Jenny Brown Interview with the Kitchen Table Patriots

This past February the Kitchen Table Patriots, a regional tea party affiliate, posted a you tube video of an interview with Jenny Brown, a Republican candidate for Montgomery County commissioner. (I've written about the Kitchen Table Patriots before).

The video is about 7 minutes long. I watched it and took some rough notes. Below my interview notes are a few personal observations. The notes are not intended as a full transcript and I encourage people to watch the video for themselves. As always I apologize in advance for any errors or misconceptions.

Introduction: Hi Jenny, my name is Kate Wright I’m a committee person from Ambler. Why do you want to be a Montgomery County Commissioner?

Jenny Brown: I want to be a county commissioner because I see the county going down the road to excessive spending, excessive borrowing, and leading to excessive taxes if we don’t have certain fiscal policies in place. We need county commissioners that have ideas for how to deal with the fiscal issues the county has. I am a strong candidate because of my background, my political and professional and personal background. I’m married, a mom and wife, married for 18 years, two children both adopted. We are, as you can imagine, big proponents of adoption because we know the blessings involved. We take the political stuff as a family, take children with us, turn it into a family walk. My husband spends about 20 hours a week helping the Republican commissioners working against the detrimental policies of the Democrat majority. Having those resources helps. I’ve been an attorney for 20 years, and have my own law firm. All we do is represent municipalities. We do tax information, with respect to local business taxes. That involves a lot of knowing tax information, showing our benefits to our clients, a lot of analysis for our clients. That municipal background will help. Politically for the last 5 years I’ve been a commissioner in Lower Merion Township, and work at that 30 sometimes 40 hours a week.

I’m trying to bring fiscal common sense. Unfortunately since Republicans lost control our debt has doubled, taxes have gone up, so I spend a lot of time trying to get good policies in place. I’m a fiscal conservative and have 5 years of newpaper clippings to document that. I don’t believe in borrowing for the sake of borrowing. I spend a lot of time with finances. I also spend a lot of time on transparency. When I came on the board there were a lot of back room deals. Initially they would continue to have the meetings and I would go out in the public and tell what had happened. It has not been easy or pleasant. After 5 years, we now have the budget and other business being done out in the open. I have the background to address those issues. I’m a good candidate because I had a lot of Democrat support. We have to realize that in Montgomery Count we need candidates that can attract Democrat support. I’m honored to have been twice elected in my ward with Democrat support. I also received Democrat nomination from write ins. Its one thing to have Democrat support when you tax and spend like a Democrat. It’s another thing to have Democrat support when you’ve held fast to our Republican principals of restrained spending and smaller government. I have a lot of support township wide, while still being true to our principals. That’s the kind of candidate we need, to attract support from all parties.


Personal observations: I notice that Ms. Brown has adopted the recent Republican habit of referring to the Democratic Party as the Democrat Party. She is also up front about working against the Democrats who are on the township commissioners board with her. I write from a Democratic perspective so perhaps these things jumped out at me more than they would for independent voters, certainly more than they would for Republican voters. Later this week I'll post an entry looking more closely at Mrs. Brown's electoral history.