Eager to shed his identity as a former senator from Massachusetts, Scott Brown’s campaign is now apparently deriding his opponent as the “third senator from Massachusetts.”
As he kicked off his Senate campaign in New Hampshire last week, Brown received assistance from the state’s former Republican governor, John H. Sununu.
Sununu didn’t steer clear of Brown’s biggest impediment as a candidate in the Granite State. Instead, the former White House chief of staff who served as one of Mitt Romney’s most confrontational surrogates in 2012 projected that weakness right onto Brown’s Democratic opponent, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen.
“[Shaheen] votes with Elizabeth Warren. She votes with [Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ed] Markey. She is the third senator from Massachusetts,” Sunnunu said at Brown’s Portsmouth, N.H. rally, according to Yahoo’s Chris Moody. “Scott’s happiest days as a young man were in New Hampshire. … So it’s going to be great to have a senator that was born virtually in the state of New Hampshire. Jean Shaheen, by the way, was born in Missouri!”
Brown was born in Maine, and as Moody put it, the Republican “quite literally was, and very much wanted to remain, a senator from Massachusetts.”
Sununu’s turn of phrase was reminiscent of Karl Rove’s “attack the strength” gambit, a campaign tactic that aims to raise doubts about an opponent’s perceived biggest advantage. And in this case, Shaheen’s biggest advantage is that she isn’t a carpetbagger.
John you realize that this argument makes Scotty not only the Senator from MA, but KY, TX, KS, SC, etc etc since he votes with Cruz, McConnell and Miss Lindsey
Shaheen is going to absolutely obliterate him. He’s completely a carpetbagger and he was a Senator from another state, like less than 2 years ago. He needs to own that issue and not pretend he’s not carpetbagging. People aren’t stupid and many of them probably remember him on TV ads running for the spot, again, less than 2 years ago.
This is really, really stupid. I understand the Rovian “attack the strength” strategy but when the strength you’re making into a weakness is unquestionably your own obvious weakness, it comes off as especially petty and insulting to voters’ intelligence. Also, I question using Sununu after his behavior in 2012. He didn’t help Romney at all, and made several fairly racist comments about the president. He was pretty much a net negative.
Mr Brown is just an old fashioned CARPETBAGGER. He assumes nobody has a memory longer than 20 minutes.
It occurs to me that Scott Brown always chooses to run against women. Why is that, I wonder? Does he just like beating up on women?
Shaheen, by the way, has lived in New Hampshire since 1973, and has served in its state legislature and as its governor before being elected to represent it in the US Senate.
And against that, Scott has, what? That he was “virtually” born in the state? Which only means that he wasn’t actually born there, only visited on summer vacation or something. Oh, except that his Wikipedia page says he spent his childhood summers in Newburyport, Mass. But hey, he has a second home in New Hampshire, so I guess that means he was “virtually” born there – in some alternate reality or something.