To no one’s surprise, political pundits were all over the board in attempting to explain Republican Scott Brown’s spectacular game-changing victory in Tuesday’s special Massachusetts election to fill the U.S. Senate seat formerly held by the late Ted Kennedy.
Brown simply did the grunt work necessary to win, some said, while his Democratic opponent, Martha Coakley, basically took her election for granted in a state that traditionally elects Democrats. No, others insisted, his election was a direct result of voter disgust with Washington politics — the pork-filled legislation, the closed-door sessions, the bribes in exchange for key votes on health care, the perceived looting of the national treasury.
Some Democrats in high places appeared to cite the usual suspect — former President George W. Bush — for a major ration of the blame for their party’s loss. In an interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, President Barack Obama said, “The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office. People are angry and they are frustrated. Not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years, but what’s happened over the last eight years.”
In the interview marking the end of his first year in office, Obama suggested that Congress must now “coalesce around the core elements” of the plan to overhaul health care. The Senate, he said, should not try to jam legislation through Congress before Brown is sworn in. Majority Democrats should, instead, show some respect, he seemed to suggest. Wait until the man is seated and then jam it through.
By most accounts, Brown, who campaigned around the state in his pickup truck, approached the task somewhat like Harry S. Truman reportedly did in his successful 1948 presidential campaign against Republican Thomas Dewey.
The late Baltimore Sun columnist and political writer H.L. Mencken wrote that Truman’s success in that close election was due, in large part, to the fact that he “assumed as a matter of course that the American people were just folks like himself. He thus wasted no high-falutin rhetoric upon them, but appealed directly to their self-interest.
“A politico trained in a harsh but realistic school, he naturally directed his most gaudy promises to the groups that seemed to be most numerous, and the event proved that he was a smart mathematician … He made votes every time he gave a show.”
Old-timers will remember the fiercely contested 1948 presidential election as one the Chicago Tribune prematurely and erroneously called for Dewey in a supersize bold black headline that dominated the paper’s front page. The Trib’s “oops” moment will live forever in newspaper lore as a caution to editors that, for headline purposes, things are never over until they’re over.
“Dewey Defeats Truman,” the headline shouted, and the memory that endures concerns the resulting famous news photograph that circled the globe the next day showing a triumphant Truman waving a copy of the newspaper while flashing his trademark ear-to-ear grin.
The Brown shocker engendered no erroneous morning-after headlines concerning defeat. Coakley conceded early, putting no harried deadline-facing headline writer in jeopardy of blowing it, and allowing political junkies to get to bed at a reasonable hour. Except for a cringe-inducing moment when Brown jokingly told a nationwide audience that his two daughters, at the podium with him, were “available,” his acceptance speech was gaffe-free. So far, so good.
Well-schooled in Massachusetts politics, Brown apparently “made votes every time he gave a show,” as Mencken said of Truman, by promising voters that he understood their discontent with Washington’s seeming predilection for driving the country into bankruptcy — understood that they are mad as hell and not about to take it any more — and he would do something about it if elected.
His seating gives Senate Republicans the lone vote needed to strip Democrats of their 60-vote supermajority. His election gives skittish politicians up for re-election in November reason to picture rabid mobs of constituents bearing torches and pitchforks and preparing to storm the Washington fuhrerbunker should their message of Tuesday be ignored.
On those two counts alone, the man may already have earned his keep.
BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may reach him by e-mail at olddawg@bangordailynews.net.