RSS Feed Menu“Après moi, le deluge?” is a fair question for Scott Brown to ask.
The real question at the heart of this most bizarre special election is whether Senator-elect Scott Brown is just an outlier who captured the popular zeitgeist of a restless, dissatisfied Massachusetts electorate, or something more – a harbinger of a competitive, yet moderate Republican Party in a state where liberal Democrats overwhelmingly dominate the machinery of government.
Former governor Mitt Romney came into Massachusetts in 2002 promising to revitalize the state Republican Party and reverse the GOP’s declining fortunes. No longer would Republicans simply concede that they had no chance of winning anything but the governorship – rather, the state party would rebuild its voter rolls and actively recruit competitive candidates to run for office at the local level.
But when Romney left office in 2006, the state party may have been in more dire shape than ever before. Despite his relatively smooth, competent tenure, voters perceived him as too focused on divisive social issues like gay marriage and too busy laying the groundwork out of state for his campaign for president. His Lt. Governor Kerry Healey lost the race to replace him to a liberal Democrat, and the GOP lost three more seats in a state legislature where their caucus barely controlled 10 percent of the seats in both chambers. Half of the state’s ten incumbent Democratic members of Congress ran completely unopposed. And though the party fielded a candidate against the late Ted Kennedy, he was a lightweight with little hope of defeating the veteran lawmaker.
But in the last three years, the political winds in Massachusetts may have shifted – in part because the party has moved towards the center and away from the ideological battles tearing apart the national party.
Brown himself epitomizes some of these compromises. In a conversation with him last November – before his meteoric rise to frontrunner status – Brown stuck to bread and butter economic issues and all-around pragmatic conservatism.
“As a party, we need to have a larger tent. And we need to have some diversity of ideas,” he told me. In response to a question I asked about the debate then raging over whether the GOP should adopt an ideological purity test, Brown was dismissive. “I’m a fiscal conservative. I’ve never voted for a tax increase. Another Republican may not feel that way. I think it’s shortsighted to have a purity test.”
The current state party chair in Massachusetts, Jennifer Nassour, emphasized roughly the same points. She made waves in national Republican circles when she told a LGBT newspaper that, “there shouldn’t be a monolithic party position” on social issues – rather individual candidates should be free to embrace a pro-choice or a pro-gay marriage position if their conscience dictates.
“To me social issues are personal issues. Those are personal views, and we are not legislating here – at least I am not legislating anyone’s personal views,” she added.
In an interview with me last fall, Nassour said “The fiscal issues are really the winning issues,” emphasizing job creation, lower taxes, good governance, anti-corruption and all around sound, moderate fiscal policy.
The truth is that the myth of Massachusetts as a liberal oasis has always been somewhat overstated. Voters were initially hostile to gay marriage when the state’s Supreme Judicial Court suddenly declared it legal in 2004. Roughly half the state’s voters are registered independents. The “Taxachusetts” label is a relic of the 1970s and 80s – the state has a flat income tax mandated by the constitution, and ranks 28th amongst the states in terms of overall tax burden. Massachusetts voters can sometimes flex a stubborn libertarian streak too – in 1986, the state’s mandatory seatbelt law was overridden by voters, and in 2008, the state essentially decriminalized simple possession of marijuana.
In short, it will take a more flexible brand of Republicanism to win in a state like Massachusetts. It will take abandoning some conservative dogmas and challenging some GOP orthodoxies. But if a moderate Republican like Scott Brown can win a race to succeed Ted Kennedy, there’s no reason why the state GOP can’t be competitive in Massachusetts.
“I try to lead by example. I think that people are looking at this race, and they’re wondering how I’ll do,” Brown told me in November.
Given his incredible five-point, come from behind victory, Massachusetts Republicans may have no other choice but to follow the path blazed by Brown.
DFL // Jan 20, 2010 at 12:19 pm
For a national party, it is imperative to allow candidates to run within the sensibilities of the local constituencies that they are to represent. And it is important for Republican candidates for office in Massachusetts to reflect the sensibilities of their constituents just as Republican candidates in North Carolina, Ohio or Colorado must do with their constituents. It would be foolish to expect Scott Brown to be a Jesse Helms of the North just as it would be foolish to run a Susan Molinari Republican for a congressional district in Alabama.
Massachusetts Republicans have experienced many conundrums since they lost its majority hold on the state over 55 years ago. The Yankees virtually abandoned politics in the 50s and 60s. The few still interested often became Democrats. In the senate election of the elegant, stylish John F. Kennedy over Henry Cabot Lodge in 1952, the Democrats became much more than a party of often-corrupt Irish ward heelers. The Democrats became the party of progress and modernity while the Republicans ossified. The decline of Massachusetts industry, which often provided votes and funding for Republicans, wrecked much of the infrastructure of the Massachuetts Republican Party. With the decline of industry, the state’s economy became dominated by government workers and those who worked for the many colleges and universities in the state, most of whom are sympathetic to the party of big government, the Democrats. The cultural revolution of the 1960s was more widespread and permeating in Massachusetts than in most of the rest of the country. So a state that first elected Democratic majorities on Beacon Hill in 1948 achieved overwhelming dominance within a generation.
If Republicans are to be rejuvenated in Massachusetts, they will do so when the intelligent young adults in the state decide that the Republicans better fit their aspirations. When young adults in Massachusetts decide they want to serve in office as Republicans rather than Democrats, then you will see change. Perhaps Scott Brown is a sign that the young and intelligent of the Bay State are willing to turn their backs on the uninspiring Democratic Party.
24AheadDotCom // Jan 20, 2010 at 10:59 pm
1. Brown isn’t a fiscal conservative in the fringe tea party/libertarian/Randroid sense, at least as far as I can tell. He might end up getting a few tea bags from the loons; maybe someone dressed as Tom Paine will even do a video about him.
2. What if raising taxes was the best thing to do? I guess he couldn’t do it without risking his career and he, like many others, would put his career ahead of what’s best.
3. The concerns about “corruption” are certainly interesting given that most GOP leaders support or aren’t strongly fighting against illegal imm., one of the largest and clearest examples of corruption available today.
4. Many in the “profits at any price” crowd think of imm. as just a “social issues” matter; the tea partiers have largely ignored it (or, in the case of most of their leaders, been on the wrong side). Meanwhile, while no tea partiers or r/w bloggers were looking, the Obama admin is feverishly working to add 200,000 brand new potential Dem voters to the rolls:
http://24ahead.com/n/9767
Isn’t it pretty stupid to ignore a massive future-vote-buying scheme like that, especially considering it will hurt the country it’s supposed to help and especially considering that adding 200,000 people to the labor market is going to have a major impact on American workers? So, why have the same leaders (major bloggers, pundits, etc.) who pushed Brown almost completely ignored that issue?
Send them an email and ask. Let them know that you know.
race42008.com » Blog Archive » Rise of the Live Free Or Die Republican // Jan 21, 2010 at 12:31 am
[...] of Washington and pundits are already busily misinterpreting the results. Here’s David Frum asking the wrong question: The real question at the heart of this most bizarre special election is whether Senator-elect [...]
The Brown Betrayal That Wasn’t | FrumForum // Mar 13, 2010 at 5:29 am
[...] contributor Byron Tau followed that up with another Scott Brown interview in December, where Brown told him that the GOP would be “short-sighted to have purity [...]