Just when you think you’ve seen it all, the state that sent and returned Ted Kennedy to the Senate nine times goes and elects as his successor a man whose chief campaign pledge is to block what the late senator called “the cause of my life.”
And it wasn’t even that close.
Returns from the 352 cities and towns in Massachusetts began trickling in just after 8:00, but already Republican Scott Brown’s headquarters — a mezzanine-level ballroom in a posh Back Bay hotel — had the feel of victory.
The crowd, perhaps a thousand of them, jostled for standing-room space between the stage and the press risers. Casual conversation was impossible. Onstage, Doug Flutie — forever a local hero thanks to the immortal 1984 Hail Mary pass that stunned the Miami Hurricanes — and his band banged out classic rock tunes while the crowd alternately sang along and broke out in chants of “USA!”
A producer for a conservative Boston radio talk show, dispatched to provide field reports, excitedly likened the Brown supporters to baseball fans watching a well-hit ball travel toward the fence, ready to explode in ecstasy the minute it finally leaves the park. In a nearby hallway, a middle-aged man wearing a hard hat and a navy blue Brown for Senate T-shirt (with neon-green long sleeves underneath) urged the revelers to join him in a chant of “Get down with Brown!”
He identified himself as Mike Doherty, a heavy equipment operator from suburban Hanson. “I just want my country back,” he said. “I want to see my legislation before my face — not behind my back.”
Like many in the crowd, Doherty called himself an independent (or “unenrolled,” the technical term in Massachusetts) and said he’d only recently become involved in politics — and even more recently with the Brown campaign. “I was tired of watching the liberals run roughshod over all of us,” he said.
Doherty’s presence, and the presence of a surprising number of other blue-collar and middle-class voters, spoke to a key cog in Brown’s winning coalition.
In accumulating more than 1.1 million votes and defeating Martha Coakley by 5 points, he racked up the second-highest share of votes for a Republican Senate or gubernatorial candidate in Massachusetts since 1972. (Only Bill Weld, reelected with 71 percent in 1994, did better.) Returns suggest that Brown’s victory was built on the increasingly tax-phobic bedroom community dwellers outside of Routes 128 and 495 (the two interstates that ring Boston) and on working-class voters in and around the state’s small and midsize cities — older, largely white places like Fitchburg and Brockton.
For Democrats outside Massachusetts, who must this fall defend suddenly vulnerable congressional majorities, the challenge now is to figure out how their party — whose candidate led this race by 30 points just a few weeks ago — could lose in such a reliably Democratic state. Was it just a complacent candidate who fell asleep at the switch (and then proved disastrously inept when she woke up)? Was it something particular to Massachusetts — a rejection of the Democratic Party that has dominated Beacon Hill for decades? Or was it worse: an unmistakable sign that the nation’s electorate is in revolt against the Democratic Party that now runs Washington.
The answer seems to be all three.
Coakley’s inadequacies as a candidate were well-documented in the run-up to Tuesday (and on Tuesday itself, when unnamed Coakley aides and D.C. Democrats used the media to engage in an embarrassing round of preemptive finger-pointing). You know the story by now: She won the four-way December Democratic primary with ease and figured the heavy lifting was over. She took a vacation, pulled her ads and refrained from pressing the flesh. In her defense, she’s hardly the first Massachusetts Democrat to do this over the last few decades — and almost all of them have gone on to win, easily.
But about two weeks ago, the polls showed Brown, a state senator from suburban Wrentham, making it a race. The press began to take notice and coverage of the election spiked — and in turn, the polls tightened further. Hearing on the news that the contest might not be a foregone conclusion jolted the state’s independent voters.
“It was a major opportunity for them to tune in,” said David Paleologos, whose Suffolk University poll was the first to pick up on Brown’s late surge to the lead. “And usually they don’t. This race really attracted an intensity that we don’t usually see from them.”
Suddenly under the spotlight Coakley melted down. Asked why she hadn’t followed her opponent’s lead and campaigned outside of a Bruins game at Fenway Park, she was incredulous: Campaign in the cold? An emergency fundraising trip to D.C. proved disastrous when it was reported that the closed-door event was attended by healthcare lobbyists. She seemed to have no clue who Curt Schilling, hero of the 2004 World Series, was. You could feel the state’s culturally conservative blue-collar voters abandoning her — especially when, in trying to appeal to pro-choice women, she suggested that devout Catholics probably shouldn’t work in emergency rooms where abortion pills are offered to rape victims.
