, she said, must restore the Glass Stegall Act passed during the Depression that separated the banking, securities, and insurance industries. Those protections were removed in 1999.

Restoring the act will prevent banks from gambling in the securities market with people's pensions, 401(k)s and college savings. "The foxes still have the keys to the hen house," she said.

Ketner's political ads are provoking some of the biggest controversy in the race. In one, she attacked Brown over his handling of a brush fire that escaped his property and burned 20 acres of the adjoining Francis Marion National Forest four years ago.

Brown's campaign called the ad "misleading and dishonest" and said it wrongly claimed he was told not to do a controlled burn at his Cordesville farm when the state posted a red flag alert — meaning burning is discouraged, but not illegal.

Brown's campaign asked Ketner to pull the ad. She said it was factual and continued airing it.

Brown at first refused to pay a fine for the fire. The controversy wasn't resolved until earlier this year, with Brown paying almost $5,000 and the government revising its policy on controlled burns.

Brown said he fought the fine because the law needed changing. It used to be if a fire spread from Forest Service property to private land, landowners had to prove government neglect to get compensated. But fires spreading from private land to a national forest were automatically an offense.

"It said big government should be protected but not the small guy," Brown told Ketner during one of their debates. "We got that changed."

Ketner says Brown used his position to get special treatment and threatened to give more scrutiny to U.S. Forest Service programs.

"If Congressman Brown attempted to get the law changed on behalf of one of his constituents who had been fined, rather than himself, we could more easily believe that his actions weren't self-serving," she said.

Ketner has been a major financial supporter and organizer of several gay rights campaigns, including a failed 2006 effort to defeat a state ban on gay marriage. Neither she nor Brown have mentioned her sexual orientation in the campaign.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee recently added Ketner to its "Red to Blue" program, which two years ago meant an average of about $400,000 in additional support, the committee said. Kyra Jennings, a committee spokeswoman, said it's not yet clear what the designation will bring candidates this year.

Despite Ketner's profile and spending, Riley said she still has a tough battle in a predominantly Republican district against a GOP incumbent. "I would say her winning is still a long shot," he said.