[Cross-posted from the ProgressMass blog. Like ProgressMass on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.]
Republican Scott Brown is desperate for voters to forget about his Republican affiliation, his close ties to Mitt Romney, and his close ties to an unpopular and increasingly far-right-wing Republican Party. That’s why he’s campaigning in the final week under the slogan of “people before party” (even though that slogan only serves to remind voters of his Republican Party affiliation). However, the real strategy of his campaign in this final full week before Election Day should have more honestly operated under the banner of “rhetoric before record” because Brown has taken great pains to hide the reality of his record.
This was illustrated in the cynical gamesmanship Republican Scott Brown employed in exploiting the emergency that was Hurricane Sandy in order to duck out on the final scheduled debate between him and Democratic nominee Elizabeth Warren.
On the Friday before the storm, Republican Scott Brown was talking tough about Sandy not keeping him from the debate.
On Friday afternoon, Senator Scott Brown was asked about the possibility of an approaching Hurricane Sandy affecting plans for his fourth and final debate with Elizabeth Warren today.
“That’s why I have a truck,” Brown told WBZ-TV. “You know, it has four-wheel drive. If she needs a ride, I’m happy to pick her up, and I’ll be there, providing the electricity is on.”
As with most aspects of Republican Scott Brown’s record, he proved to be “all talk.” As we all know, on Monday, without consulting with the Warren campaign or the debate organizers of the Boston Media Consortium, the Brown camp unilaterally decided that the debate would not go on. But Brown assured us that the debate would still happen.
“If it’s appropriate we’ll have it tomorrow,” he said, according to the Associated Press. “If not we’ll just do it the next day or the next day. Certainly we’re going to do it. I think the people want to hear where we stand on all the final issues, a couple of days before the election.”
Apparently, Republican Scott Brown was just kidding because the Boston Media Consortium was eager to re-schedule for later in the week and the Warren campaign agreed to re-schedule. However, Brown all of a sudden determined that Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday were all booked up. This is particularly curious given that Brown only had one single event scheduled for Wednesday. Regardless, Republican Scott Brown exploited Hurricane Sandy as an excuse to duck his way out of the debate.
The Boston Globe, one of the members of the Boston Media Consortium, editorialized that the debate should have gone forward. The Boston Phoenix’s David Bernstein simply dubbed Republican Scott Brown a “Scaredy-Cat” for debate ducking, after pointing out the latest Brown hypocrisy that, though Brown declared it not appropriate to debate amid the Hurricane Sandy emergency response, he was happy to continue running his misleading attack ads. It seems that even local political pundits Jon Keller and Andy Hiller agreed that the debate should have gone on.
Despite all of that pressure, Republican Scott Brown stubbornly maintained that there would be no more debates. The Brown team must have calculated that putting Brown on stage to defend his disappointing record would simply do more political harm than good, and that the blowback from ducking the debate would be less politically costly for Brown than actually debating and attempting to defend his record. The cynical political calculation sounds similar to Mitt Romney’s campaign calculating that the blowback from not releasing Romney’s tax returns would be less politically costly than revealing what the tax returns contained. In both cases, cynicism won and the voters lost.
But that’s what this is all about, after all: Republican Scott Brown’s record of partisan obstruction and his work to prioritize powerful special interests like Wall Street and Big Oil ahead of Middle Class Massachusetts. Brown wants to avoid having to defend his record because he knows that the more Massachusetts hears about his real record, the more disappointed we will be with it.
To that end, here are some useful resources you should share with your family, friends, neighbors, classmates, co-workers, and any other Massachusetts residents (right now!) to inform them about Republican Scott Brown’s real record. Please share these links on Facebook and Twitter, and otherwise circulate them over e-mail to your contact lists.
· MassUniting has assembled a thorough timeline laying out “The Real Scott Brown Record” harming Massachusetts students, working families and seniors.
· Rethink Brown offers its list of Republican Scott Brown’s votes to kill tens of thousands of jobs for Massachusetts.
· Of course, ProgressMass has compiled www.BothWaysBrown.com as a one-stop site for learning about the enormous gap between Republican Scott Brown’s misleading rhetoric and his actual record. On the micro-site, we also offer a concise, two-page document listing the content for easy printing and sharing. Further, ProgressMass offers social media graphics and YouTube videos on a wide array of issues. Share your favorites on Facebook and Twitter today!
Remember, all of this information is useless if you don’t actively share it and help hold Republican Scott Brown accountable by informing other Massachusetts residents about his real record. So stop reading and get to it!
is so non-Republican he took to the streets of the North End with the odious (and very Republican) Rudolph W. Giuliani on Saturday. Only a day after Giuliani called for President Obama’s resignation for not having overcome GOP obstruction to fix in its entirety, the economic mess left him by George W. Bush, for whom Giuliani campaigned vigorously twice.