It’s probably true that a different Democratic nominee would have weathered the storm better. In hindsight, this was going to be a closer-than-expected race no matter what. That’s what 10 percent unemployment and complete Democratic control of Washington (and Massachusetts) will do. But Mike Capuano, the congressman from working-class Somerville who finished second in the primary, would have been better-suited to keep blue-collar voters from defecting once the spotlight was on. “Capuano,” one Bay State Democratic pro argued, “wouldn’t have won those voters. But he would have kept it close enough.”
But it wasn’t just an unfortunate caricature and a series of stumbles that sunk Coakley. This election marked the emergence of an angry, right-leaning breed of independent voters. (In other states, they may actually be Republicans, but a little over 10 percent of the Bay State’s electorate is actually registered with the GOP.) They’ve always been conservative, but until Barack Obama’s election, they weren’t that vocal.
“We watched what was happening in Washington and just saw this insane spending,” Charlotte Mastroianni, a retired nurse who attended the Brown party with her husband, explained. Mastroianni described herself as an independent voter, but said she hadn’t been involved in politics for 30 years. But last year, she and her husband joined Glen Beck’s 9/12 Project, traveling to Washington for the September rally.
“They’re just remarkable, remarkable people. Wonderful people,” Mastroianni said of her fellow 9/12 participants. “But unfortunately it got lousy press because of some crazies.”
When they saw polls showing a surprisingly close race in Massachusetts three weeks ago, Mastroianni said, she and her husband drove to Wrentham — Brown’s hometown — and volunteered to do phone banking at his office.
Heavy spending by Washington, President Obama’s healthcare push, and the administration’s decision to try some accused terrorists in civilian court were — by far — the issues cited most frequently by the Brown crowd.
“He’s going to keep my country safe for my children,” Doherty, the machine operator with the hard hat, said.
“We don’t want socialism,” Mastroianni said. “We don’t want to be Europe. The politicians want to, but we don’t. It’s a nice place to visit. But we don’t want to be them.”
Not that Brown wanted to be linked to the tea party-9/12 crowd, mind you. Anger from the right provided Brown with an energized base and an army of workers, but polls showed that his Republican Party remains in profound disfavor in Massachusetts. A PPP poll the weekend before the election found that 62 percent of Bay State voters have a negative view of the congressional Republicans whose ranks Brown will soon be joining.
The key, then, for Brown was to hang on to the tea party base without scaring off less conservative independents who are motivated by a more general sense of economic anxiety. Hence, his shunning of the Republican label and national Republicans (except Rudy Giuliani and John McCain) and his repeated declarations of political independence.
“The independent majority,” he declared on Tuesday night, “has delivered a great victory.”
But his tea party supporters wasted no time claiming credit for helping Brown to victory. The group Tea Party Express circulated a Rasmussen poll early Wednesday morning showing that 40 percent of Massachusetts voters now approve of the movement (to 41 percent who disapprove), and talking about the party’s contribution to Brown’s win. “Many different groups involved in the tea party movement contributed to Scott Brown’s victory in a number of ways, and each brought their own strengths to the table,” said the group’s Amy Kremer. “Tonight’s victory in Massachusetts is just the start of things to come.”
In this sense, much of his strong showing can be attributed to an irony of politics: The more dominant a party becomes nationally, the weaker it becomes in elections. So when the Democrats were handed the White House and House and Senate majorities by the electorate in 2008, they also assumed ownership of the massive economic problems that were created under Republican rule. Unfair? Of course. But that’s how politics works.
“The [Republican] Party is the windfall beneficiary of a failed 2008 presidential election,” said Paleologos. “And this is a fairly typical early symptom of a midterm backlash. We’ve seen it happen with previous presidents. It’s fairly predictable.”
For Obama, there is comfort in this. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton watched their parties suffer drubbings in the first midterms of their presidencies — at which point their opponents (and the media) wrote them off as certain one-termers. And they were both reelected two years later by wide majorities. Speaking at Brown’s party tonight, Mitt Romney called the election “a shot heard round the world.” But history suggests that it may all be forgotten a few short years from now — if the economy improves.
