by Scott Brown
Added to that, the district itself was a challenge. It had been cobbled together to all but guarantee a Democratic seat, and it slithered like a narrow snake for forty miles, running through twelve separate towns, from Wayland to Attleboro. It had Wellesley College, a traditionally liberal female school; Needham, one of the most liberal cities in Massachusetts; and Norfolk, Plainville, and Wrentham, which were more moderate or conservative. This was gerrymandering at its worst, and it was hard to believe that I ever stood a chance.
I had to get 300 certified signatures from throughout the district—clear, accurate, and legible—from registered Republican or Independent voters just to get on the ballot, but I decided to get 300 individual signatures in each of the twelve towns, 3,600 signatures total. I wanted to get to know the voters. I stood in front of Walgreen’s in Needham, Roche Brothers, Sudbury Farms, and a host of busy coffee shops, restaurants, and other businesses in the district. It was one of the coldest winters on record, but I stood outside in a big old blue puffy down jacket that my mom had given me one Christmas, and I collected my signatures, shook hands, and talked to people.
Angus raised huge sums of money from special interest groups, inside the state and outside the state. Every day, it seemed, he or one of his interest group supporters was dropping a new flyer beating up on me, misrepresenting my votes and my positions. We were civil to each other in the debates, but it was always clear that he thought the seat was his. A quick look at the map almost proved it. I would never win Wayland, and I also had no chance in Natick or Wellesley. Angus lived in Millis, but his mom lived in Needham, so he also claimed Needham as his hometown. I focused on the so-called southern end of the district—Wrentham, my home; Norfolk; Plainville; North Attleboro; and Attleboro—and I decided that I wouldn’t concede Millis either. The goal was to do well in the lower part and try to contain the bleeding in the north. Attleboro and North Attleboro would balance out Needham, while Norfolk and Plainville were large enough to counter Natick, Wellesley, and Wayland. This meant the election would probably be decided in Wrentham.
Election Day arrived. I was on the phone from 7 a.m. until 8 p.m. that night, when the polls closed. I had a tradition that I always called all the people I knew in Wrentham on Election Day to remind them to vote and to ask each of them to call five people, just five, and remind those five too. Most usually do. I had friends and family holding up signs outside polling places, including my mom and my dad. Both of my parents had been very supportive of my state rep and now my state senate run. They had each given the maximum amount, $500, to my campaign, and had recruited their friends to help as well. That morning, they were each standing outside of key polling places, holding up Scott Brown for State Senate signs.
But at many of the polling spots, Angus’s supporters, including his own mother and father, made it a point of walking up to my supporters and saying, “You know, you guys gave a good race. Our victory party is in Millis tonight.” As my mother stood, proudly waving her sign for me, Angus’s dad came up to her and said, “Well, my son is going to win. Why don’t you come over to our victory party? We’ll have a beer and break bread together.” My mom was offended and gave him a few choice words back. She spent the rest of the hours waving her sign harder. And my friends, my sister Leeann, and the others out there holding signs for me were also offended. But it made them even more resolved. The polls hadn’t closed yet.
