Updated: I misremembered that Brown ultimately voted against the Ryan budget.
Dan Kennedy has a reasonably well-balanced account of the Scott Brown/Elizabeth Warren senate race in a Huffington Post colum, with two puzzlers.
Kennedy says that “[t]he outlier” to Brown’s “not taking strong stands on divisive issues” is the Blunt amendment. Seems curious to omit Brown’s support for Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan to eliminate/replace/transform Medicare and Brown’s support for the Balanced Budget Amendment. Both are extremely conservative answers to the challenges of the day.
Maybe Kennedy didn’t include Brown’s positions on Medicare or the Balanced Budget Amendment because they are not, in the current conversation, divisive issues. Let’s call them potentially divisive issues. If so, then Kennedy’s dismissive note that “no one is really angry at Brown other than liberal activists” is also curious*. Maybe nobody’s angry because nobody (outside the liberal-activist echo chamber) knows Brown’s positions. Which might be because the media (Kennedy in this piece included) have spent more time admiring Brown’s skills at appearing moderate than analyzing the positions he’s taken.
What do you think? Are there other “outlier” positions that might make those who don’t hate Brown rethink how moderate he is?
*He had an even more curious set of tweets (here and here)this week:
The dynamic driving #masen is that no one is mad at @ScottBrownMA except for activist Democrats and liberals. #mapoli
Activist Democrats and liberals telling us how much they detest @ScottBrownMA doesn’t change that dynamic. #masen #mapoli
Activists Democrats and liberals are using social media to share why we detest Brown’s positions (not Brown, it’s not personal), with the hopes of changing the dynamic. That’s the point of social media.
first, Brown eventually said he didn’t support the Ryan plan (after famously saying that he did, and then refusing to say anything about it).
Second, I find it hard to disagree with Dan’s point that, for the most part, there’s not a lot of actual anger out there at Scott Brown. I mean, I’m not angry at him. I’m disappointed and puzzled, and I certainly hope he loses in November, but it’s not really his fault that he’s not a leader (it’s just not in some people’s constitution), and for the most part (Blunt amendment being the glaring exception), his positions on the issues don’t surprise me – he is, after all, a Republican.
He won’t lose because people are mad at him. If he loses, it will be because he is basically a lousy Senator whose views on at least some important issues are well out of step with the people of MA, and because Elizabeth Warren has convinced the people of MA that she can be a much better one. I have no doubt that she can make that case. It’s up to her to do it.
He said the S&P downgrade was a shot across the bow, and thanked God Ryan stepped up to propose a budget, he didn’t say it was exactly the budget he’d prefer: “And finally we had Congressman Ryan come forth with a budget proposal, thank God, because we hadn’t had one in a couple years, and that now has forced the debate and forced the President actually to come forth with his budget proposal.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQrSnth18Io
And then, after Congress had that “forced debate” it was Brown who led the Senate out of their partisan gridlock.
Hmm, what did I say back then?
There is a great advantage to having the ear of an independent Republican Senator who has leadership in Washington. Imagine if Coakley were in there, she’d just have been another Democrat in the chorus complaining about Boehner and Ryan, and it would all have come down to who had the majority, and if she had won, 2010 would have been much worse for Democrats in the rest of the country than it was.
LOL that is news to me, and also to everyone in Washington DC. Brown didn’t “lead” anyone out of anything, because he never actually came forward with any ideas. He was less of a party ideologue on those issues than some, but that is not the same as leadership.
Opposing Elana Kagan for the Supreme Court. But we also can’t forget Senator Brown’s fight to save big financial institutions $19B in taxes to pay for the financial reform bill. He voted against toughening regulations on derivative markets that were a key factor in the financial meltdown.