by Scott Brown
Triathlons push you to the edge. They require an athlete to be good at three things at once. And, for me, they have a powerful ability to clear my mind. When I run, when I bike, when I move my arms in the synchronized, repetitive motion of the crawl, the rhythm of the movement gives cohesion and clarity to my thoughts. I can take a problem or a concern with me to my bike and work it through in my own mind. I think while I move, when it is just me alone, with no distractions.
I started swimming in Wrentham’s Lake Archer, diving off the Ross family’s dock near the center of town, surrounded by the old, lush Colonial-era green. I started sneaking in runs, the way I had sneaked in basketball games. I’d go to the store for milk and juice, but before I got the groceries, I’d run. I’d hop out of the car, do the three-mile loop at full speed, jump back in, crank the air-conditioning to dry the sweat, spritz on a little cologne, and rush home. My briefcase was now a second home for my sneakers and gym shorts, which Gail saw almost any time she opened it. When I ran, I’d wonder how I could fit in a swim. When I swam, I’d think of ways to fit in a bike ride.
I began competing in national and international triathlons and duathlons. I made the national team multiple times in my age group—competitions are based on age brackets, such as 35–39, 40–44, and 45–49; triathletes may be some of the only people who look forward to getting older so that they can move up into the next age bracket and be the youngest in their field. As a top-twelve competitor in my various age groups, I represented the United States at the world championships in places like Canada, Germany, Italy, France, and Spain, as well as the United States. The beauty of the races is that while you are competing against the other runners and swimmers, a race is also a bit like golf: you compete against the course, trying to maintain or beat your previous times on the terrain. I never wanted to leave a course or a race thinking that I hadn’t done the best I could have done.
In this mix, I had never planned on running for elective office. But not long after Gail and I were married, when we first moved to Wrentham, I saw that there was an opening for a town assessor. I went down to the town hall and inquired. There was a position open because one of the board members had quit after having his tires slashed. (Real estate disputes can get pretty heated.) Since I was an attorney who focused on real estate cases, the Wrentham Board of Selectmen was happy to appoint me to fill the slot until the next election. I never had any serious conflicts because I worked very hard to be fair. When my term expired, I ran for the office, served a full term, and then retired to focus on my family and my law practice, but knowing a lot more about the inner workings of the town.
In 1995, when Arianna was nearly four and Ayla had already started school, a big school-budget-override issue came before the Wrentham Board of Selectmen. I went to a couple of cantankerous meetings and watched. The town selectmen were a kind of “old boys” network back then, and they were treating a lot of the parents who had come out to voice their views like crap. Afterward, I went up to a group of the selectmen and said it was an interesting meeting, adding that I had never seen local citizens treated so disrespectfully. And one of them replied, “If you don’t like it, why don’t you run? See how you like it up here.” I had Arianna with me and she was starting to get fussy, so I didn’t really respond, and left.
Back at our house, I started complaining to Gail about the meeting and what had happened. Finally, she said, “Stop complaining. If you’re so angry, why don’t you do something about it and run for office?” I looked up at Gail and decided that she was right. I ran, and I won. A couple of new selectmen also came on the board at the same time, and we all got along really well. Together, Charlie Farling, Scott Magane, Peter Preston, Mike Carroll, and I worked to solve many of the town’s problems, including getting a better trash contract, a police contract, and a fire contract. In some ways, it was an excellent introduction for me to politics; it was the best of public service, helping my community, my town.
Then, in 1998, the local state representative for my district decided to run for a state senate seat. Jo Ann Sprague was a petite, white-haired woman with a penchant for red dresses, who had been a WAC in World War II. She was a Republican who believed in term limits, no more than three terms in any one position. Jo Ann called me and told me of her intentions, and added that she thought I ought to run. The rep spot would be an open seat, the best possible scenario for a new candidate. I would not be facing an incumbent. I had a good record on the Board of Selectmen, I had National Guard experience, I had my own law practice, and I was competing in triathlons, swimming, biking, and running, and often winning. I had a great family and the stability of having lived in the same town for over a decade. I was considered by many to be the classic well-rounded candidate. There was only one hitch: I was running as a Republican.
I had Republican family ties: my grandfather, who was born and raised in New Hampshire, was a Republican, as is my dad. But I came to be a Republican on my own. And it was partly driven by sports. The brutal massacre of eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team during the 1972 Munich Olympics had been seared into my mind the week before I turned thirteen. That event was bookended by the weaknesses of the Carter years, our faltering steps with Iran and the old Soviet Union, and the belief that we were somehow less than or the equivalent of our adversaries abroad. I believed in a strong military and in service, and in standing up to those who wanted to do harm. But beyond that, I had largely identified with Republicans as the party of fiscal responsibility and fiscal restraint. When you grow up with no money, you know the value of a dollar; you know the work that it takes to earn it and the choices that families have to make to spend it, and how difficult it is to save. When government asks families for their tax dollars, it is taking money that those families have earned, that they have labored over, sometimes in two or three different jobs. There is a sacred responsibility to spend that money with the utmost care. And to spend less of it. But when I looked around, especially at state politics, neither of those things was happening.
