Against All Odds

by Scott Brown

  Money was now coming in at a better clip; we were able to pay our bills. But every day was still a challenge. Beth Lindstrom, my campaign manager, who had come out of political retirement to help, was working almost round-the-clock. She tried to keep everyone focused on the ultimate goal, making tough decisions and managing a small and not always experienced staff while still keeping a smile on her face. She put in countless late nights over those few months when I know she would have rather been home with her family, and I remain grateful for her dedication.

  Our chief goal was to save all our money for TV ads, because if a candidate isn’t on TV, that candidate isn’t considered serious. During the primary, we had spent only about $40,000 on media, primarily on radio, compared with the hundreds of thousands of dollars that Jack E. Robinson III had spent on TV, radio, and mailers. I wanted every penny accounted for. We planned on buying $500,000 worth of airtime in the last two weeks before Election Day.

  Where the campaign was taking off was over the Internet and the radio. We had already launched Web ads, including one before the Democratic primary. We called it our Halloween ad, officially “the Democrat House of Horrors,” and it gave all the primary candidates roles in an old-style Hollywood horror film. Representative Mike Capuano was “Cap and Trade” Capuano, and there were “Second Stimulus” Khazei and “Public Option” Pagliuca. But the scariest line of all was reserved for Martha Coakley, who in a late-October television interview, when asked about her foreign policy and national security experience and whether she would face a learning curve in the Senate, had responded first by saying, “My sister lives overseas.” She went on to explain that her sister had lived in London and now the Middle East, and she discussed what her sister told her about dissatisfaction with George Bush’s policies abroad. But calling one’s sister for foreign policy advice wasn’t a great response. We had tried to use that ad to get some interest in the race down in Washington, to persuade the political operatives and the money people that Coakley was not invincible. But they still weren’t interested in Massachusetts. The early polling had showed that I was down 31 points to Coakley. The race, as of mid-December, was still supposed to be a blowout.

  But it didn’t feel that way when I went out and shook hands and spoke to people. I was spending my day with actual voters. I’d leave the house at 6 a.m. and come back around 10 or 11 p.m. In between, what I heard was that people were scared, worried about the economy, worried about their jobs, worried about how they were going to afford new taxes in one of the highest-tax states in the nation. And it didn’t feel like a blowout when I talked to radio hosts. I came back from my time on the campaign trail and told my staff, “I think we’re only down by ten to twelve points.” We had less than one and a half months to close that gap.

  On December 17, Peter Flaherty, one of my campaign advisers, was in Washington, D.C. He stopped by the Republican Senatorial Committee for all of five minutes and told the people there that the race was tightening. They asked if there was any polling. He said not much, but it was clear that the race was tightening. I was collecting some big endorsements, starting to get attention. Once again, the Republican Senatorial Committee gave him the brush-off. Come back when you have some real numbers, they said; for now, we’ll be monitoring the race.

  I very much wanted to debate Martha Coakley, but she didn’t want to debate me one-on-one. When she ran for attorney general, she had refused to hold a single debate with her Republican challenger, even though he was fully qualified. This time, she was even less enthusiastic. She would not agree to a live televised debate with just me. My campaign kept offering to debate her, anytime, anyplace. Her counterproposal was to have Joseph P. Kennedy—no relation to Ted Kennedy’s family—who was running for the office as a Libertarian candidate, onstage and part of the debate too. She insisted upon it. We knew her strategy: she wanted people to see that he was not a member of the Kennedy family, and she wanted to dilute my presence and strengthen hers. I said fine, I’d have a debate with whoever was on the stage.

  Our first group appearance was on Dan Rea’s radio show, Nightside, to air live at 8 p.m. on December 21. It was originally designed to be a forum, and I finally got fed up with her talking around the issues, talking in half-truths, and waffling. I respectfully started going right after her, questioning her and her policies and half answers. I wanted listeners to know that I was playing for keeps. When the forum was over, she said, “I thought this was a discussion, a forum. I didn’t realize we were debating here.” And I replied, “Well, Martha, I’d love to debate you. You won’t debate me. So I wanted to ask questions and hope that you’ll provide the answers.” After our forum, when she was asked why she wasn’t debating me, her answer invariably was, “I already debated Scott. I already debated him on Nightside.”

  Right after Nightside aired, three things happened. The Republican Senatorial Committee called us, we decided on a big media buy, and in a plane flying from Amsterdam to Detroit, a Nigerian man attempted to detonate a bomb in his underwear.

  On December 23, the Republican Senatorial Committee called my campaign advisers. The committee said it had a poll showing me just 13 points behind Martha Coakley. At first, Eric and Peter thought the committee had misread the polls. The numbers usually showed me trailing by 31 points. But this was a real poll, and what’s more, among voters who said they were intensely following the race, only single digits separated me from Martha Coakley. The committee was offering us phone banks and technical support, and the separate Republican National Committee would kick in $20,000 cash for the balance of the race. We gladly took it. The Republican Senatorial Committee also gave us support and guidance with research and background issue reports, and I was grateful. It was one of the most valuable pieces of assistance I received at that point in the campaign.