By 8:30 p.m. the Boston media had all called the race for Angus. In Millis, Angus’s supporters were partying and celebrating even before the polls were shut and the counting began. The victory call had been based on the early returns from Natick, Wellesley, and Needham, all places where I would do very badly. I had a friend planted in Angus’s ballroom and everyone was walking around and calling him “senator.” While Angus was celebrating, I was home having some chili with my wife and kids before I went over to greet my supporters. Darrell Crate, the head of the Massachusetts State Republican Party, was with me. Mitt Romney, Massachusetts’s Republican governor, and his lieutenant governor, Kerry Healey, had worked hard on my behalf. They were driving out from Boston to meet me and wait for the results. My supporters had packed the nearby Luciano’s at Lake Pearl in Wrentham, but they were watching the television reports and growing increasingly discouraged. I made a call to them and said, “Look, Wrentham, Norfolk, Plainville, Millis, none of these places has come in yet. You guys have given up. Don’t give up.” I could see the numbers. I was down by 15 percent. But then Millis came in, and I only lost there, Angus’s hometown, by a mere handful of votes. Then Needham came in, and I didn’t get clobbered. It was respectable, only about nine hundred votes down. Next, North Attleboro, one of my best towns, came in, and I won substantially there. Suddenly, I was down only a few percentage points in the overall vote totals—all that separated us was single digits. Then Norfolk came in, and I crushed him. I won in Plainville, and it was a draw in Franklin. Finally, Attleboro came in. Now we were neck and neck. Everything had come down to Wrentham. All of a sudden, some of the media folks began coming over to my election night spot. My supporters started saying, “Oh my God, Scott could win.”
I knew Wrentham. It’s a town where they either love you or hate you. The town could have hated me, but I also knew that I lived here; I had been a selectman; my kids were here; I was in the Lions Club for many years; I coached some of the local sports teams. I turned to Gail and I said, “I think I’m going to win this thing, honey.” Wrentham had a lot of absentee ballots. It was the middle of winter, and people were away, so we had worked hard on the absentee ballot campaign. About 4,000 absentee ballots came back throughout the district. And I crushed Angus in Wrentham. I ended up winning the overall race by 343 votes.
Immediately, we knew there would be calls for a recount. And we were ready. Anticipating this move, we had put lawyers and poll watchers in every polling place to check for irregularities. Plus, there were new machines being used. I came right back and said Angus should save each town the money. There were no reports of irregularities or complaints in any of the polling places. The clerks had done their jobs well. Angus would not be able to make up those 343 votes.
Even into the next day, parts of the media were reporting that I had lost. Gail’s own station, Channel Five, was still broadcasting that I had lost. She called up the newsroom and said, “Scott won.” Her editor said, “Well, that’s not what the Associated Press is reporting.” And she replied, “I’m here with my husband. He won.” They kept saying that it wasn’t true, that all the blogs were saying that I had lost. And she said, “I’m telling you, he won.” Finally, the television stations reluctantly reported that I had in fact won the race, and a few days later, Governor Mitt Romney swore me in to the Massachusetts State Senate.
Nine months later, I faced Angus and the Democratic state machine again in the regular general election. This second race was just as brutal. They threw everything at me, trying to make it seem that my race and my win had been a fluke. On Election Day, I beat him by about three thousand votes.
Because it was a special election, I had been sworn in almost immediately, and as I moved over to the senate side, we had a small reception in the house members’ lounge with pizza for our guests. We invited state reps and local officials, and one of the people who came by was the town administrator for Norfolk. He told me about a house that an elderly family had donated to the state to provide a group home setting for mentally challenged adults. But instead, it was being used to house convicted sex offenders. The same private company that managed group homes for the mentally ill also had the contract to manage homes for sex offenders. These people were now living in the middle of a residential neighborhood, with children all around. And it had been done with very little notice to the town or to the neighbors. The administrator told me the story of a mother calling him up in tears because one of the men in the house was watching her and her family through binoculars in the front yard. One of my first efforts as
a state senator was to get the sex offenders removed from that house. After dealing with the situation in Norfolk, I learned a lot about the sex offender laws in Massachusetts, particularly how, in the way that they had been written, they contained far more protections for the perpetrators than for their young victims. I became a committed advocate to strengthen and revamp our state sex offender laws. In those months, my life had come full circle. If I could spare another child the fear and torment that I had known, or far worse, then every campaign, every freezing early morning that I had stood outside shaking hands would be worth it.