Even before I started, I knew it would be an uphill battle. Republican voters generally make up only about 13 percent of all registered voters in Massachusetts. About 51 percent are independents and the rest are Democrats. Many of the independents lean Democratic; they were usually raised in Democratic homes and have often left the party as a protest against the Democrats, rather than because they have any real affinity for Republicans. What I didn’t realize when I got into the race was that, given the nature of modern Massachusetts politics, it would not be simply me against a Democratic opponent. It would be me against my opponent, and also against the Democratic State Committee; all the teachers’ unions; the police, fire, and other unions; interest groups; and everyone who constituted some satellite of the Democratic machine. For years, to run as a Republican, for almost any office in Massachusetts, was to run largely if not totally alone. It was always me against the machine.
The larger irony is that Massachusetts was once the cradle of American democracy. Since the time of the first settlers landing on Plymouth Rock, local residents had gathered together in town meetings to decide the course of their communities. A noisy room of common voices, where everyone might have a say, was about as close to direct democratic rule as citizens could get, far removed from the notions of representation in Great Britain, where many people could not vote and, in Parliament, were represented by men who had no connection to their daily lives. In a Massachusetts town meeting, farmers in from the fields, millers, tanners, and soot-charred blacksmiths could argue over grazing rights, the building of a bridge, or taxes on barrels of rum. Whereas in the American South wealthy gentlemen planters often held sway, in Massachusetts there was a wider swath of voices in public life. And that was how the state thought of itself: wide, diverse, and open, even when the sound of an array of voices stopped.
Many scholars of Massachusetts politics trace the decline of small-d democratic Massachusetts to the profound strug
gles between the Yankee residents, descended by and large from English settlers, and the massive influx of Irish immigrants in the 1800s. Boston in particular, and parts of Massachusetts more generally, had, for all their revolutionary leanings, been fairly homogeneous places and fairly insular. Residents who could trace their lineage back for generations, no matter what their profession or financial position, were suddenly horrified by the sea of immigrants that had appeared in their midst. The man many now hail as an educational pioneer, Horace Mann, argued that local schools must become centralized and professionalized in large part to force these immigrants to, as he put it, “morally acclimate to our institutions,” or in less polite language, to break the newcomers and remake them in a far different mold. J. Anthony Lukas, in his landmark work, Common Ground, about the 1970s Boston busing struggle, quoted nineteenth-century school committeeman George Emerson as saying, “Unless [the children of immigrants] are made inmates of our schools, they will become inmates of our prisons.” The long-term result, Lukas noted, was a battle for control on the Boston School Committee between the indigenous Yankee Bostonians and the far more recently arrived Irish. The Irish emerged victorious and the prize was control of nearly all the appointments and nearly all the patronage slots within the public schools.
That scene has, in varying forms, replayed itself across Massachusetts politics, not between ethnicities, as in the microcosm of Boston, but between political parties, with the winners being the Democrats and the losers being the Republicans. Over the course of two hundred years, Massachusetts has gone from being one of the most representative states in the nation, a laboratory of small-d democracy, where the town of Wakefield would divide itself over passions surrounding the War of 1812, to becoming a state dominated by a single party.
And that domination isn’t just at the ballot box. The stranglehold that the Democrats have over electoral politics has been extended across the entire political apparatus. It’s not just the elected officials who are Democrats; it’s all the people they’ve hired over the years. Every advisory board, most of the judges, the committees—all are dominated by Democrats. The vast majority of political contests are not over ideas or ideology, but over cronyism and keeping power and privilege; they are about horse-trading for favors, not over principled policies and who has the best position. A tragic result of this one-party rule is that very little is ever done in the open. Most discussions and decisions happen behind closed doors. There are few if any open debates; very little is written down; it’s governing by handshake, backslap, and quid pro quo exchanges, which isn’t governing at all. Whether in a town, a city, a state, or a nation, nearly complete one-party domination invites bad decisions, arrogance, excess, and oftentimes abuse of the most basic ethics and of public trust.
In this environment inside Massachusetts, once many politicians get elected, they feel entitled, as if the position should come with a bonus and a litany of special perks should be theirs. It’s why one ex–House speaker faces up to twenty years in prison for allegedly taking kickbacks. It’s why three House speakers have had to resign in disgrace. It’s why State Senator Dianne Wilkerson was caught on surveillance footage stuffing ten $100 bills into her bra inside a fancy Boston restaurant as part of a bribery scheme. The money was given to her by an undercover FBI agent. And it’s not just corruption. There are legislators with embarrassingly low attendance records for votes. They don’t need to show up because they won’t have any opposition when they run for reelection. They don’t have to be accountable.
By the time I decided to run for the state rep slot, I knew about the Democratic political machine in theory. To confront it in fact was a very different thing.