One other factor must be mentioned: gender. Coakley is now (at least) the eighth woman from a major party to seek a Senate seat or the governorship in Massachusetts. And she is the eighth to lose. Yes, they all had their individual deficiencies, but the pattern is undeniable — even if it’s too simplistic to simply say Massachusetts is filled with sexist voters.
“Gender exacerbates a lot of the underlying issues,” Shannon O’Brien, the Democrats’ 2002 gubernatorial nominee, suggested.
Like Coakley, O’Brien lost an early lead in her race against Romney, although the circumstances weren’t completely analogous. Still, the demographics of Brown’s coalition are eerily similar to Romney’s — bedroom community people with blue-collar voters from small and midsize cities. Romney connected voters’ faceless frustration with Beacon Hill to O’Brien. Brown connected voters’ faceless frustration with Washington to Coakley. The effect was the same.
“Women candidates can’t make mistakes in these high-profile races,” said O’Brien. “They’re blown out of proportion. And women play a much greater price for negative advertising.”
The story about Elizabeth Warren’s Native American heritage refuses to die. Today, state Republicans are calling on Harvard to investigate whether Warren used her Native American status to land her teaching post. Some Democrats, haunted by the infamous meltdown of Martha Coakley against Scott Brown two years ago, are wondering if it’s déjà vu all over again.
“The people in Washington are saying, ‘The people in Massachusetts are a bunch of fuck-ups who couldn’t run a race for dog catcher,’” said one veteran Massachusetts Democratic insider. “This is someone they handpicked, filled the coffers with millions and millions of dollars, made it their number one race, and the people who are up here running it with every resource you would ever want are getting killed.”
The Boston Herald broke the story April 27 that Harvard touted Warren’s Indian ancestry, and it’s been downhill since for the Senate hopeful. A genealogist has suggested Warren is 1/32 Native American, although the campaign has not provided documents backing her claim. Warren spoke in one interview of grandparents with “high-cheekbones.”
Joe Trippi, the prominent Democratic consultant, said the response to the initial stories raised questions in the nation’s capital about the campaign’s readiness to deal with a dangerous foe.
“There is a question about why they weren’t prepared,” Trippi said. “This happening in May is a wake-up call. They have to be ready for a much tougher fight than they envisioned.”
Warren should have expected such attacks: Brown’s chief strategist, Eric Fehrnstrom, is famous for confrontational tactics. “It’s great to be out there trying to make a case for working people, but the other side is not going to let you do that — Fehrnstrom doesn’t work that way,” Trippi said. “He’s going to try and make it into a knife fight. You have to be ready to make the process case and fight back.”
There’s a growing concern that Warren’s campaign has been too passive in its clashes with Brown, indeed that they’ve been too one-sided.
Dan Payne, a veteran Democratic consultant based in Boston, said the non-handling of the Native American question is part of a larger problem that has plagued the presumptive Democratic nominee.
“There are a finite number of weeks a candidate has to beat a popular incumbent,” Payne said. “If you spend a week on your Indian heritage and a week on tax returns, you’re not making the case against the incumbent. That’s the problem. The Warren camp has been made the incumbent and Brown has been made the challenger. It’s been a role reversal.”
Democrats don’t like to use the “C” word — Coakley. But Payne said, like Coakley, who didn’t understand she needed to shake hands outside a chilly Fenway Park, Warren doesn’t seem to know what to do with Brown.
For instance, Brown got free media showing he hit a half-court basketball shot – even though he needed several tries. The shot builds on his regular guy image, which neutralizes Warren’s arguments she stands up for the regular guy, Payne said. Yet, you never heard Warren ever smack him down.
“So far, Warren has shown an inability to deal with Brown’s use of symbols,” Payne said.
Warren’s chief strategist is Doug Rubin, who masterminded Gov. Deval Patrick’s two improbable victories – both based on positive campaigning and avoiding negative attacks. Fehrnstrom, meanwhile, gets out of bed thinking how to attack, said Payne.
Even before Warren entered the race, Fehrnstrom anonymously tweeted as Crazy Khazei, lobbing broadsides aimed at her while disguised as a loony version of another Democratic rival, Alan Khazei – until he was unmasked.
