Why is Scott Brown doing this? I remembered being bothered by Brown’s position not just because my representative in Washington was taking a position so egregiously contrary to my own because somebody this moronic was representing me!
After careful thought about the situation, I can only come to one conclusion. The only red herring in all of this is the notion that Brown will actually buy any “Catholic” votes with it. He won’t. Any Catholic voting for Brown was already going to vote for him. Think of the folks at Mass Citizens for Life. No, this is about money. While Brown mocked Warren for hobnobbing with Hollywood, he was planning fundraisers among Marco Rubio’s uber-conservative friends. Brown’s thinking he can simply buy his way out of this election with the money he can raise since the SuperPAC window is (for the moment) shut. Either that or he’s hoarding money for some other race if he loses.
Now let’s remember that under any circumstances this election will be a hard fought battle royale. Nobody should take anything for granted in this election and getting Elizabeth Warren elected will require every ounce of work Democrats and her supporters can muster.
Brown, by comparison, is relying on money. He’s assuming he can use his vast spending advantage, bolstered by religious right contributions and simply overpower Warren through sheer force of money. There is, however, one story Brown has forgotten if that is this strategy.
Linda McMahon!
Yes, the WWE executive, who still doesn’t get that Nutmegers do not want her as their senator spent more money per vote than any other candidate for any other office anywhere in the US in 2010 ($50 MILLION! overall) and still lost by almost 12 points could not buy the election. Now there are some key differences. Between the choice of the, um “reserved” AG Connecticut residents had for 20 years, Vietnam claims notwithstanding, and the wrestling lady, they chose the Blumenthal. Blumenthal’s brand as AG is different from Warren’s populism (although by my estimate, they have remarkably similar issue profiles) and while McMahon’s and Brown’s bases are probably almost identical, nobody seemed to want to have a beer with McMahon.
Still Brown’s cynical calculation to choose money over what anybody else would call common sense politics in Massachusetts (and we don’t have to be as liberal as we are caricatured for Brown’s position to be untenable) gives him the potential to be Massachusetts’ own McMahon. True, he is not self-funding as she did, but if he takes more positions like the Blunt Amendment, he loses his best card, the “moderate” label (which is more valuable than independent, which tells voters nothing). That only leaves him with money, and when the gulf between you and voters widens, money may not be enough. That chasm between Brown and voters may not be as wide as it was for McMahon and Nutmegers, but he would be a fool to rest on his monetary laurels alone.
Then again, maybe he is a fool. See opening paragraph.
We wonky liberals look at the percentage of Catholic women who have used birth control. We console ourselves too with the number of Catholics who are pro-choice. However, even among pro-choice Catholics, there are some who will still perceive the recent kerfuffle as an attack on the Catholic Church. In a country that had well over a century of anti-Catholic sentiment, that could strike even liberal-seeming Catholics as a sign of prejudice. It certainly gives openings for Republicans to demagogue — and, at that, they are very skilled.
I wish that we could get good policy more often while risking bad politics less often.
“… on the Catholic Church.”
Uninformedly so. I am so annoyed at this notion that having to comply with labor law if you have employees is some kind of unjust attack.
For Catholics — especially “liberal-seeming” Catholics — to ally with today’s GOP in response to invented (and utterly false) “anti-Catholic sentiment” is analogous to Jews partnering with the KKK to resist a claim that government policy towards Israel is “antisemitic”.
The militant brand of extremist right-wing Protestant fundamentalism that dominates the Tea Party (and therefore today’s GOP) has a very long history of violent anti-Catholicism. I understand that “politics makes strange bed-fellows”, but this particular pairing is bizarre.
Unfortunately, low-information voters are a significant share of the electorate. Near every election campaign has to think about winning them over.
We would enjoy ourselves more if calling them doody-heads and chucking sharp metaphors at them worked. It doesn’t.
… isn’t the ‘low information’ part. It’s the stretching if a concept not based on a misconception but out of an almost deliberate attempt to find a way take umbrage, making it less an ‘accident of ignorance’ and more of a ‘deliberate framing in order to justify being an asshole’. When the majority of states already had this rule there was no clarion call, but now there is. Smells of deliberate framing and intent rather than sincerity.
People are remarkably good at feeling victimized.
I’m not making excuses but asserting it’s not so clear to me we have won a little victory over Senator Brown.
Ultimately, I just don’t see it winning enough votes to matter. The real pudding in the pie here is the money Brown can earn. He already knows Warren has $1 million this quarter and frankly, the tap is probably starting to run dry. He lacks the dynamic duo of small dollar donations nationally and liberal donors, also nationally that Warren has and his strategy will have to be bombard the airwaves.
That said, any residual benefit Catholics feel (I don’t think liberal Catholics are going to feel their church is being singled out because they probably have many issues with the institution as anybody, they’re there for the religion not the bishops), has been blunted by Brown’s invocation of Kennedy. Continuing to do so, in contravention of the family’s wishes burns whatever advantage he may have had with Catholic voters IMO.
You’re probably right, he’s a Senator and this is a national race, nationally watched and nationally run. Lots of Rush fans who aren’t Catholic but don’t like ObamaCare and feminazi mandates are going to pour money into his coffers if he stands his ground.
Anybody who uses the term “feminazi” has lost any semblance of credibility in my book. Typically, that kind of terminology is reserved for people who say women are raped too much.
I use the term “feminist” myself, but I used the term Rush Limbaugh uses because I was referring to his millions of listeners and their passion for supporting candidates who oppose abortion and feminism.
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