  For Christmas Day, I took a break from campaigning. Arianna and I went to a homeless shelter to serve food to those less fortunate, which was a wonderful way to give back on that day. Afterward, we did what we always do: we drove to Gail’s mom’s house, to my mom’s house, and to my dad’s, three separate Christmases with three separate families. By the end of the day, I was completely exhausted. In the middle came word that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had tried to detonate plastic explosives hidden in his underwear aboard a Northwest Airlines flight as it was preparing to land in Detroit. Suddenly terrorism was back in the headlines. Terrorism and national security had been cornerstones of my campaign: I’ve had strong opinions about them ever since I joined the National Guard. For months, I had said, “In dealing with terrorists, our tax dollars should pay for weapons to stop them, not lawyers to defend them.” But almost the first thing the FBI had done with the underwear bomber was to read him his Miranda rights and then get him a lawyer at taxpayers’ expense. And there were hundreds of unanswered questions about why Abdulmutallab—whose name was on federal watch lists and whose own father had gone to the U.S. embassy in Nigeria with concerns that his son had become radicalized by Islamic imams in Yemen and who arrived at the boarding gate apparently without his own passport—was ever allowed to board the plane.

  In the face of an attempted terrorist bombing and then a suicide bomb attack on American CIA agents at a U.S. base inside Afghanistan, Martha Coakley’s answer about her foreign policy experience being buttressed by her sister “living overseas in the Middle East” seemed a whole lot weaker and my thirty years of military training and service in the Army National Guard looked a whole lot stronger. And I kept right on talking about terrorism. I was opposed to trying self-admitted 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed with taxpayers’ money in a New York City civilian court, and I wasn’t afraid of interrogating enemy combatants under all of our applicable laws in order to discover what other violence they might be plotting against the United States and American citizens. I have always said that the U.S. Constitution and American laws are designed to protect our nation, not to give rights and privileges to people who have n
ot earned those protections, namely our enemies during wartime. And Boston had firsthand experience with terrorism. Two of the hijacked planes on 9/11, the two that hit the World Trade Center, had left from Logan Airport. In the Boston Public Garden, just beyond the fabled duck pond and Swan Boats, there is a small memorial to the people from Massachusetts who died on board those planes.

  On Sunday, December 27, my top campaign staff—Eric, Peter, and Beth—gathered to discuss a media buy. They had prepared one television ad. It began with some old newsreel footage of a 1962 speech by President John F. Kennedy making the case for his tax cut proposal to stimulate the economy, by returning billions of dollars to the nation. Then the old footage faded out, the screen went completely fuzzy, and I appeared, talking about how tax cuts would put more money back into our economy to help create new jobs and new salaries, and those jobs and salaries would create more new jobs and salaries. Lower taxes would equal more jobs. The ad was designed both to highlight my economic beliefs and also to show that decades ago those ideas had been part of the Democratic Party’s philosophy as well. One thing that I heard across the state and that my advisers also heard repeatedly was, “This is no longer my parents’ Democratic Party. They don’t represent my interests.” It was one reason why there were so many independent voters in Massachusetts, over 50 percent of the electorate. It was not so much that they had left the Democrats; it was that over the course of fifty years, the Democrats had left them.

  We were saving the ad for the last two weeks of the race. But on that Sunday afternoon, the decision was made to release it now, to buy airtime now. Everyone thought we were crazy. The conventional wisdom was that no one would pay attention to the election in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, that no one would be around watching TV. We settled on a $150,000 media buy, starting December 30. It was a risky ad. I wasn’t saying that I was a modern-day President Kennedy; I was saying that his philosophy on spending and taxation was exactly like my philosophy. And what was true then is still true now. Present-day Democrats, especially some in power in Massachusetts, have too often forgotten about that. They don’t believe strongly or even much at all in free-market enterprise, in freeing businesses from taxes and regulations to succeed. Their philosophy is more government control, more government intervention, and fewer individual rights. The ad was designed to be daring. We knew people would love it or hate it, but if you believed the Boston Globe polls, I was down 30 points. Martha Coakley might want to run a no-direct-debate race and simply coast to election night, but I didn’t. The final weeks were going to be anything but a conventional campaign.

  The Republican Senatorial Committee got wind of the ad and was horrified to the point of being apoplectic. The members called, telling us not to run it, to take it down. Even Gail was nervous. She said, “People will think it’s sacrilegious. You’re going to infuriate the Kennedys. You’ll get everyone fired up.” I said, “Honey, that’s the point. We want people fired up.” We did the full media buy. The ad ran for nearly a week. All of a sudden people started talking about the race. Who was this Republican state senator who was linking his views to JFK’s? Overnight, the national media began to take note. But what really excited us was the word that the next night at New Year’s parties around the state, people were talking with their friends about “the Kennedy ad.” Coakley’s people wrote it off as a last-ditch effort. And they didn’t put any of their own ads on the air. In fact, between Christmas and the New Year, it seemed as if Coakley had taken a vacation.

