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Remember the age old question - “If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

Today Ohio’s freshman Senator Sherrod Brown answered that question by giving his inaugural floor speech in the well of the Senate to a very limited audience - 2 1/2 Senators (West Virginia’s Robert Byrd who was invited by Brown to witness this birthing moment, Illinois’ Barack Obama who by default sat in the Senate President’s chair to preside over the chamber and finally the 1/2 goes to Massachusetts’ Edward Kennedy - Kennedy had stumbled into the room midway through Brown’s speech simply because he was helping to manage the floor debate on an increase in the minimum wage and Brown was still speaking when he entered the room) to be exact.

I’ve never been a Sherrod Brown fan - frankly his idea of the middle class is anybody who isn’t a Republican (apparently in his economic scale all Republicans are rich), but I actually felt bad for him today as I watched him helplessly wander through his written remarks, with his characteristcally disheveled hair, hands meandering in and out of his pockets almost as much as his discourse rambled from topic to topic (’we must raise the minimum wage, we must insure the uninsured, we must end the war in Iraq, we must lower the cost of prescription drugs, we must use alternative fuels, we must stop global warming’ - mind you I’m paraphrasing but he did touch on each of these topics in totally unrelated fashion, by the way the musts are his) offering no solutions only his belief that we MUST do this and we MUST do that.  It was obvious he was nervous and his rhetoric matched his discomfort.

The turn-out of fellow senators was so dismal that Senator Byrd, the Senate’s geriatric encyclopedia, rose following Brown to remind his fellow statesmen that it used to be the custom of the Senate during a new senator’s first floor speech to attend the event out of courtesy.  No such courtesy existed today.

To make matters even worse, prior to Brown’s speech Obama was forced to admonish some senators in the chamber to either quiet down (they were having a rather loud sidebar) or take their conversation elsewhere so that Brown could make his remarks.  They chose to leave rather than listen to the new guy.