“It’s been very mean and it’s only going to get meaner,” said Michael Shea, a Democratic consultant. “They’ve raised $30 million and it’s not going toward positive ads, and it’s only just begun.”
There’s no doubt the Senate race is going to be nasty. It’s had a negative tone from Day One, when Brown – in response to a joke Warren made about him paying for college by posing nude – quipped on a radio show he was glad the 52-year-old hadn’t done the same.
The Native American story may appear an isolated one but it’s part of Brown’s strategy to craft a narrative about the first-time candidate, said Peter Ubertaccio, chairman of the department of political scientist at Stonehill College.
“You do that by raising questions about who she said she is and hold up who is in tune with average voters and is more like average voters,” Ubertaccio said.
In a statement, Warren’s campaign said:
Elizabeth has been straightforward and open about her heritage while the people who recruited her have made it clear it was because of her extraordinary skill as a teacher and a groundbreaking scholar. Scott Brown has been peddling nasty insinuations to distract from his million-dollar tax returns and multi-million dollar Wall Street fundraising. We’re getting back to the issues that really matter in this election, like how to level the playing field for middle class families.”
Democrats aren’t giving up on Warren.
Washington has tried to bolster Warren, Payne said. For instance, the president is signaling his support by appearing in an ad with Warren running on television stations statewide.
Trippi noted that while the Republicans drag out the story about her native roots, Warren’s campaign continues to show positive signs – and it’s only May.
“[Brown] scored,” Trippi said. “But she’s raising money, she has a very strong message, and the people know she’s fighting for the working people of Massachusetts.”
But Brown isn’t giving up either.
“Scott Brown takes this very seriously,” the Democratic insider cautioned. “This is control of the United States Senate. This is big stuff.”
Retiring Sen. Olympia Snowe has finished grading the president’s report card. President Obama gets an “F” in bipartisanship, where “bipartisanship” is defined as “constantly stroking the fragile egos of self-important Senate moderates.”
Snowe is not seeking reelection because the Republican Party wholly merged with the conservative movement and then began enforcing much stricter party discipline than it had in the past, and she would likely lose a primary election to a more right-wing candidate. But in her high-minded version of what happened, she is leaving because of “partisanship,” an evil spell cast on the formerly fraternal and cooperative United States Senate by comity-hating wizards.
This is how bad things have gotten: President Obama hasn’t called her in almost two years!
If there were ever a Republican for President Obama to work with, it was Maine Senator Olympia Snowe. She was one of just three Republicans in the entire Congress to vote for his economic stimulus plan in 2009 and even tried to work with him on health care, but in an interview with ABC’s senior political correspondent Jonathan Karl, Snowe makes a remarkable revelation: She hasn’t hasn’t spoken to President Obama in nearly two years.
Snowe said that if she had to grade the President on his willingness to work with Republicans, he would “be close to failing on that point.” In fact, Snowe, who was first elected to Congress in 1976, claims that her meetings with President Obama have been less frequent than with any other president.
That’s so weird, that President Obama stopped talking to her around two years ago. I wonder what happened? That wizard probably got him, and now he hates bipartisanship. That is the only explanation I can think of for why Olympia Snowe — a Republican the president could definitely try to work with! — hasn’t heard from Obama for around two years.
I mean, Snowe “even tried to work with him on health care.” Hey, that was around two years ago, actually! How hard did she try, again? If I recall correctly, she intentionally delayed the process for months before finally voting against a plan she’d previously voted for, never making a single substantive criticism of the policy of the bill in the fear that her criticism would then be addressed by Democrats and she’d be forced to come up with a new reason to oppose the bill, because it turns out she didn’t actually want to vote for healthcare reform, and she would not have supported any plan to expand coverage to all Americans, no matter how it worked.
So this is the problem. In the popular imagination, and in Barack Obama’s naive pre-2010 fantasies, “bipartisanship” means “working together to accomplish things.” In reality, in the Senate, it means “indulging moderates, forever.” For Olympia Snowe, the act of calling Olympia Snowe is more important than the act of … passing legislation to solve problems.