  Now, as with a modeling go-see or a job interview, I was getting a second look. I’d cast over six thousand votes in my time in municipal service and in the Massachusetts state legislature; I’d served in the National Guard for three decades, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel; I had been a town assessor, a state rep, a state senator; I’d been married for twenty-three years, with two great kids. Both Gail and I had started from nothing, and Gail had a wonderful reputation as a fair, honest, and hardworking reporter. People knew her for her hats and coats and being out reporting in the worst of the winter storms. They remembered Ayla for being a contestant on American Idol, how she handled her fame with poise and dignity and became a role model for young girls. Arianna was well-known around Wrentham, at her school, and in our church for her volunteer work and her love of animals. People began to see that I wasn’t like the candidates who came out of the Democratic machine, nor could I be written off as a “typical” country-club Republican, and that I wasn’t like a lot of other politicians from both parties, a rich guy born with a silver spoon in his mouth. And they knew that I was a hard worker; even people who didn’t agree with my politics or my votes couldn’t say that I wasn’t a hard worker, because I always was. Now more and more of the citizens of Massachusetts were getting comfortable with me, with who I was. They knew that I was tough on fiscal issues and military issues. They also knew that I would listen, keep an open mind, and make an independent decision. I was right where a lot of Massachusetts voters were on the political spectrum.

  On January 5, pollster Scott Rasmussen released a poll showing Martha Coakley at 50 percent and me at 41 percent. Her lead was now down to single digits; my gut had the race even closer, tied or with me slightly ahead. That day, I also went back on Laura Ingraham’s radio show, this time with Laura herself. She grilled me, and she asked me for my Web site. I worked it in about four times. After the poll and her show, we raised $100,000 online. Now, almost daily, major online money started to come in. That night, we put up our next ad. It featured me in my truck with 199,467 miles on the odometer (now it’s got over 213,000 miles and counting), and I talked about how I had been driving my truck around Massachusetts, what I was hearing from voters, and how the truck had brought me closer to the people of our state. The Republican Senatorial Committee balked at this ad too, thinking it had too much about the truck. We put it up anyway, and suddenly I had a new tagline: Scott Brown from Wrentham, the guy who drives a truck. And it wasn’t an image; it was the real me, with no deviation. I’ve had the same truck for years, and it smells like a locker room. Gail always complains about the smell.

  I did drive around the state in my truck. And I drove myself. For a while, the campaign tried to get me to use a volunteer aide, but most of the time, the aides didn’t drive that well or didn’t know where they were going, so I ended up driving them. For a lot of events, I simply drove myself. I drove working two phones, stuffing a piece of pizza into my mouth, sometimes even maneuvering the steering wheel with my knees. I’d hop out of the truck in my barn jacket, the only warm jacket I had, which Arianna had bought for me as a gift, and I’d arrive places alone. People would ask, “Where’s your entourage?” And I’d say, “What entourage?” The answer would be, “Well, everyone has an entourage.” I’d tell them, “No, I don’t—no entourage for me. I’m not Martha Coakley.” When she went to events around the state, she had state police drivers and a phalanx of aides and state troopers, plus a gaggle of reporters.

  On many days, it appeared as if she had only a couple of public events, and on some days, it seemed that she didn’t have any. When she did go somewhere, it was usually a quick in and out, only a few hellos, barely any shaking of hands. She wasn’t giving interviews either, and people in the press started to complain. On January 6, Brian McGrory, a Boston Globe columnist, wrote a piece titled, “Where’s Martha Coakley?” His first sentence was “If you’re a registered voter in Massachusetts, your friendly Democratic Senate candidate, Martha Coakley, is sticking her thumb in your eye.” McGrory went on to rip Coakley for refusing to debate me live, except once, and for having no campaign schedule to speak of. “For all we know, she’s spending much of her time at home with the shades drawn waiting for Jan. 19, Election Day, to come and go.” He ended with, “In Washington, senators don’t get to dodge their opponents. Right now, dodging looks like the Coakley way.”

  Our first formal debate, moderated by Jon Keller, the well-respected B
oston political analyst with WBZ, had been taped right before Christmas, and had aired that weekend after the holiday. It was a spirited back-and-forth, and Keller was a great moderator, but because of its airtime early Sunday morning, it did little to change the dynamics of the race. Now, we were scheduled to have another debate in Springfield, Massachusetts, Coakley’s home base area, but it was also getting limited airplay and was being sponsored by a small, local public TV station. However, everyone in the room recognized that the stakes were rising. Throughout the debate, she got aggressive, often cutting me off by saying, “Scott, just answer the question. I don’t know why you can’t answer the question.” I’d reply, “Excuse me, I’m trying to answer the question,” and she’d say, “You’ve already answered it.” Her whole tone was dismissive, aggressive, and condescending. As I drove home, I thought about it and said to myself: So this is her new strategy. She’s going to come out as the big, tough prosecutor, be aggressive, and try to put me on the spot.