First the disclaimers: the Massachusetts U.S. Senate race between incumbent Scott Brown and challenger Elizabeth Warren is too close to call. Some recent polls have Brown with a slim lead, while others have Warren ahead. Nobody knows what (if any) impact the recovery from Hurricane Sandy will have. Sen. Brown remains as talented a retail politician as Massachusetts has produced in recent years. (Here comes the “but”.)
But if Brown loses this election, it will be because he lost it, as Boston Globe columnist Scot Lehigh pointed out last week. For those who can’t get beyond the paywall, here are some excerpts:
Brown is “…running a dumb campaign in a smart state.“
Brown’s “...debate and TV attacks have made you seem petty and desperate — and not the likable guy voters once thought you were.“
The template for Mass. Republicans getting elected to statewide or national office is pretty straightforward and well documented: be fiscally conservative, and socially liberal (or at least, tolerant). Be a “nice guy”—not like those crude and mean national Republicans (e.g., Newt Gingrich, Mitch McConnell, Eric Cantor). Paint your opponent as beholden to the Democratic establishment: the state legislature, labor unions, the pointy-headed intellectuals and (this last one delicately) minorities who want “special treatment”.
Instead, Brown spent weeks obsessing about Warren’s ancestry and spent millions running ads trying to paint her a legal-gun-for-hire for big corporations. Neither charge holds up well in the light of day, and both tarnish Brown’s well-burnished “nice guy” image.
Lehigh also nails the reason that moderate Republicans are a dying species in national politics. They’ve refused to stand up for themselves.
“Despite your more moderate inclinations, as it stands now, a vote for you is a vote to put a right-wing party in control of the US Senate. And if Republicans win the Senate, that would spell a callithumpian parade of anti-choice, anti-government conservatives in key legislative posts. Men like Mitch McConnell, who as minority leader has made abuse of the filibuster his calling card. And climate-science denier James Inhofe of Oklahoma. And Tea Party favorite Jim DeMint of South Carolina.
If you’d been far-sighted, you would have worked from the day of your arrival in Washington to build a moderate Senate bloc that wielded genuine influence. At very least, you should have announced early on that you wouldn’t be joining reflexive Republican filibusters, but instead would routinely vote to bring measures to the Senate floor for debate on the merits.
If you’d done both, you’d be on much firmer footing today.” (emphasis added)
Moderate Senate Republicans could have been far-sighted. They could have spent the past four years trying to govern. They could have spent the past four years working to pass a more conservative version of Obamacare (they’d have succeeded; Obama and the Democrats were desperate for bipartisan support). They could have negotiated and helped pass a market-friendly cap-and-trade law to reduce greenhouse gases. They could have taken what Sens. Collins, Snowe and Specter did on the Recovery Act (withhold their votes until they got some of what they wanted—more tax cuts, a smaller bill) as a template for action on a host of legislation. But they didn’t.
I’m not saying Collins, Snowe and Specter’s policies made sense. (They didn’t. If anything, the Recovery Act should have been larger.) I’m saying it’s an example of how to build room for a moderate caucus within the Republican Party. Stare down the extremists within your own party and act like moderates, compromising with Democrats when the result would be moderate policies that benefit the country as a whole and your constituents in particular. Instead, Specter switched parties, Snowe is retiring, the American Jobs Act (full of policies that had enjoyed bipartisan support in the past) proposed by Pres. Obama last fall has gone nowhere at the cost of at least 1 million jobs, and all across the country Republicans are on the verge of losing races—like Brown’s—that seemed like sure winners a year ago.
Crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/