Getting in your own Fenway…

You have probably all heard them.  Scott Brown has money to blow and so he spends it on the relatively inexpensive radio ads that make him sound like a regular guy.  I mean the truck to pull his daughter’s horse and the $600 barn coat just like the one my mother owns already scream “wow just like me!”  However, the radio ads praising the patriots and the Red Sox are what really bring Brown close to our hearts.

With opening day at Fenway Park only hours away, Scott Brown thought he’d take another swing at it and hit another one with one of these ads.  Oh, but instead he fouled it off…oh, wait, wait, it’s an OUT! Caught by (among others)…the Boston Herald?

Brown’s latest radio ad praises the decision to keep Fenway Park as the home of the Red Sox ahead of the stadium’s centennial.  We’ll hand this off to the Boston Globe for more:

As a state legislator, he pressed for a bill to have the Sox move to Foxborough, the town adjacent to his own town of Wrentham. Brown even asked Patriots owner Robert Kraft to consider using property around his football stadium to build a new ballpark.

That’s a sharp contrast to today’s radio ad, in which Brown extols the current Sox ownership and the old park itself.

“Think of it: the park opened in 1912 – the same year as the sinking of the Titanic,’’ he says. “It’s not only the home of the Red Sox, it also connects us to our past….”

Brown campaign spokesman Colin Reed said the senator acknowledges in the ad that the calls for moving the team out of Fenway were wrong.

But Brown’s only reference in the radio spot to the earlier public debate over the future of the ballpark is more general.

“You know there has been a lot of talk over the years about replacing the park, but that would have been a mistake,’’ Brown says in the ad.

He makes no mention of his role.

According to an article written in 2001, Brown said explicitly, “Exploring the possibility of a Red Sox relocation to Foxboro makes fiscal and economic sense.”  The Providence Journal’s headline of the AP story dings him appropriately, saying Brown “evolved.”

So Scott Brown extols the virtues of the beloved park, acknowledges the “talk” of replacing it, but fails to mention that he was a leading proponent of moving the team to a town abutting his district and not keeping Fenway like it is.  I mean nothing says Everyman like rewriting history.   Let’s not fault Brown just for opportunism in 2001, even in committing a sin like attempted Fenway-cide, because any legislator would probably try that if they had a chance (and many did).  However, to ignore your own role in an effort to move the park only to condemn those who tried is just classic…”etch-a-sketch” I think is the word we’re using for Massachusetts Republicans these days.  Or we could just say the hell with it and call it hypocrisy.  Plus, I mean what did Martha Coakley complain about, something to do with a famous stadium…hmmm, I forget.

I doubt that this little flap will cost Brown the Everyman-hood for which he has become so well-known.  However, it should make Bay Staters think twice every time he calls Professor Elizabeth Warren and the rest of us (in an email) elitists.

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