Snowe is now endorsing Scott Brown, saying Massachusetts residents should vote for him because he is another true believer in independent, party line-crossing bipartisanship. He even supports the Violence Against Women Act! (Why should Massachusetts residents vote for a Republican who is willing to cross party lines sometimes to vote for bills that every Democrat supports, instead of just voting for a Democrat whose support you won’t have to just sort of guess at until he comes out and says it? Because “bipartisanship,” that’s why.) (And the fact that Brown supported allowing employers to deny contraception coverage — a measure Snowe opposed — while his opponents shared Snowe’s position on the issue also doesn’t matter, because being a Republican who sometimes bucks the party line to do the right thing is more Honorable than being a Democrat whose party line is already the right thing.)
Would Olympia Snowe have voted for cap-and-trade if the president had called her more often? Or would she have done exactly what she did during the healthcare reform process, and strung Democrats along for months before voting against it for nakedly political reasons? (She was beginning to play the exact same game as she had before, saying she would maybe bring herself to support a “scaled-back” version of the legislation as long as other Republicans also promised to do so.)
Would Olympia Snowe have supported the “scaled-back,” less ambitious alternative to comprehensive immigration reform that was the DREAM Act, which would have allowed people who came to the U.S. as children and served in the military or went to college to seek citizenship legally? No, she would not have, because if the act had passed, “millions of illegal immigrants could attempt to become legal residents….”
So instead of cap-and-trade, we got nothing. Instead of the DREAM Act, we got nothing. If healthcare reform had failed, we’d have nothing. If Snowe’s stated goal was to maintain the status quo, because she doesn’t care about immigration and doesn’t believe in climate change, then she’d be totally doing a very good job. But she claims to care about climate change and want to do something about immigration, which leads me to believe that she’s horrible at being a senator. It is the incompetent political maneuvering of “moderates” like Snowe, and not “partisanship,” that leads directly to Senate inaction. If what she needed, in order to be swayed to the side of passing legislation to address problems, was for the president to make a much bigger public show of courting her, then she’s a bizarre and repulsive specimen. Being against everything because people aren’t paying you enough attention is so much worse than being against everything on principle.
The so-called People’s Pledge seemed like a somewhat gimmicky win-win proposition for both incumbent Republican Sen. Scott Brown and his Democratic challenger, Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren, in their race for the seat once held by Ted Kennedy. The idea, proposed by Brown, was to staunch the flow of super PAC money into the race with an agreement of elegant simplicity: If a candidate is attacked by name in an ad, then the one who comes off looking better is obliged to donate half the cost of the ad buy to a charity of the other candidate’s choice. Pretty simple: Why shoot yourself in the foot, right?
The trick in the gimmick became clear this week when Brown announced that he was holding up his end of the pledge, agreeing to pay half the costs of an ad from a group called Coalition of Americans for Political Equality (CAPE PAC) and asking it to pull its Google ads promoting him. The group’s website is now offline. Jeff Loyd, a Tea Party activist from Arizona who chairs the PAC, confirmed that his group spent all of $673.99 in pro-Brown online advertising with Google.
Brown’s ostentatious willingness to be the first to trigger the enforcement mechanism against himself displays a street-smart opportunism that the Warren camp, for all her populist credentials, lacks. Far from shooting himself in the foot, the penalty amounts to $327 out of the $13 million in his campaign coffers. It was money well spent to help burnish his image as a moderate and man of the people, even as he raises more than $2 for Warren’s every $1. (Warren has raised $6 million to date.)
“Sen. Brown is a man of his word,” Brown’s campaign manager, Jim Barnett, trumpeted in a letter to CAPE PAC. “And as a result of your advertising on his behalf, he will honor the agreement by paying out of his campaign account an amount equal to 50 percent of your spending. In short,” the letter continued, “while your advertising on his behalf is clearly intended to be helpful, it is actually costing his campaign valuable resources.”
CAPE PAC’s Loyd said he killed the ads reluctantly at Brown’s request.
“We regret the candidates in this race are asking for groups like ours to suspend our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms to campaign in support of whatever candidates we choose,” he said. “However, we respect the wishes of our supporters and as such will honor their requests to suspend our advertising campaign in support of Senator Brown.”
