Mitt Romney and Scott Brown: Frenemies or Soul Mates?

Sen. Scott Brown (R–Mass.)<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/statesenatorscottbrown/5510506584/sizes/z/in/photostream/">Scott Brown</a>/Flickr

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I wrote on Monday about GOP political guru Eric Fehrnstrom’s dilemma heading into the November election: How to convincingly shill for two candidates, Mitt Romney and Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown, who hold sharply diverging views on the some of the biggests issues of the day. What will Fehrnstrom say when he’s inevitably asked to defend Romney’s fierce opposition to the Dodd–Frank Wall Street reform law—a law that Brown voted for (after watering it down) and is campaigning on already? Make one false step and you’re the star of someone’s $500,000 ad buy.

The flip side of that dilemma is that even if Fehrnstrom doesn’t end up disparaging one of his candidates’ positions, Democrats are perfectly content to lump Brown and Romney together as BFFs. Brown, locked in a dead-even re-election battle against Democrat Elizabeth Warren, got a lot of traction ahead of his 2010 special election by pushing back against Democrats’ attempts to tie him to George W. Bush and other Republicans. Relative to the rest of the party, he’s still quite popular in Massachusetts, in large part because voters see him as somewhat mavericky.

Massachusetts Democrats would like to change that, and they’re hoping the presence of another Massachusetts GOPer on the ballot next November will make it easier to tie Brown to more-unpopular Republicans. Here’s a new spot just released from the Massachusetts Democratic party:

There’s some symmetry to the campaign, at least. For some time now, Warren has tethered her Senate campaign to the fortunes of President Barack Obama. Warren played a starring role in the president’s recent documentary-quality infomercial, and the Obama campaign recently sent out two minutes of deleted scenes from the film featuring…Warren, talking about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau she conceived and helped design.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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