Massachusetts Moderate
Posted on March 9, 2012
Scott Brown graced the front pages of both the Washington Post and the New York Times today.
Brown is in a tough re-election fight against Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard Law School professor who has become a hero to the far-left for her efforts in skewering Wall Street.
Warren has also become a hero to Hollywood. She has raised boatloads of bucks schmoozing with the West Coast elites, telling the rich how much she hates the filthy rich and how if she is elected to the Senate she will recapture the legacy of Ted Kennedy.
The New York Times story detailed how intertwined the Brown campaign is the with Romney Presidential effort. That should come as no surprise. There aren’t too many Republicans in Massachusetts and they tend to have to work together.
But it is hard to make the case that Brown and Romney are cut from the same cloth.
Romney’s father is a former Governor (of Michigan) and once was thought of as a possible Presidential contender. Brown’s mother was a one-time welfare recipient and his parents divorced when he was young kid. Romney as a Mormon doesn’t drink, and said that he once had a beer but didn’t like the taste. You can see Scott Brown at the Dubliner ordering his own beer without staff around.
Scott Brown perhaps once worked as a male model, but that was so he could pay his way through law school. I am pretty certain that Mitt Romney didn’t have to take off his shirt to pay tuition at Harvard, where he got his MBA.
Brown is a blue-collar guy. He has seen life at the lower end of social register. He knows the struggles that face working class Americans. He knows, instinctively, that not everybody lives a model life, not everybody has the perfect family, not everybody gets all the breaks.
As a Senator, Brown has had to chart a careful course. He understands that he was brought in on a wave of Tea Party activism, but he also understands the Tea Party, while perhaps initially inspired by the Massachusetts of the 1770’s, doesn’t have a huge presence in the Bay State. That means that every once in a while, he has to vote with the Democrats.
One such vote was on Dodd-Frank. Now, Dodd-Frank is a bad law, and it has made the financial situation even worse because it has confused the marketplace. But for Scott Brown, he really had no choice but to vote for it. First, the folks from his blue-collar community have a natural aversion to Wall Street. They don’t trust those guys, and in the aftermath of the financial crisis, they believed that the government had to do something to stop all the stealing.
For Brown, he had no choice but to vote with his blue collar base on what the Republican Party saw as bad law. And both Scott Brown and his Republican colleagues were correct.
Brown’s vote for Dodd-Frank also makes it harder for Warren to attack him as a stooge of Wall Street. He isn’t. But he is a stand-up guy who fights for the working class of Boston. It is unlikely that he will be sipping Chardonnay with the Hollywood elite anytime soon.