The statement from Brown’s campaign stressed that this was the very first time that either candidate had taken tangible action to enforce the pledge: “Notably, two pro-Warren groups, ReThinkBrown and BoldProgressives, also ran Google ads after the signing of the historic People’s Pledge,” it added pointedly, putting Warren on the defensive.
The Warren campaign seemed to be slightly caught off guard by the GOP attempt to co-opt the money-in-politics issue. It found itself in the unenviable position of having to acknowledge Brown’s move to honor the pledge, even while defending itself against a cheap shot thrown late.
“To the best of our knowledge, those ads [bought by ReThinkBrown and Bold Progressives] were run prior to the [Jan. 23] pledge and were taken down almost immediately,” Warren spokeswoman Alethea Harney told Salon. “We’ve asked Warren supporters to provide us with suggestions for the charity,” she added.
Defanging Warren on her big issue — money in politics — is a smart tactic for a Republican looking to get reelected in the most liberal state in the country. By not acting like a Republican, and sometimes reaching across the aisle, Brown has stood out as a voice of reason in the GOP wilderness who sticks with his party only 54 percent of his time, according to a Congressional Quarterly study of his 2011 voting record.
After an initial burst of enthusiasm that launched Warren’s campaign with great fanfare last fall, the Brown campaign has eclipsed her. Warren, who was leading a few weeks ago, now trails by 9 and 10 points, according to two recent polls. By compromising with the president now and then, and distancing himself from the Tea Party movement that swept him into office, Brown never misses a chance to tout his record as a flexible pragmatist. All mention of the Tea Party has been scrubbed from his site.
While Brown voted against tax hikes on the rich, he has gone against the GOP grain by backing a sweeping bill to curb insider trading by members of Congress; Republican leaders favored a narrower bill. He also supported the Obama administration’s plan to allow homeowners to refinance their mortgages if they are “underwater,” owing more than what their homes are worth.
At the same time, Brown has sided with Big Oil consistently and supported an effort by fellow Republicans to ban the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases linked to global warming. Most egregiously, he stood squarely with the Senate GOP on contraception, co-sponsoring the narrowly defeated Blunt Amendment that would have permitted employers and insurers to restrict access to birth control.
Yet this proved to be a safe gamble in Massachusetts with its large number of Roman Catholics who use birth control faithfully. Even if most parishioners who make it to the pews each Sunday believe insurers should offer contraception in their employee healthcare benefits package, they don’t mind if their senator takes the same stand that’s preached from the pulpit. That issue, stalking Romney through the primaries, has not hurt Brown much, even after Brown was roundly condemned by the Kennedy clan for misrepresenting his predecessor’s position on contraception.
Brown’s new persona was on display last week when he told a group of military veterans on the north shore of Boston a colorful tale about how he managed to get Obama on board with his insider trading bill by calling out to the president after his State of the Union speech.
“The whole row cleared out and, therefore, I actually get to walk up right next to the aisle as the president’s coming up, and I’m saying to myself, ‘Man! He wants an insider trading bill. I have one,’” Brown told the vets. “So I said, ‘Mr. President, my insider trading bill is on Harry Reid’s desk. Tell him to get it out.’ And he looked right at me and he says, ‘I will. I’ll tell him to get it out.’ Problem was he was miked up live with Fox.”
Brown boasted dubiously that the exchange brought the bill to the Senate floor where it passed, proof, he said, that he “gets things done.” It’s a winning strategy for a Republican in Massachusetts, and he only needs to look at his latest polling numbers, which show him leading among independents, voters under 50, voters over 65, and in central and western Massachusetts, according to the most recent survey from Western New England University.
The departure of Maine’s GOP Sen. Olympia Snowe, the most bipartisan member of Congress, also served to boost Brown, as she gave him a ringing endorsement on Thursday. ”In an institution characterized by gridlock and partisanship, Scott Brown is a much-needed breath of fresh air,” Snowe said in a statement.
As Brown bobs and weaves to the center, Warren has to figure out how to lay a glove on him. She hasn’t done so in a while.
BOSTON—If there’s a lonely glimmer of hope in the gloom and doom over money in politics, it was born this week in Boston with the signing of the People’s Pledge agreement to extinguish the onslaught of SuperPac ads polluting the Massachusetts airwaves, ten months before the nation’s most closely watched Senate race comes to an end.
