On January 19, 2010, one year after the inauguration of Barack Obama as president, Scott Brown, a little-known Republican state senator from Massachusetts won a special election to fill out the term of the US Senate seat vacated by the death of Ted Kennedy.
Brown beat his Democrat opponent Massachusetts attorney general Martha Coakley by 5 points, a stunning margin for this very liberal state. And Brown immediately became an American political superstar.
Brown was fortunate in having Coakley for his opponent. She was an inept campaigner who utterly imploded when she did not even know about a famous player for the Boston Red Sox. And when a political hotshot from Beantown does not know every 100th degree factoid about the Sox, well then he/she is a dead duck. The ridicule was heard ‘round the world.
In his campaign Brown toured the state in his battered pickup truck and wore his trademark weathered brown denim work coat. So there had developed some working-man sympathy for a guy who came up on hard knocks unlike the Kennedy clan that floated on wealth and privilege.
Brown has since served half-decently in the Senate. He has been a moderate Republican in order to be seen as viable in Massachusetts, but surely better than any Democrat. And he was elected on one conservative theme – that he would be the vote that would stop ObamaCare. And he won on that premise but ultimately he was unable to affect the legislation.
Reports Wikipedia.org about Brown:
When told that at various times he has been labeled a conservative, moderate and a liberal Republican, he responded "I'm a Scott Brown Republican." According to Politifact, while Brown was a Massachusetts legislator, he voted about 90 percent with the state Republican leadership; however, Republican Leadership in the Massachusetts legislature is generally considered far more moderate than the national Republican Party.
Brown has angered conservatives by voting to repeal the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell rule for homosexuals in the military and he has voted for several other Obama-friendly pieces of legislation. His full voting record can be seen here
Brown became an instant celebrity in Washington for his giant-killer status and for his good looks. (He once appeared as a pin-up boy in Cosmopolitan magazine.) But then in 2011 he revealed that he had been molested as a young boy at a Massachusetts day camp and it has come to light that he was relatively poor in his youth.
So Brown has built up an image as a regular guy and even as a youthful victim who never had all the big breaks in life like the Kennedys did. And now he will face Democrat Elizabeth Warren in November for the full six-year US Senate term.
Warren is a very liberal Harvard law school professor. She has been called the ‘intellectual mother’ of the far-left occupy Wall Street movement and according to Wikipedia.org:
Warren served as chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel created to oversee the Troubled Assets Relief Program in 2008. She later served as Assistant to the President and Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under U.S. President Barack Obama.
In 2011 she was selected by Massachusetts Democrats to take on Brown. This obviously was due to the fact that the entire US House of Representatives delegation from Massachusetts – all ten of them, all ultra-liberal Democrats who might normally make up the pool of candidates to advance to the US Senate – is male.
Warren is largely unknown in Massachusetts. By dint of her party affiliation, however, she was doing pretty well. Spring 2012 polls have alternately shown Brown winning and then Warren winning. But that all came crashing down when Elizabeth Warren had her Martha Coakley Moment. And this moment has shaken the Democrat party to its core from coast to coast.
Warren has claimed throughout her adult life to be 1/32 Native American. Her great-great-great grandmother was said to have been a Cherokee and even that is not yet verified. And like a good Democrat she has declared herself a “minority” on various checkoffs over the years in order to get preferential racial treatment.
Well, Massachusetts may be liberal but it is 64% Republican/independent. And when this story broke you could hear the independents guffawing all the way to Fenway Park. Rest assured that even Massachusetts moderates know a good political joke when they hear it.
Oh, you could see the Massachusetts Democrat party sinking in its corrupt chair and thinking that this is Martha Coakley all over again.
Said national political guru Larry Sabato: “This takes (Warren’s) biography into a bizarre dimension. It has derailed the effort to define Warren in a voter-friendly way.” Sabato added that Warren’s claim is not credible that she didn’t list herself as a minority for racial advantage, adding, “This is what happens when candidates don’t tell the truth. It’s pretty obvious she was using (the minority listing) for career advancement.”
Here are just a few examples of how columnist Howie Carr of the conservative Boston Herald (yes, there is a conservative newspaper in Boston) eviscerated Warren in just a small slice of what all of Massachusetts was thinking when the news came out:
‘We all know about “undocumented workers.” Now we have Elizabeth Warren, the undocumented Indian. … the blue-eyed, one-32nd Cherokee (or so we’re told) who went from the Southwest Conference to the Ivy League over the course of a decade in which she was claiming to be a “minority professor.” But once she’d parlayed the racial-spoils racket all the way to a tenured position at Harvard Law, she decided to … pass, as they used to say in the old South. Once she’d reached the pinnacle of her trade, she ditched the fake-Indian routine. Maybe White Eyes Warren saw the smoke signals and figured out that someone was going to call her out on her ancestry. She was right… .Still, all’s well that ends well. She has her $1.7 million wigwam in Cambridge. Greedy Wall Street lawyers slurp top-shelf firewater at her $1,000-a-head Manhattan fundraisers. Maybe someday she’ll even smokum peace pipe with Tim Geithner.’
You get the point.
And what is Scott Brown saying about all this?
Nothing. After all the old political adage says that when your opponent is crashing, step aside and enjoy the show. And Brown certainly is savoring this show and reliving that delicious moment when Martha Coakley went over the cliff during a Boston radio interview.
And while Brown will certainly and wisely not make a big deal out of the race issue itself, he does have a legitimate debate with Warren over her use of racial preferences. Because rest assured that the wider electorate in Massachusetts is not in any way sold on that issue.
Meanwhile Martha Coakley slipped in the mud shortly before the election and never recovered but Warren still has six months to get her act together.
Will Warren rally?
It is hard to say. Who knows what else will come out. Her balloon certainly has burst. This obviously is a huge setback precisely as she is introducing herself to people in Massachusetts who largely have no idea who Elizabeth Warren is.
And even in Massachusetts there are still some rational people who look seriously at a candidate before pulling the Democrat lever.
Nikitas3.com picks Scott Brown for re-election to a full six-year US Senate term.