In Massachusetts Senate Race Incumbent Scott Brown Condemns Opponent Elizabeth Warren For Accepting Contributions From Out of State

While Mr. Brown Accepts Huge Contributions from Wall Street

The most interesting Senate race of 2012 pits Senator Scott Brown (R, Ma) against challenger Elizabeth Warren.  Mr. Brown is the Republican who won election to complete the term of the late Senator Edward Kennedy.  Ms. Warren is a consumer rights advocate, author of legislation to protect bank customers from unscrupulous practices by banks and thus the bane of Wall Street.

Mr. Brown is now attacking Ms. Warren for accepting campaign contributions from out of state.  A little bit of context here.  Mr. Brown has raised a huge amount of money, much of it from bankers who deathly fear the election of Ms. Warren will validate regulations keeping bankers from doing things like charging $35.00 for a $2.00 overdraft.  The only chance that Ms. Warren has is to raise big dollars, and she is doing so in part by relying on out of state contributions.

Nearly 20 percent of Ms. Warren’s itemized donations (those over $200) in the last quarter of 2011 came from California, where a number of actors and others in the entertainment industry are fired up about her race against a first-term senator, Scott P. Brown, to reclaim for Democrats the seat long held by Edward M. Kennedy.

But the real reason Ms. Warren is getting out of state money is that voters outside of the state of Massachusetts know that if she is elected, she will represent them also.

Emily Albu, a classics professor at the University of California, Davis, who donated $200 to Ms. Warren in December, said she hoped Mr. Brown did not succeed in painting Ms. Warren’s California support as a negative.

“I suspect there are a lot of people like me, who aren’t Hollywood whatevers, who have ties to Massachusetts or a larger concern for the country and want her to win,” said Ms. Albu, a registered Democrat who used to live in Cambridge.

The ideal constituent of Mr. Brown,  whom he is looking out for looks, sounds and talks like Mitt Romney, with about the same amount of wealth.

Yes, Mr. Brown is incensed that Hollywood types would support his opponent, even as he takes in money from the very people who precipitated the economic crisis.

And while most of Mr. Brown’s top sources of donations over $200 in the last reporting period were in Massachusetts, he, too, raised a lot of money elsewhere. The Texas cities of Dallas, Houston and San Antonio provided a combined $123,150. He raised just over $50,000 in California (2.2 percent of his total itemized donations). He also got more than $15,000 in contributions from the District of Columbia, West Palm Beach, Fla., and New Canaan, Conn., and he has held fund-raisers recently in Philadelphia, South Florida and New York.

So it is not clear exactly why Mr. Brown is raising this issue.  There may be political races decided against a candidate because he or she took out of state money, but this Forum has yet to find one. 

The real issue is probably Mr. Brown’s need to keep voters from associating the Senator with that demographic called ‘useful idiots’.  Useful idiots are people who are so stupid that they are used by other people without getting anything in return or even knowing that they are being used.  For Republicans Mr. Brown is a ‘useful idiot’ delivering votes for Republican causes which cost him votes in his home state without Mr. Brown getting anything in return.  Mr. Brown will never ever get any thing from Republicans, no leadership position, no recognition, no special treatment.  All he does is provide them with a vote.

Inexplicably the recent polls have shown Mr. Brown with a substantial lead.  Of course the race itself will be close and not be decided until the votes are cast.  In the meantime though, if Massachusetts residents are so idiotic that they really want to be represented by a ‘useful idiot’, they have the perfect choice in Mr. Brown.