" It was fun,” Massachusetts senator-elect Scott Brown said of his trip last Thursday to Capitol Hill. “The only time I’ve been there really,” he told me, “was when I was looking for a bathroom as a tourist, and now I’m looking for a new office. So it’s kind of surreal but very exciting.”
The newest Republican senator said he doesn’t have a clue where he’s going to stay in D.C. after he’s sworn in, but he’s already the talk of the town—and the nation—following his stunning victory in the January 19 special election to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat. The day after the election, the Drudge Report ran a story on Brown with the headline: “Now … Will He Run for President?”
“The good news, as evidenced by my speech the other night, I have a sense of humor,” Brown says of chatter about presidential ambitions. “It’s certainly flattering, but I think it’s very premature.”
Republicans and conservatives might not have known much about Brown beyond the fact that he owned a pickup truck and had promised to drive it to Washington, D.C., to make road kill of Obamacare. That alone was enough to earn him millions of fans, but there’s more to the man than the vehicle he drives.
Brown grew up on the wrong side of the tracks in Wakefield, Massachusetts. His parents divorced when he was an infant, and his mother and father each remarried three times. “My mom was on welfare,” Brown told me in an earlier interview. His memory of “getting the blocks of cheese from the back of the truck” while he was a child on welfare is one reason he’s “fiscally responsible” today.
“I don’t think I would have changed a thing,” Brown says of his tough childhood. “Because if I changed one thing it affects everything else. If I wasn’t on welfare or wasn’t from a broken home, I never would have learned from my parents’ mistakes” and been so devoted to his wife of 23 years, TV news anchor Gail Huff, and two college-aged daughters, Ayla and Arianna. By 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, Brown was jetting from Washington back to Boston to watch Ayla, a basketball player at Boston College, take on the University of Virginia. (BC lost by 2 at the buzzer; Ayla scored 9 points.) When Brown isn’t watching his daughter play, he likes to train for triathlons. He finds inspiration in books by Lance Armstrong (and also enjoys books by David Baldacci and Dan Brown).
It’s hard to imagine a better biography than Brown’s for a Republican candidate in Massachusetts. He joined the Army National Guard ROTC program at Tufts University, where he also played basketball, earning the nickname “Downtown Scotty Brown.” Now 50, Brown is a lieutenant colonel in the Guard. To help pay for law school at Boston College in 1982, Brown earned $1,000 by being named “America’s Sexiest Man” by Cosmopolitan and posing nude in the magazine. “You don’t see anything. It’s Cosmo, not Playgirl,” Brown says.
As you might imagine, Brown is not exactly a puritan, but he does worship with his family at a Christian Reformed church. “I have to admit I don’t go as often as I had” before the campaign, he says. Brown also has close ties to an order of Cistercian Catholic nuns in Wrentham, where he lives. The nuns are “amazing women” who “survive by selling fantastic candy,” he says. “I’d certainly appreciate it if you could mention their website [msmabbey.org].” As the Boston Globe reported, Brown and his wife helped raise more than $5 million “to replace the order’s 50-year-old candy factory with an environmentally friendly plant, complete with solar panels and a wind turbine.”
Brown got his start in politics when he was elected assessor and then selectman in Wrentham in the early 1990s. Beginning in 1998, he won three terms in the state house and then three terms in the state senate, where only 4 of his 39 colleagues were Republicans.
That Brown is a perfect fit for Massachusetts doesn’t mean that he’s bound to disappoint conservatives. True, Massachusetts is one of the bluest states in the country. But during his campaign, Brown sided with conservatives on almost all the major policy issues before the Senate and still managed to appeal to independents.
In his victory speech, he returned to two major themes of his campaign. “The trillion-dollar health care bill that is being forced” on the American people, he said, “will raise taxes. It will hurt Medicare. It will destroy jobs and run our nation deeper into debt.”
“I believe that our Constitution and laws exist to protect this nation,” he said later. “They do not grant rights and privileges to enemies in wartime. And the message we need to send in dealing with terrorists, our tax dollars should pay for weapons to stop them and not lawyers to defend them!”
Brown says he now wishes he hadn’t voted in the state senate for a regional greenhouse gas initiative and would oppose a similar national cap and trade proposal. Though he wants to speed up the legal immigration process, he opposes amnesty. He calls Roe v. Wade the “law of the land” and says he would have voted to confirm both John Roberts and Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. He has an A-rating from the National Rifle Association. He supports the surge in Afghanistan and calls for the “quick passage” of sanctions on Iran.
Brown must thank President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid for pushing a liberal agenda so unpopular that he could win as an independent-minded Republican candidate in Massachusetts. His victory was no fluke explained by low turnout in a special election; 2.25 million people cast votes on Tuesday, slightly more than voted in the 2006 gubernatorial election. True, his Democratic opponent, Martha Coakley, sealed her fate with a string of gaffes in the final week of the race. Polls showed the race neck and neck—just before Coakley said there are no terrorists in Afghanistan and called Red Sox great Curt Schilling a Yankee fan. But the main reason Brown surged to victory is that he is an appealing candidate who ran a smart campaign against the Democratic leadership in Massachusetts and Washington.
Between now and November 2012, when he faces reelection, Brown will have to work hard to maintain his appeal in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans three-to-one. “In my streak of independence, I’ve never been beholden to the Republican party,” says Brown. “I’m still not.”
So far, so good.
John McCormack is online editor of The Weekly Standard .