Good Esquire article!
Cosmopolitan
It didn't have to be like this. Senator Scott Brown could have run for the Senate based on his high personal-approval ratings, and on what was once considered a winning personality, and on his perceived status as an independent voice in an increasingly polarized national legislature. He could have taken the high road in his election against Elizabeth Warren because, quite honestly, the road wasn't all that high. It was within reach even for someone who didn't have Brown's hoops-honed vertical. It would have been easy to do.
Instead, almost from jump, Brown determined to run as a not-particularly-bright evening drive-time AM radio host. He latched onto the nothingburger of Warren's Indian ancestry and went into it all the way back to his molars. He wouldn't shut up about it. Alternately, he tried to make an issue out of the fact that Warren had worked for companies going through bankruptcy, including Travelers Insurance, which was dealing with the whopping awards granted to the people whom the asbestos industry had poisoned and killed. This might have worked — to understand what Warren did required a knowledge of bankruptcy law beyond most people who are not Elizabeth Warren — except that Warren marshalled the lawyers for the plaintiffs in those suits, and the surviving members of the victims' families, and they all went very public about how much Warren's work had helped them and their families. Some of them appeared in a very powerful television commercial called "Ashamed," in which they criticized Brown for politicizing their private tragedies in such a reckless way. That, people could understand.
At which point, Senator McDreamy decided to double down the way you would if you were, say, Sean Hannity, and somebody got through the call screeners....
"A lot of them are paid," Brown said. "We hear that maybe they pay actors. Listen, you can get surrogates and go out and say your thing. We have regular people in our commercials. No one is paid. They are regular folks that reach out to us and say she is full of it."
How many ways is this stupid? (I quit counting after 23.) Needless to say, the people actually in the Warren commercials went completely up the wall....
"Let Scott Brown tell me to my face that I am nothing but a paid actor, and I'll set him straight on what it was like to watch my father suffocate to death," English said. Another victim's family member who appeared in a Warren advertisement about the asbestos controversy spoke out about Brown's comments as well. Steven Yapp said that Brown's actor comments were cruel. "To dismiss what my family went through by calling me a paid actor isn't just disrespectful, but it's cruel," Yapp said. "He's attacking people who lost loved ones to asbestos poisoning, just because we stepped forward to tell the truth about Elizabeth Warren. Sen. Brown showed his true colors today. He's a politician who will say anything and attack anyone that gets in his way."
There is shooting yourself in the foot. Then, there is shooting yourself in the foot, cutting off the foot, placing it upon your head, and then shooting yourself in the foot and in the head simultaneously. A lot of people have been talking about the fact that Willard Romney's campaign has been remarkably truthless because of how the right has constructed its own universe with its own physical laws and its own history and its own facts. But this episode is why living in that universe on a fulltime basis is a dangerous thing. Somebody on Scott Brown's staff — or the Senator himself — thought this gambit was shrewd politics because so many of the people in "the base" would believe it without proof of any kind. The fact that it was a fundamentally indecent thing to do to people who'd already paid a whopping price for an even bigger indecency never entered into the calculation because those kind of things never do. Listen to those radio shows some time. Hell, listen to the way people talk about the president sometime. It didn't have to be like this. At all.Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/scott-brown-asbestos-ad-13853238#ixzz29gkUGpQz
No comments:
Post a Comment