Having watched Scott Brown for several years from my perch here in SmallTown, I thought I had him pegged in the gaffe department: frequent small gaffes, but no huge tectonic ones. This, after all, was the pattern in his recent campaign, and not bad for a statewide rookie under the national spotlight.
I’m re-evaluating this view. Gail Collins’ column on Saturday 2/20 is a bellwether:
When the new senator from Massachusetts was asked on Fox News [by Neil Cavuto] about the I.R.S. office attack, he appeared to embrace the possibility that the pilot of the plane might have been one of his followers.
“And I don’t know if it’s related, but I can just sense, not only in my election but since being here in Washington, people are frustrated,” he said. “They want transparency.”
…How many of you think this story would have come out differently if there was more transparency in Washington? That if only President Obama had followed through on that pledge to put the health care negotiations on C-Span, Stack [the pilot] and the I.R.S. offices would all be with us today?
Senator Brown needs to watch out for the Rick Santorum syndrome. That’s where the little gaffes persist, and persistently add up to the public persona of a doofus. That’s where media types of all stripes (Collins is liberal, Cavuto, conservative) successfully bait pols into making embarrassing statements. Think Alfonse D’Amato. I won’t even mention Sarah Palin.
Neil Cavuto knows where his paycheck is coming from. He’s a polished practitioner of the “And apart from that, how did you enjoy the play, Mrs. Lincoln?” gambit that most media people have in their bag of tricks. Think Jim Braude, Andy Hiller. Emily Rooney, not so much.
When Ted Kennedy screwed up, it was big time. Chappaquiddick, of course, but also the hapless run at the presidency in 1980, and the William Kennedy Smith rape case in 1991. But week-to-week, Ted was usually on message, and in the past 30 years was reliably able to give a stemwinder inspirational speech that got the Democratic base pumped up when it counted.
There are at least two personas at work inside Senator Brown’s head. The regular I-drive-a-truck guy who speaks his mind-sometimes a bit too plainly, and the suppressed right-winger who let’s too much slip-even under no pressure. He needs to sort things out-for his sake and for ours. We really don’t need Scott Browntorum or Scott Brownamato in the Massachusetts state delegation.
I watched that interview and the whole was a mass of complete contradictions and unevidenced assertions. Of course he was on FOX so got no push back, but it was in so many ways a shambles. We lost to this dolt?
<
p>For instance, he went from talking about getting the debt down to pushing an across the board tax cut with no sense of irony or contradiction. He didn’t even try to explain how we can do both.
<
p>He hatcheted the president’s commission on fiscal issues, calling it a waste of paper, but then seemed to endorse a commission to resolve social security and medicare issues. Well what the heck did he think the president’s commission was going to look at?
<
p>He talked about how people were frustrated with the lack of progress in Washington but offered nary a solution as to whether he would support anything to make it happen.
<
p>I know he got away with this crap during the campaign, as so many of us didn’t pay attention until too late. But now that he has the national stage, he’s reminding me a lot of another little know candidate who became a rock star of the right only to see their standing eviscerated by ignorant remarks on the issues.
<
p>HE’S PALIN IN A SUIT!!!! We got three years to bring his ignorance to light.
<
p>Good post.
Severin was, obviously, very sympathetic. In the five minutes I listened to the show, I was mildly impressed by 2 things: 1. Brown sounds like a very nice guy. Merely a superficial impression, but he sounded humble and, like, mild-mannered. 2. Brown was at least able to grasp the fact that jobs have been saved by the stimulus, though he disparaged them as merely “government jobs”. Any interviewer but Severin would have used this as an opportunity to explore relative numbers of job losses over the Bush years to jobs lost during Obama year one, which might have made things more interesting.
<
p>A premise this current incarnation of Conservativism seem to really espouse (or pretend to espouse- I’m never quite sure which) is that the eliminating taxes would create millions of jobs. That is, we fire everybody on the government payroll (God knows how many consumers who would now be unemployed, and presumably, starving to death in our midst) while at the same time severely damage God knows how many defense contractors and other vendors who rely on tax dollars for their livelihood. Are taxes so oppressive that getting rid of them would cause some kind of corporate orgasm, accompanied by a bountiful explosion of industry and private sector work in America for truck-driving Joe’s in all 50 states? Somehow I doubt this great economic transformation would occur, even if we completely ignored the fact that our whole public infrastructure would collapse and we’d have no justice system, public safety officers, streetlights, traffic signals, or public schools.
Hubblog put it best:
<
p>
<
p>That he’s now sounding like a rookie Santorum is bad news for the folks who voted for him.
<
p>Also, don’t forget Brown and Severin’s close ties to Mitt Romney. Brown hid them exceptionally well, but…
And big media pundits who tell us what we should think.
I think it is by deliberate design,by calculated design over decades even. The removal of Americans from their former lifestyles for the fun and profit margins of the very few elite. No hope of progress for all mankind, in fact human arrogance has kicked us out of space itself mostly because our leaders are assholes, control freak sociopathic parasitic assholes.