As Republicans succeed Democrats in New Jersey’s and Virginia’s governors mansions this month, Tuesday may see a vibrant, photogenic conservative replace the late liberal icon Ted Kennedy in the U.S. Senate. Scott Brown of Massachusetts is surging in the polls, sweeping in donations, and smiling on national TV news shows. Across America, gleeful free-marketeers are pinching themselves and wondering, “Could this really happen?”
Brown stirs excitement thanks to a Monday-night Rasmussen survey in which 47 percent of likely voters supported the GOP state senator while 49 percent backed Attorney General Martha Coakley, a Kennedy-style liberal Democrat. One week earlier, Rasmussen pegged Brown at 41 percent, Coakley at 50. Independents compose 51 percent of Massachusetts’s electorate. Brown wows them, 71 percent to Coakley’s 23.
Brown, an Army National Guard lieutenant colonel, proved tough and quick in a Monday night debate. Moderator David Gergen asked if Brown wished “to sit in Teddy Kennedy’s seat” and stop Obamacare. Sharply confronting the concept of American royalty, Brown replied: “With all due respect, it’s not the Kennedys’ seat. It’s not the Democrats’ seat. It’s the people’s seat.” That exchange became an instant YouTube hit, scoring 451,922 views as of this writing.
Photo credit: John Tlumacki/Globe Staff
Brown, 50, deftly deflected Coakley’s caricature that his proposed tax relief means, as she said, “He wants to go back to those Bush-Cheney policies that provide for the very wealthiest.’’
“You can run against Bush-Cheney, but I’m Scott Brown,’’ he replied. “I live in Wrentham. I drive a truck.”
Coakley, 56, favors an Afghan exit strategy because “we believed that the Taliban was giving harbor to terrorists.” And now, Coakley announced Monday night, “They’re gone. They’re not there anymore.”
Unlike Coakley, Brown does not consider Afghanistan terrorist-free, especially since al-Qaeda-tied double agent Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi blew up seven CIA agents and himself near Khost on December 30. Also, Brown does not want to “give people who want to kill us constitutional rights and lawyer them up at our expense, instead of treating them as enemy combatants to get as much information as we can under legal means.”
On Tuesday, Brown’s campaign announced that it had raised $1.3 million overnight via RedInvadesBlue.com from 16,000 donors nationwide, an average contribution of just $81.25. This sum is nearly double the campaign’s stated goal of $750,000.
Can GOP candidates win statewide in Massachusetts? Republican Willard Mitt Romney beat Democrat Shannon O’Brien for governor in 2002, 49.8 percent to 45. Former GOP governor Paul Cellucci defeated Democrat Scott Harshbarger in 1998, 51 percent to 48. Meanwhile, incumbent Democratic governor Deval Patrick’s approval rating has sunk to a sub-freezing 22 percent. This special election has electrified Republicans, who are ready for lightning to strike. Independents seem poised to send a message to Washington’s bailout mongers. And Democrats are disoriented by this truly non-Camelot moment. One Coakley TV ad even misspelled the Bay State “Massachusettes.”
In an incident that could be dubbed Beat the Press, Coakley’s campaign turned violent Tuesday night. As Coakley departed a Washington, D.C., fundraiser for her attended by Beltway lobbyists, Democratic activist Michael Meehan, who accompanied Coakley, shoved Weekly Standard staff writer John McCormack into a metal railing as he tried to interview her.
“I ended up on the sidewalk,” McCormack wrote in an article headlined “We Report, We Get Pushed.” McCormack added that Meehan “helped me up from the ground, but kept pushing up against me, blocking my path toward Coakley down the street.” McCormack suffered a bruised leg and a ten-inch rip in his pant leg.
President Obama appointed Meehan last fall to the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. “Knocking down reporters who ask questions is the type of arrogant behavior we’ve come to expect from the political machine and their candidate,” Brown campaign spokesman Michael Harrington told the Boston Herald.
For his part, Brown promises to oppose Obamacare on the Senate floor. This would deny Majority Leader Harry “no Negro dialect” Reid (D., Nev.) the 60th vote he needs to quash a GOP filibuster against the landmark legislation that Democrats are crafting secretly, far from Republicans and C-SPAN’s cameras -- Obama’s eight transparency promises notwithstanding.
As the Republican caucus’s 41st member, Brown would empower the GOP to filibuster the Democrats’ frightful public-policy agenda. Beyond Obamacare, if they stay united, GOP senators could stop the $646 billion cap-and-tax measure against so-called “global warming,” “card check” legislation that would kill secret ballots in union elections, plus such Democratic brainstorms as imposing payroll taxes on investment income and slapping fresh fees on banks that dutifully repaid TARP funds, with interest.
Without a filibuster-proof Senate, President Obama would have to choose between sailing his presidency onto the jagged rocks to his immediate left or steering towards the center, where he could reposition himself as the unifying problem solver that voters thought they elected.
How delightfully ironic that America and, ultimately, Barack Obama could benefit from the election next Tuesday of a previously obscure, increasingly famous state legislator inexotically named Scott Brown.
— New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.
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