Reporters Ponder Scott Brown for Governor
Senator John Kerry’s pending departure from the Senate has had the chattering classes in Washington wondering for weeks whether former Senator Scott Brown would make an attempt to regain a Senate seat. But now, it seems that Brown may be contemplating another office entirely. Both Politico and the Associated Press have speculated over the weekend that Brown will sit out the Senate special election and instead make a run for governor. He’d be taking a page from Mitt Romney’s playbook, one that was written by Eric Fehrnstrom, who orchestrated Romney’s run for governor and oversaw both Brown and Romney’s campaigns this election cycle. And it might keep him politically viable, says Politico’s James Hohmann. Another loss for Brown, so soon after his throwdown with Elizabeth Warren, “could end his political career,” Hohmann says. And even if he does run for special election—it’d be his third campaign in four years—he’d have to up and run again in 2014. Let’s face it, the guy is probably just exhausted.
The case for Brown to wait seems to make sense on the surface, says The Atlantic Wire’s J.K. Trotter, as Massachusetts has a history of being more amenable to Republicans running for state, rather than federal office (lest we forget that the governorship was held by Republicans from 1991 through 2007). And he could distance himself from the toxic situation of working alongside Republicans in Congress. But both Trotter and Hohmann question whether Brown will come off as having the executive experience to run the state. From Politico:
Most Massachusetts politicos “see Brown more as a legislator than an executive,” said a senior Republican strategist in the state. “That’s what he was as a state representative and then a state senator. I think they prefer someone with executive experience…”
Over at MSNBC, Lawrence O’Donnell busted out his Boston accent (which, apparently, he can do at will—and is hysterical because he sounds more like Rachel Dratch than an actual local) to offer a takedown of “loser Scott Brown’s” political future in a segment last night. Saying that Brown ran “a Senate campaign that was worthy of the thugs” in his old Boston neighborhood, O’Donnell looked gleeful as he ran the old clips of Brown calling Warren “professor” and questioned his campaign strategy of focusing in Warren’s heritage, saying it undermined his nice guy persona. Despite Brown’s recent digs, he’s not going to be able to paint Congressman Ed Markey as an outsider, he argues. “Please, please, please run for Senate again,” O’Donnell opines, hoping he’ll take a stab at a race against the Congressman. “You might actually have to talk about policy.”