The most frustrating thing about being a Republican in the Massachusetts legislature was that we would constantly lose on most issues involving fiscal responsibility and good government. We’d work for hours on presentations and ways to move an idea forward, only to have Democrats say, “Oh, it’s a great idea, but I can’t vote for it. I’ll lose my chairmanship. I’ll lose a secretary. I’ll lose a worker.” The Democratic leaders exercised total control through chairmanships or office space, they controlled their votes through granting or withholding benefits or favors, and there was next to nothing that I or anyone else could do about it. When measures came up for a vote, the house speaker or senate president would sit on the raised dais and the legislators would crowd around in the well. They would all be clamoring for money or amendments or ways to bring home some perk for their constituents or for themselves. The scene resembled a medieval king being besieged by his serfs, with all the favor-buying and horse-trading. There was very little that was democratic about it.
Despite that, I had some great relationships with Democrats. It was hard not to. Republicans were not just a minority; we were at times a completely irrelevant minority. But we were a busy one. I had six committee assignments, while most Democratic legislators had only one, because there were so few Republicans to go around. I also got leadership pay because, again, there were so few Republicans that all of us received leadership pay. By my second term, five of us made up both the rank-and-file and the leadership on our side; there was no one else. If I wanted to get anything done, even on something like sex offenders, I had to find Democrats to work with. My entire legislative career was predicated on reaching across the aisle. But for the Democrats, even being bipartisan sometimes carried a price.
One of my best friends in the legislature was Jim Vallee, a fellow lawyer and National Guard JAG officer who represented the Tenth Norfolk district as a state rep. Jim’s from Franklin, the next town over from Wrentham; he’s a moderate Democrat, with two young daughters. We still serve in the same military unit together. One year, we even held a joint fund-raiser together. We invited people and said: give a check to Jim, give a check to Scott, whatever you want, whoever you support is fine—and the people who came loved it. The Republican Party in Massachusetts told me, “That’s a great idea. Good for you.” The Democrats were livid and tried to take away Jimmy’s credentials for the state convention where they would be nominating the Democratic candidate for governor. But I’ve written campaign checks to Jimmy and he’s written them to me, because we’ve said we’re friends first. In local parades, we walk together; we carry one sign on the left and one on the right. We have often worked together to challenge fixed party politics and to put the emphasis on solving problems. Sometimes, we actually succeeded. But ultimately, too many issues came down to simple control, to how one party, the other party, could maintain its nearly total domination.
Being a Republican in the legislature meant I was unlikely to pass lots of legislation on my own. But that never bothered me. We have too many laws and regulations on the books as it is. Adding more doesn’t often solve problems. I was able to incorporate amendments into Democratic bills, and to produce key bills on veterans’ issues. One bill of mine that I did get passed was the commonsense idea of having a check-off box on state tax forms for returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan. Massachusetts provides these vets with a $1,000 welcome-back bonus and a host of special services, but most men and women in uniform had no idea that they were eligible. But we knew that veterans were filing tax returns. The box gave them the option of receiving information about the help and benefits they were legally entitled to, and although it seems like a small thing, it had a huge impact. Now returning men and women who have served their country can automatically receive their money.
I also worked to get more funding for a program called the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (METCO), which gives kids from inner-city Boston an opportunity to attend better schools in the suburbs. Many of these kids get up at 4 a.m. to travel to their suburban schools. They have to commute home after the end of the school day, after art or sports practice, and then do their homework. Many don’t get to bed before midnight, and they do it all for the shot at a better education. I learned that METCO hadn’t had a funding increase in over a decade, and the communities with METCO students in their schools had to make up the difference at a time when their own budgets were strained. For three years in a row, we got additional funding for METCO. I received three awards from METCO and became the cochair of the METCO caucus in the senate.
