Two Thoughts on Scott Brown

The first thought is part of my ongoing series of observations on how hard it is to know what childhood experiences will lead to adult happiness and success. Brown is famously disciplined and organized and has been married to the same woman for 23 years:

Mr. Brown’s craving for discipline and order was born of a chaotic childhood. His parents were divorced when he was 1, and each one was married four times. He lived for a time with his grandparents and dealt with an ever-changing cast of stepparents.

“Some of these marriages were not that pretty,” said John Encarnaceo, a retired colonel in the Massachusetts National Guard and former boyfriend of Mr. Brown’s mother, Judith Brown.

“I grew up fast,” Mr. Brown recalled. “I remember waking up in the middle of the night, and hearing the banging and the screams and having to be the 5- or 6-year-old boy having to save Mom.”

He grew his hair long, listened to Aerosmith and Kiss and, at 12, was arrested for shoplifting a bunch of albums (Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and Grand Funk Railroad) at a local mall.

The second thought concerns the Republican party at this moment, because people are already comparing Brown to Obama as a rising star. And he is an impressive person who ran an impressive campaign. But what does he stand for? Here is the op-ed he put out during the campaign:

I’m running because more of our people are unemployed today than ever before. Public debt has reached $12 trillion and counting, and Washington politicians want to borrow trillions more. Terrorists want to strike our country again, and they will do so if we let down our guard. We have fighting forces in two theaters of war, and those men and women need our support.

Like everyone else, I want to see more Americans with good health care coverage. I like what we achieved in Massachusetts. It’s not perfect, but nearly everyone is now covered by a private insurance policy - not a government policy. I hope other states follow our example.

But the healthcare bill under discussion in Washington is not good. It will raise taxes and increase spending. If you are a senior on Medicare, it will lead to a half trillion dollars in cuts to your care.

It's maddening. His two biggest issues are unemployment and the budget deficit, but neither he nor anybody else has any idea what could be done about unemployment that wouldn't increase the deficit even more. And anybody who has ever looked at the budget knows that we can never balance it without finding some way to reduce Medicare spending. Brown's economic plan?

My plan for the economy is simple: an across-the-board tax cut

That ought to reduce the deficit right quick.

Now nobody really expects the average politician to put out detailed, sensible plans the first time he runs for a major office, and most campaigns produce lies about the budget. But Obama had lots of concrete ideas when he first ran for the Senate, and he has been remarkably upfront about the budget choices we face. Nor has Scott Brown ever said or written anything anywhere else that suggests he has any ideas, other than cutting taxes and waterboarding suspected terrorists. In this he is entirely typical of the Republican Party, which hasn't had a real program since 1994. With nothing to say, they put forward smiling athletic nice guys like Scott Brown and hope that bad economic times and obstruction in Congress will bring them back to power. It may work for them, but it won't help the rest of us.