The brainchild of Harvard Professor Elizabeth Warren, the darling of the left—yet prompted by Senator Scott Brown, the Tea Party centerfold who took Ted Kennedy’s seat—the key enforcement mechanism is remarkably simple in its conception: the candidate favored in a third-party ad on TV, radio or online must make a contribution worth half of the ad’s costs to the opposing candidate’s charity of choice within three days of broadcast.
The negative air war that was predicted two years ago as a consequence of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling could very well be thwarted in this one key race. It’s the little engine that could, nationally, but if the Massachusetts experiment in self-punishment proves enforceable here, it could catch on elsewhere, sort of like the Pledge of Allegiance against dirty politics, a yardstick that blunts the worst consequences of the high court’s decision.
Or it may prove to be a campaign game changer only in a blue state like Massachusetts where an incumbent Republican is covering his left flank with a clean-money pledge. In red states where there’s a Democratic incumbent, say, the People’s Pledge is much less likely to take root.
Warren, the less-well-known newcomer who needs to do more flesh-pressing to win over undecided voters, may benefit more from the pact than Brown, who took the late great lion of the Senate’s seat in a stunning upset runoff election in 2010. It was Brown’s camp that came up with the idea, and Warren, personally, who gave it teeth, essential enforcement mechanisms being a forte that would seem to separate this woman from the boys on Capitol Hill, should she take back Brown’s Senate seat for the Democrats.
The People’s Pledge is most likely to rise or fall with her political fortunes, which is to say its potential is every bit as promising as the smart money’s long-shot favorite to be our first female president. A regular on the Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where she re-appeared last night as her apple-cheeked, all-American self, looking professorial, but without the affected demeanor, Warren comes across as the down-to-earth daughter of, as she told Stuart, “a guy who sold fencing.” Warren went on to give a little history lesson about the 1940s, when she was born, when the government went to bat for the middle class, the same government that today goes to bat almost exclusively for the 35,000 lobbyists that swarm the halls of power
The deal, signed by both candidates, will be watched by none more closely than the shadowy, big-money SuperPacs that have hijacked the 2012 election season. Above all else that means Karl Rove and the Koch brothers who back his billionaire front group, the American Crossroads GPS think tank, which has already sunk more than $1 million into the Brown-Warren contest.
Rove may be pleased to know that not one Boston radio or television outlet has agreed to comply—it’s business after all and, as Ronald Reagan said, the politics of America is business—though they will feel nearly irresistible pressure to do so over the next few days as both campaigns mail a co-letter asking media outlets to forgo what amounts to a nice chunk of change for the local market.
The liberal League of Conservation Voters, which just bought a $2 million ad buy against Brown, said it would honor the deal Still there was a muted response in the blogosphere, a place normally divided over the wisdom of grotesque sums being spent on vulgar attack ads. The truce was noted widely if dispassionately. Daily Kos merely observed that the campaigns had swapped letters about the sums being spent already. The site noted that Brown had called on Warren to condemn the ads, and the Warren had responded last Friday with her idea to stand together beyond mere words. Brown accepted, the Daily Kos noted generously, even though the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had said it would become “significantly involved” in defeating his opponent.
Similarly, Talking Points Memo ran with a straight-up “we intend to comply” story quoting a Massachusetts Democratic Party official.
The muted response may be a consequence of the hardened skepticism about plugging the flow of SuperPac money. Sending letters to TV stations and advocacy groups asking them to curb the ads amounts to “an interesting and commendable effort,” said Paul Ryan, a lawyer for the Campaign Legal Center, which works on behalf of tighter campaign funding laws. “But I’m not entirely convinced it will be effective.”
Ryan said that issue ads, traditionally used to dodge limits on direct candidate advocacy, may blur the lines, complicating compliance.
Though no other group has come out against the pledge, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and National Republican Senatorial Committee have not yet said if they’ll try to call off the dogs in their own parties.
All that can be said for sure is that populist politics appears ready to trump the billion-dollar campaign industry in at least one race in the cradle of liberty. But if the People’s Pledge really takes off in Massachusetts, putting your money where your SuperPac mouth is may be the only way to avoid wearing the dirty-money badge of shame. Best case scenario: In the era of Citizens United, the People’s Pledge could yet become an unavoidable rite of American politics.