Sometimes, a large part of my job was to make legislation better. One such moment was the stem cell research bill in the state legislature, a bill that was very controversial. I was torn about it. I went and spoke to doctors, to clergy members, and to nuns and priests, and did a lot of research. The more I listened, the more concerned I became that if we didn’t regulate some stem cell research, we would be more likely to have experiments like human cloning, and we could quickly cross an ethical line. The bill was very important for Robert Travaglini, the senate president. I told Trav that I wanted to come and see him about the bill. He thought I was coming in either to complain or to ask for something. I sat down and I told him that I wanted to support the bill, but I had some concerns about some of the ethical issues. And I said that I had a suggestion. I thought it would help if we put in an umbilical cord and placental tissue amendment to the bill, to allow for umbilical cord blood that is harvested from the discarded cord after a baby is born to be used as an alternative for research and also to establish a separate cord blood bank to preserve larger quantities of cord blood. Beyond cord blood, I thought the bill should also allow placental tissue stem cells to be used for research. I said: if we can do this, I think I’m good with it, and I think it will help you with three or four other votes as well.
We wrote up the amendment right there in his office, and then he said, “What do you want?” And I told him that I just wanted a good bill, that I wanted Massachusetts to have the best regulatory bill in the country. He said, “Let me get this straight. You’re coming in here and you’re offering suggestions and you’ll help get me some additional votes, and you don’t want anything?” I answered, “No, I don’t.” And he said, “Let me tell you something. This is the first time ever in my political career that there’s not somebody coming in here and begging and borrowing and whining and complaining and telling me how they need me to do something for them.” And then he added, “You know what—I’m not going to forget this.”
Trav and I remain good friends to this day. He was a solid leader and always looked out for the people of Massachusetts.
In the 2008 election, the Democratic Party thought it could win back the Norfolk-Bristol-Middlesex district that I now held by relying on the massive pro-Obama turnout. The big money got on board behind the Democrats’ handpicked candidate, a female psychologist from Needham, the largest town in the district. The Nurses Association and the Teachers Association heavily backed my opponent. The Boston Globe endorsed her, even though she had basically no experience and hadn’t been involved in town meetings and had missed many crucial town votes. I had a 98 or 99 percent voting record in the state legislature; the votes I missed were on days when I had National Guard duty to perform. A couple of other papers endorsed her too, and I figured that the other side could be running a convicted crimin
al, and the reflex would be to endorse him or her over me. I ended up beating her by over 20 points at the height of the Obama wave in the election.
After that, it began to dawn on some of the Democrats that I run to win. Some of them, but not all of them.
Chapter Fifteen
“You’ll Never Win”
There has been a sea of words used to describe Edward M. Kennedy and his hold on Massachusetts politics: titan, lion, a force of nature, American royalty, larger than life. But none really captures him or the wider array of Kennedys. I had a JFK ring as a four-year-old boy and I was moved and saddened when RFK was shot, even though my family was not Irish, and a good many of my relatives were even Republicans. One of my campaign strategists grew up in a home where a framed photo of Jack, Bobby, and Teddy hung on the wall. It hangs there still. For over half a century, one Massachusetts U.S. Senate seat had been occupied almost solely by a Kennedy brother, first Jack, then Ted. But their political legacy stretched back to the 1890s, to the days of John F. Fitzgerald, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy’s father, who was the political boss of Boston’s North End, then a congressman, and then Boston’s mayor. Across the city’s harbor, in the late 1800s, Patrick J. Kennedy held sway as the ward boss of East Boston and as a state legislator. The Kennedys were entwined with Massachusetts like roots in soil, until it was almost impossible to separate one from the other.
Everyone knew that Ted Kennedy was ill, but the reality of his death was still hard to process. It seemed impossible to imagine him anywhere but Washington, Boston, and the Cape.
But that didn’t prevent a lot of politics from being played with the U.S. Senate seat. In 2004, the Massachusetts legislature had revoked the power of the governor to appoint a replacement to fill a vacant U.S. Senate seat, with the idea that if U.S. Senator John Kerry won the presidency as a Democrat, the Republican Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney would not have the power to appoint a replacement. The law was enacted over Romney’s veto, and Ted Kennedy himself made a personal request to have the new Senate succession law passed.