The machine is so strong that two-thirds of all state legislators in Massachusetts run unopposed in most election cycles. There are two hundred seats total in the Massachusetts legislature; only twice in the last fourteen years (between 1996 and 2010) has the number of challengers been over one hundred. Most years, at best, sixty-four incumbents face any kind of battle for reelection. The same is largely true for the congressional delegations. It’s not uncommon for congressmen and congresswomen to have had no opposition in their elections. In fact, the last time Massachusetts had a Republican U.S. senator was in 1972. Largely because of gerrymandering and because the numbers are so stacked against them, many Republicans don’t even try.
Almost from the start, the Democrats were funneling money to my opponent in the race for the Ninth Norfolk district. She was picking up nearly every union endorsement, even though I had been a union member since 1982 and my days in New York. I finally managed to get the support of the state police and a couple of local police unions. I felt like an NFL quarterback, a little like Kurt Warner or Steve Grogan or Doug Flutie, with the other team’s entire defensive line coming straight for me. I was running for my life, scrambling around, trying not to get sacked again.
What I think made the difference in that first state rep campaign was a question I was asked by one of the Democrats running in the primary for the seat. John Vozzella was a bit of a perennial candidate, running again and again. But this time, he struck me dead on. He said, “You’re so busy. You’re a selectman, a father, you’re a lawyer, you’re in the military, you play basketball, you’re a triathlete. How are you going to represent the people of this district too? I can do a better job; I’m retiring, this will be my only responsibility.” I listened, thinking: boy, that’s a good question. And I said, “Well, I’ll tell you what. I have a lot of energy. If you want to get something done, you give it to a busy person, to a person who knows how to be busy and likes being busy. That person will always find the time. But more importantly, I’m going to run to everybody’s house in the district, to meet each voter and show my commitment. And if I don’t find your house, you shouldn’t vote for me.”
And that’s exactly what I did. I spent all my free time running. People would see me in my shorts and I would spend eight hours a day running from house to house. The local cable commercial we ran, the T-shirts, the brochures, all of them said, “Vote for Scott Brown. He’s running for you.” I had about eight or nine volunteers. The other side had hundreds, but I ran to the houses while they walked. I ran so much that I tore my plantar fascia and had problems with my Achilles tendon. At lunchtime, I used to go into a local restaurant in the center of Walpole and stuff down two full turkey dinners, with gravy and mashed potatoes, because I was burning so many calories running up and down the streets. I won that race by a close margin, and then I ran again and won, and again, eventually winning easily.
As a state rep, I spent a lot of time trying to improve conditions in my district. The Ninth Norfolk consists of lots of small towns—parts of it can even be considered semirural—and we often didn’t get a lot of attention in Boston. I fought to get project money to repair roads and bridges and to create jobs. I was pro-business and wanted fiscal restraint. And I got heavily involved in public safety issues, which helped me win the respect of the fire and police unions. Much as my opponents wanted to, they couldn’t portray me as a right-wing nut, which is pretty much the default position for characterizing most Republicans in Massachusetts. And I was out in the community. I loved going to meetings, to Veterans Day events, to town fairs, to senior centers, anywhere where there were a lot of people. I loved meeting the constituents and walking in parades. Some officeholders, because they have no competition, think that they can get elected and just disappear. But not me.
In 2004, my local state senator resigned to become executive director of the Human Rights Campaign in Washington, D.C. She was the first openly gay state senator in Massachusetts and had served for nearly a dozen years. When she left, her chief of staff, Angus McQuilken, was expected to be chosen as her successor in the special election. In the halls of the senate on Beacon Hill in Boston, Angus was known as the forty-first senator (there are only forty elected senators), and there were jokes about how he wanted everyone to call him “chief�
�� because he was the chief of staff. In the race, he claimed credit for almost every piece of legislation that his boss had sponsored.
I was sitting at breakfast one morning, eating a bowl of Rice Chex with raisins, thinking about the race, when Gail said, “Listen, you really should run for this. You’re qualified. You have the experience. You’re a hard worker. You could do a good job for Wrentham and the whole district. The other people in the statehouse won’t care about Wrentham or Plainville or Walpole; they don’t even show up around here. Why don’t you run?” I spooned up my cereal and I said, “You know, I think I will.” Everybody else thought that I would get creamed.
To make matters worse for me, the election was the only special election in the state and the Massachusetts legislature passed a special law to move the date of the vote. Originally, like all other special elections, the state senate vote had its own date, but the senators and representatives moved it so that our election would be held on the same day as the Democratic presidential primary between John Kerry, the junior U.S. senator from Massachusetts, and Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont. George W. Bush was running unopposed for the Republicans. The claim by the Democrats was that lumping all the votes together would save the taxpayers money, but most political observers knew better. In the minds of the politicians who passed it, changing the date of the vote nearly guaranteed they would have only five Republican state senators in the entire state senate, not six. It was being done purely for tactical advantage, because the voters most likely to show up on that presidential primary day were Democrats; there was no reason for the Republicans to come. Moving the election date was a way of keeping the political thumb down on any and all Republican candidates, particularly me, and to try to guarantee that I lost.
