Scott Brown - problem? - Granite Grok

Scott Brown – problem?

I think a lot of Northeast Republicans were fairly happy when Scott Brown won the special election from “Marsha” Coakley  in MA to fill the Senatorial seat left empty upon the death of Ted “The Swimmer” Kennedy a few years ago now.  Occupying “the Peoples’ Seat” (as opposed to the “Kennedy Family Seat”), he pretty much met most expectations – not a Democrat, but not rock solid votes on Republican issues either.  Now, he’s making noises about running for election again – just unsure for what and from where (except for MA Guv, which was on the list but he just ruled out – maybe).  From NH, perhaps, due to his home out on the Seacoast?

Several people took note on him filling in – locally, Karen Testerman did (Note: Karen is an exploratory candidate for NH Gov).  Given that the Laconia Daily Sun only does “pictures of text”, that’s all I’ve got:

Karen Testerman on Scott Brown

But Brown filling in for Bill O’Reilly also caught a national audience as well.

Jeffrey Lord at the American Spectator also had some thoughts – a bunch of them in fact – the post goes for 7 pages and I have no intention of putting it up here.  However, here are a few snippets:

…While that record has been discussed many times in this space, your Talking Points Memo — and recent attacks on Senator Ted Cruz by former aides to President George W. Bush, plus a recent (and yet another) attack on conservatives from Jennifer Rubin, the “conservative” columnist of the Washington Post, provide a further opportunity for discussion of the differences between Reagan and the perpetually losing moderate wing of the Republican Party. Not to mention that it is a chance to examine just why Americans routinely rate Reagan — not moderates Hoover, Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Bush 41 or Bush 43 (as in this Gallup poll) as America’s “greatest President.”

So if I may, a response.

…Perhaps most notably, Reagan looked Americans in the television eye that night and said that Democrats were:

taking the party of Jefferson, Jackson and Cleveland down the road under the banners of Marx, Lenin and Stalin.

One suspects, Senator, that had you, Wallace, Wehner and Rubin been around as sentient adults that October night of 1964 all of you would have fainted dead away at that line.

He [Reagan] became the gold standard, the role model, for the successful primary challenges of today’s Establishment Republicans from people like senators Ted Cruz of Texas, Mike Lee of Utah, Marco Rubio of Florida, and Rand Paul of Kentucky. And yes, he served as inspirations for challengers like Christine O’Donnell of Delaware, Sharron Angle of Nevada and Joe Miller of Alaska who successfully defeated Establishment favorites in primaries (in the case of O’Donnell and Miller defeating a sitting GOP congressman and GOP senator respectively) but lost in November. All of these challengers — the winners and the losers — are latter day personifications of the Ford-Reagan, Establishment-Anti-Establishment battle. They clarify — they don’t blur.

…Reagan understood the mistake moderates always made.   Moderates held (and still hold, your Talking Points Memo a case in point) as gospel the idea that in order to win elections you must win the center of American politics by moving to the center. Reagan understood that this cherished moderate belief had it exactly backwards.

Move the Center to the Right — not the Right to the Center.   Always — always, always, always — articulate the conservative case in as crystal clear a fashion as possible.

…Reagan, by then in the seventh year of his presidency, understood to his core that even in failure there is victory — as long as, to use his phrase, “we can point out to the people how different the Dems & Repubs are.

That presupposes, by the way, that Republicans have acted in ways that actually show people that there is a difference.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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