the matter of Scott Brown
There was a spike of eye-brow garnering attention when Scott Brown became one amongst five Republican Senators to vote “yes” for a “Jobs Bill”. This garnered a whole mass of anger from his conservative to tea party supporters, and it’s not too hard to search for the frustrating facebook twitter blasts.
On this score, I always had to give Glenn Beck credit for expressing “distrust”. Scott Brown’s political record was “to the left” of the political record of Dede Scozzafava, the New York Congressional candidate the “Tea Party” and assorted Republican activists threw overboard leading to a Democratic pick-up in the special election. Not that it is too big a fuss in a short-term: his election threw Obama and the Democrats’ painstaking 60 vote strategium into tatters in one big strike, and also — hey! He’s a huge fan of Torture! I’d say that’s a good trade off for them.
He wasn’t exactly the “Candidate of the Tea Partiers”. If he was, he would have lost that election. It’s up to those activists to decide if this was a good trade-off for them. Actually, Brown’s election resembles nothing so much less than various special election victories Democrats scored in the Bush Era — in deep red districts, winning congressional candidates apt to disappoint at any moment and throw your political schematic into tumult. They’re not “The Netroot’s” candidate either.