(Updated)
You’ve probably already heard about Senator Scott Brown’s gaffe this morning. Asked about a statement by Elizabeth Warren, his likely Democratic opponent next year, that she (unlike Brown) hadn’t posed nude to help pay her way through college, Brown replied: “Thank God.”
Needless to say, it’s landed Brown in some hot water, with Democrats blasting him for engaging in “frat house” chauvinism and media outlets across the country picking up the story. This comes at a bad time for Brown, whose once-mighty standing in Massachusetts has eroded and who is now running even with Warren in polls, and could be particularly damaging since it threatens to undermine what has been the key to his popularity in blue state Massachusetts: His personal likability.
There is some irony here. Brown’s comment seems to be the product of an unguarded moment on a Boston morning radio show, and, more than any other politician in Massachusetts, local radio has played a pivotal role in his rise.
Massachusetts may be a heavily Democratic state, but you’d never know it from scanning the radio dial. The Boston market has more than its share of standard-issue conservative radio hosts, and the ideology frequently bleeds over to the dominant all-sports station too. Local talk radio served as a virtual arm of Brown’s campaign when he won his Senate seat last year. He made frequent appearances on WEEI, the sports station, bantering with the hosts, playing up his regular-guy-with-a-truck image and connecting with the station’s predominantly white male listenership. When President Obama came to town for a last-minute appearance with Martha Coakley, Brown’s campaign organized a rally headlined by several prominent sports celebrities and three WEEI personalities. On that station and others, the promotion of his campaign, and the disparagement of Coakley, was relentless. Here’s how the Boston Globe’s Alex Beam described it:
On Election Day, WRKO ran 11 hours of nonstop pro-Brown agitprop from 9 a.m. on, including get-out-and-vote-for-Brown pleas. Over at its sister station, WEEI, Glenn Ordway’s afternoon sports goons taped promotional videos for Brown. You could say the same thing about WTKK, but ‘RKO and ‘EEI have actual listeners.
Since winning the election, Brown has kept up his local radio appearances, chatting casually with his friends, playing along with their drive-time antics, and sometimes letting his guard down. Here’s how Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham described one such session last July:
With all of that love and power, you can’t blame Brown for getting a big head. And as an interview he gave two of his fans on WEEI last Friday made clear, it is pretty darned big.
“So, last night I got off the plane and I’m driving through Wrentham saying, `Man, I just can’t believe I’m a United States Senator,’ ” he crowed to his adoring interlocutors. “And then Tim Geithner calls me on the phone and says, `Scott, I just wanted to go through some things that we’re working on right now . . .’ He just called me a minute ago, too . . .
So you might say that Brown’s casual put-down of Warren was a long time coming. Granted, it didn’t take place on one of the all-talk stations that double as Brown fan clubs, but rather a morning show on classic rock WZLX. Still, he was in a potentially dangerous setting — an irreverent live show with hosts who traffic in provocative hijinx and “guy” humor — where he’s come to feel a bit too comfortable. The sort cruelty embodied by Brown’s comment is heard all the time on these types of radio shows, in Boston and everywhere else, but it usually goes unnoticed. Unless it’s coming from a United States senator.
Update: A reader emails to point out that the latest Arbitron numbers show that WEEI is no longer the dominant sports station in Boston, and has been eclipsed by the new (and apparently not overtly conservative) Sports Hub.
Massachusetts State Sen. Scott Brown, R-Wrentham, celebrates in Boston, Tuesday, Jan. 19, 2010, after winning a special election held to fill the U.S. Senate seat left vacant by the death of Sen. Edward Kennedy. Brown defeated Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, a Democrat, and Joseph L. Kennedy, a Libertarian running as an independent and not related to the late Sen. Kennedy. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola)(Credit: Elise Amendola) 
Elizabeth Warren (Credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst) 
Olympia Snowe (Credit: Reuters/Jessica Rinaldi) 
U.S. Senator Scott Brown (Credit: Hyungwon Kang / Reuters) 
Super PACs beware(Credit: AP/Elise Amendola/Steven Senne) 
U.S. Senator Scott Brown (R-MA) (Credit: Hyungwon Kang / Reuters) 
