I haven’t been following the day to day developments in the Massachusetts Senate race between Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren, so I was only dimly aware of the fact that asbestos had become a campaign issue. Elizabeth Warren represented the families of people who died from asbestos poisoning, and some of those people agreed to appear in one of her campaign commercials attesting to the good work she did on their behalf. As a result, Scott Brown received a question yesterday from a firefighter while he was campaigning in Taunton, Massachusetts.
During a question and answer session, one firefighter commented that both campaigns are publishing advertisements featuring family members of victims of asbestos-related illness. He asked Brown how Warren gets the victims’ family members to go on her commercial.
“A lot of them are paid,” Brown said. “We hear that maybe they pay actors. Listen, you can get surrogates and go out and say your thing. We have regular people in our commercials. No one is paid. They are regular folks that reach out to us and say she is full of it.”
That was a big mistake on Scott Brown’s part. Three family members came out to blast Brown for his insensitivity.
“What Scott Brown said today is so offensive to me and my family after what we went through,” [Ginny] Jackson said. “He’s sunk to a new low.”
Jackson said going through her husband Sam’s sickness and death from mesothelioma was one of the most difficult situations she ever endured.
“Sam and I were childhood sweethearts and we had been together since I was 15 years old,” Jackson said. “I came forward in this campaign because Massachusetts voters need to know the truth about what Elizabeth Warren did to help families like mine who were affected by asbestos poisoning, rather than Sen. Brown’s misleading attacks.”
“Let Scott Brown tell me to my face that I am nothing but a paid actor, and I’ll set him straight on what it was like to watch my father suffocate to death,” [John] English said
“To dismiss what my family went through by calling me a paid actor isn’t just disrespectful, but it’s cruel,” [Steven] Yapp said. “He’s attacking people who lost loved ones to asbestos poisoning, just because we stepped forward to tell the truth about Elizabeth Warren. Sen. Brown showed his true colors today. He’s a politician who will say anything and attack anyone that gets in his way.”
All Scott Brown had to do is acknowledge that his opponent has done some nice things in her life and that her work on behalf of these families was one of those things. Then he could have explained some of the things he has done on the behalf of firefighters and said something about why he deserves their support. But he couldn’t give Warren any credit, so he came up with a conspiracy theory to explain why she had won the support of these survivors.
He was probably going to lose anyway, but I think this fiasco probably seals the deal.
