Facing an increasingly long-shot reelection bid next year, Scott Brown has launched a Mitt Romney-style reinvention campaign, but his campaign coffers are still bursting with millions in Wall Street money from big bankers and financiers who know Scott Brown is on their side.
Massachusetts voters have seen this kind of sudden election year conversion before. His name is Mitt Romney.
Alabama Republican Sen. Richard Shelby may have accidentally spoken the truth a couple of days ago when he told POLITICO that he still has Brown’s back. Even though Brown has claimed to disagree with Shelby and other DC Republicans, the Alabama Republican sees Brown’s political calculated posturing for what it is.
“That’s politics,” said Shelby who last month held a recent high-dollar Wall Street fundraiser for Brown at a posh DC restaurant.
Wall Street and the Republican Party continue to rally around Scott Brown because they know that his politically calculated attempt to reinvent himself is just politics. Scott Brown has become just another Washington politician ready to do or say anything just to keep his job. The people of Massachusetts aren’t going to be fooled into believing he is something that he isn’t.
Earlier this month, a report from the non-partisan Center for Public Integrity noted that Wall Street interests and K Street lobbyists have “been working hard to help the freshman senator win his high-stakes battle for re-election.” The report also noted “deep-pocketed GOP allies” like Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS groups are already weighing in heavily in support of Brown.
In November, the New York Times reported that Wall Street is rallying around Brown, who they consider an important ally. Brown has taken more money from the financial services industry than any other senator, the paper said.
The bottom line is despite Brown’s Mitt Romney-style reinvention campaign, the junior senator is still banking on Wall Street paying for his campaign.
Kevin Franck is Communications Director for the Massachusetts Democratic Party. So there.
Somebody or another amongst the Funders of Fratboy is pretty clever, to have come up with this :
One really should have seen that one coming, but I, for one, did not.
Happy days.
in going after the banks for their role in the foreclosure disaster, like he thinks Eric Holder has been with Freddie and Fannie?
Coakley filed suit against five banks earlier this month, including Bank of America and JP Morgan. She’s also extracted settlements from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and the Royal Bank of Scotland. She charges the banks with violations of the (civil not criminal) consumer protection laws. And Brown’s beef with Eric Holder is that a civil lawsuit does not go nearly far enough. Maybe he’s right — somebody needs to go to jail. Hard to argue with this point that Brown makes:
On the other hand, urging the criminal prosecution of his donor base is maybe too bold a move to expect? Consider the amounts each bank mentioned in this comment has given, through its PAC, to Brown’s Senatorial campaign so far this year:
Bank of America: $7500
JP Morgan: $2500
Morgan Stanley: $2500
Goldman Sachs: $2000
RBS: $1000
PS — If you want to troll through the thousand or so PAC’s contributing to Senator Brown’s campaign this year and last, the list is here (50 or so of the PAC’s are working against him). If you followed the story of Brown’s request for campaign dough to Koch Brother David Koch last May and are wondering how that turned out, the brothers have come through with $10,000 so far this year.
It will please the right as it fits their belief that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae caused the collapse. It also is yet another attack on Holder suggesting that he has not done what he should have here. And, best of all for Brown, is that it requires him to do absolutely nothing.
This coupled with his hastily put together Congressional “inside trader” bill which will not be the bill that comes out of committee – if any bill does, is creating an image that Brown will likely use as a crusading opponent of corruption. In spite of him having never really having a record on this.
Senator Brown is grandstanding here for the RW using a myth that began with the American Enterprise Institute. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/24/opinion/nocera-the-big-lie.html?_r=1&hp
So this is how the Big Lie works.
You begin with a hypothesis that has a certain surface plausibility. You find an ally whose background suggests that he’s an “expert”; out of thin air, he devises “data.” You write articles in sympathetic publications, repeating the data endlessly; in time, some of these publications make your cause their own. Like-minded congressmen pick up your mantra and invite you to testify at hearings.
You’re chosen for an investigative panel related to your topic. When other panel members, after inspecting your evidence, reject your thesis, you claim that they did so for ideological reasons. This, too, is repeated by your allies. Soon, the echo chamber you created drowns out dissenting views; even presidential candidates begin repeating the Big Lie.
Thus has Peter Wallison, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and a former member of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, almost single-handedly created the myth that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac caused the financial crisis. His partner in crime is another A.E.I. scholar, Edward Pinto, who a very long time ago was Fannie’s chief credit officer. Pinto claims that as of June 2008, 27 million “risky” mortgages had been issued — “and a lion’s share was on Fannie and Freddie’s books,” as Wallison wrote recently. Never mind that his definition of “risky” is so all-encompassing that it includes mortgages with extremely low default rates as well as those with default rates nearing 30 percent. These latter mortgages were the ones created by the unholy alliance between subprime lenders and Wall Street. Pinto’s numbers are the Big Lie’s primary data point
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The sad thing is that the truth is so much more complicated that the lie – playing into the wariness of many to accept something complicated enough as to require a multi-paragraph explanation.
I messed up the blockquote
Maybe I am just bitter…disappointed, perhaps…but here goes: Nice to see Brown has something in common with the President. He’s still banking on Wall Street, too.
Nice spin from the party, but that’s really not the attitude we should take. The polls are within single digit margin of Warren and he has quite the warchest. I put odds at 50/50 right now.
Brown is definitely reacting to the polls, and he is trying to make headlines that make him look centrist. Brown is not panicking, however. He is a crafty politician with very deep pockets.
Elizabeth Warren will need to raise a lot of money in order to be able to respond to non-stop attacks from Brown, Rove, and his buddies.
he really is tone deaf.
Yesterday, he was on the Erin Burnett show on CNN as the latest of the Republican legislators she has brought on – rarely with any Democrat to balance them. The obvious topic was that his independence in calling the House Republicans out over their actions.
But, listen to his answers on dealing with the debt problem. He is 100% against raising any tax rates – yet he babbles on about bipartisanship and working with people across the aisle. However, it is NOT bipartisanship when you take ALL tax increases off the table.
http://outfront.blogs.cnn.com/2011/12/22/sen-scott-brown-on-washington-gridlock-were-americans-first/
“Bipartisan” = “Swallow whatever we attempt to jam down your throat”
Particularly at this juncture. Poll questions are unidimensional, and so, capture preference without its depth. Near the election, polls will have more prediction power.
Brown’s in trouble, no question. I don’t think anything we say here will change how Warren runs her campaign. Burned by Coakley’s campaign three years ago, and with even more at stake, no one is going to take their eye of the ball here.
The politicians, in election campaigns, speak with moderation. In fact, most campaign ads are “mom and apple pie,” which is basically nice-sounding fluff.
But, Brown is funded by big banks because that is who he governs for.
To win, Warren has to show the voters that she will do more for voters on pocketbook issues than Brown.