Scott Brown Adds Governor to the List of Things for Which He Won’t Run

Cementing his new career as a public ponderer of potential campaigns, former Senator Scott Brown said Wednesday that he wouldn’t run for governor of Massachusetts.

“I’ve decided, with my wife’s blessing, that I will not be running for governor of Massachusetts in 2014,” Brown said on WBZ’s “Dan Rea Show.” He followed up with a statement on Facebook:

For the first time in 15 plus years, I have had a Summer to spend with my family. In addition, I have been fortunate to have private sector opportunities that I find fulfilling and exhilarating. These new opportunities have allowed me to grow personally and professionally. I want to continue with that process.

Governor is, at this point, the fourth office Professional Tease Scott Brown has considered since his loss to Elizabeth Warren in a much publicized Senate campaign. Brown hinted he might run in the special election to replace John Kerry in the U.S. Senate before deciding against it, leaving the field wide open for the eventual nominee, Gabriel Gomez, to lose to Ed Markey. Instead, he started spending some time at his place in New Hampshire and suggesting he might unseat a Senator there. Taking jobs at Fox News and the law firm Nixon Peabody, Brown next turned toward hinting he might run for governor in a field where his name brand would set him up well in a year with no obvious Democratic nominee. Even before he crushed Howie Carr’s dreams this week, Brown had already moved on to publicly musing on a run for pretty much the only office he hadn’t yet tried on for size: President of the United States.

This leaves previous Republican gubernatorial nominee Charlie Baker with a much better shot at the nomination. Baker has said he’ll make his decision by Labor Day— that’s next weekend—and has suggested he’d probably step aside should Brown decide to run. Meanwhile, Brown is headed to Iowa to gauge interest in his “brand of Republicanism” and further cement his career path as a professional maybe-someday-politician-or-something.