Martha Coakley is pretty obviously not going to win any awards for best Senate candidate of the year. But her Republican opponent in the Massachusetts special election for Ted Kennedy’s seat, Scott Brown, sure isn’t any great shakes either. According to an op-ed he wrote in the Boston Globe yesterday, his platform is this:
- Oppose healthcare reform.
- Oppose fiscal stimulus. (Because February’s stimulus bill “failed to create one new job.”)
- An across-the-board tax cut, deficits be damned.
- Harsh interrogation of the Christmas bomber.
This all comes under the rubric of “a new day is coming,” but it sure sounds like the same old tired GOP day to me. Is there even one thing in this entire piece that isn’t just a retread of eight years of the Bush/Cheney administration?
And while we’re on the subject of state politics, I was sorry to learn today that here in California, Republican Tom Campbell has decided to drop his bid for the governor’s mansion and instead run for Barbara Boxer’s Senate seat. He would have been a better candidate for governor than either of the other Republicans, and going up against Jerry Brown I might even have voted for him in the general election. But he couldn’t raise enough money to compete with a couple of Silicon Valley zillionaires, and I suppose he figured that when push comes to shove, people like me wouldn’t have ended up voting for him after all. And he might be right about that. But he doesn’t bring anything at all to the Senate, so it’s a net loss all around. I doubt that Boxer will have any trouble at all dispatching him.
