Figuring Out Scott Brown

Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA)

This is a question that has been bothering me for a while now, and I just cannot get a handle on it: what the hell is going on with Scott Brown?

Scott Brown, for those of you with wildly short attention spans, is a former U.S. Senator from Massachusetts who won Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in 2010 after a close race against Attorney General Martha Coakley (who is in far better political fortunes these days than Brown, as she is currently positioned to be the next governor of the Commonwealth).  Brown’s win stopped the supermajority in the U.S. Senate, giving the Republicans a crucial 41^st vote to enact filibusters.  Some called Brown’s win the “canary in the coal mine” for the 2010 GOP midterm victories.

Brown, thanks to both a strong campaign from Elizabeth Warren, and more potently, an impressive coattail effect by President Obama (who clobbered Mitt Romney in the Bay State), lost his seat in November of 2012.  Since then, he has made some headlines, but seems intent on only running in elections he has no hope of winning.

Because of his personal popularity, many thought (correctly) that he would have gone into the special election for John Kerry’s seat as the prohibitive frontrunner.  Brown, who would have had to run four elections in five years if he’d gone that route (the seat is up for its full-term election in 2014), declined and Ed Markey was elected to the Senate as a result.  Brown then was considered a strong frontrunner for the GOP nomination for the governor’s mansion.  Massachusetts has a fairly decent-sized history of electing Republicans governor (the GOP held the governor’s mansion there from 1991 to 2007), so he would have had a decent shot for the seat, though not as strong as his position in the special election.  Again, though, Brown declined the race.

What Brown does seem intent on running for, though, are two seats he has little-to-no hope of winning.  The first is the Senate seat currently held by Jeanne Shaheen.  New Hampshire has a fairly strong history of electing Republicans to Congress, at least it did up until a decade ago (the state has made a sharp blue turn since 2004’s election of John Kerry and John Lynch in the state).  But the idea of him running in a different state tham he had represented before is absurd, especially if he hopes to win.

Border-hopping for members of Congress has largely gone the way of the dodo since the nineteenth century, and in particular, the passage of the seventeenth amendment.  The last person to successful win federal office in two different states was Edgar Foreman, in 1968.  Since then, multiple people, including the likes of Bob Smith, Harold Ford, Jr., Dennis Kucinich, and William Weld would explore runs in other states, but never with any success.  Though the country has become more fluid in the way we move from one state to a next, once a politician has established his or herself within the political confines of a state, it seems the electorate doesn’t want them to leave said state to run somewhere else.

The fact that Brown still enjoys popularity in Massachusetts and has had opportunities there is the truly bizarre thing about all of this.  Brown had a far better shot at returning to the Upper Chamber with the Kerry special election (which Markey underperformed in) than he does in taking on the popular Shaheen.  And Brown’s behavior in regard to the seat has been markedly strange if he truly intends to run.  His calling Jeanne Shaheen “shameful” for sending out fundraisers because he might run against her is a weak sauce argument.  This is done regularly by politicians of all parties to get early money; pick your toughest opponent, worry your donors, and reap the rewards even if you don’t end up taking them on (there’s always another election to run for that you might need the money for later).

The weirdest part, though, is that he’s now started to float a trial balloon for the Republican nomination for the presidency.  Anyone who sees this can laugh at how absurd it is.  Brown couldn’t even make it three years in his Senate office, and lost his last election by seven points.  To think that he could make the jump from ousted senator to the White House without some sort of stop in the middle like a successful statewide campaign is nonsense.  Rick Santorum is the only recent candidate to make a dent in a presidential race after having lost his previous race, and that’s only because Santorum has an unusually large following in the GOP “Christian Conservative” wing of the party.

Brown may end up being less a fool than I assume, of course.  This might all be a ploy to try and get a Cabinet position in a President Christie or President Cruz administration.  But right now, he seems to be squandering what once seemed like a promising career by chasing a dream that will never come true.