Scott Brown Wants To Change New Hampshire-- "Live Free And Die"-- And Thomas Ravenel Wants To Do Something Weird In South Carolina

Last night, Rachel Maddow's opening segment was the Scott Brown Story (above). It's an excellent piece of reportage and I recommend it. Thursday he makes his "official" declaration of candidacy to run for Senate (in New Hampshire). There are 4 other Republicans running, including an ex-New Hampshire 2-term U.S. Senator, Bob Smith. He might find it awkward using the carpetbagger charge against Brown because after he was ousted by John Sununu is the 2002 primary he moved to Florida (and ran for Senate there, unsuccessfully, in 2004 and 2010). But, awkward or not, he'll use it. And he won't be the only one. Mark Hounsell, Republican former assistant leader of the New Hampshire state Senate, pounded him as a shameless carpetbagger in the Conway Daily Sun and said Brown is a dunce to ignore the primary and assume he's the candidate against Shaheen.

To me, either Bob Smith, or Jim Rubens are much more preferable than the slick looking, silver tongued, golden boy from the flatlands.


Scott Brown is looking to the November general elections and not considering the GOP primary at all.  The John H. Sununu camp and his puppet, GOP Chairman Jennifer Horn, are doing all they can to see to it that Brown gets that nomination. Political hucksters, such as Karl Rove, are raising huge amounts of money for Brown’s campaign. Yet, they are forgetting one thing.  The GOP primary voters favor conservatives. Case in point.  the recent Executive District  One GOP primary.  The NHGOP establishment all lined up behind the moderate Chris Boothby and were floored when the conservative Joe Kenney prevailed.  That is real good evidence that in spite of everything else the independence of the New Hampshire voter cannot be bought.  Scott Brown will be a bright and short-lived Roman Candle, in the mold of Texas Governor and short-lived presidential candidate, Rick Perry. Rubens will split the moderate vote from Brown and Bob Smith will eek out a victory and secure the Republican nomination.


Regardless, of where they may fall philosophically on the political spectrum of left or right, both Bob Smith and Jim Rubens have something that Scott Brown lacks.  That is New Hampshire roots and New Hampshire experience.  New Hampshire voters will not elect a “Johnny come lately”  who will say, or do anything in order to achieve what he wants. When Brown loses his bid to become a Senator from New Hampshire where will he move next?  Perhaps he will pack his carpetbag and shamelessly move to Maine?

Yesterday, Joshua Miller interviewed Elizabeth Warren for the Boston Globe about Brown's chances against Shaheen. “Jeanne is tough, she is independent, and she is strong," she told him. "I think Scott Brown is going to have his hands full.” She also predicted Shaheen, who was New Hampshire's popular governor from 1997 until 2003, will win another term. Shaheen is the first woman in U.S. history to have been elected as both a governor and senator.

Recent polling backs up Warren's prediction. PPP reported that 40% of New Hampshire voters already have an unfavorable opinion of Brown (and only 34% have a favorable opinion of him). In a head-to-head match-up she beat him 46-43%.

Speaking of loser Republicans running for the U.S. Senate, last night, after his incredibly dysfunctional weekly appearance on BRAVO's sit com/reality show Southern Charm, South Carolina's Republican former state Treasurer, Thomas Ravenel, announced that he's a candidate for Lindsey Graham's Senate seat. He was forced to resign when he was caught selling cocaine and sentenced to prison. He's out of prison now, a BRAVO star, an embarrassment to Charleston and someone who could take away enough votes from Lindsey Graham in the general election to see progressive Democrat Jay Stamper become South Carolina's senator. Imagine!

Which Republican Will New Hampshire Senator Jeanne Shaheen Beat In 2014?

I doubt we'll see a Republican primary fight between Florida's Bob Smith and Massachusetts' Scott Brown for the worthless GOP Senate nomination. Brown seems to have made up his mind to run for president governor (of Massachusetts), leaving the field open for Smith, who, unlike Brown, actually did at one time, live in New Hampshire, having moved there from New Jersey. In fact, he was both a Representative (beating someone named Dudley Dudley) and a Senator from that state. He's 72 now and living in Florida... but wanting to get back on the Beltway ego/gravy train.

Smith was a bit of a crackpot even before the Republican Party institutionalized crackpottery as the official party stance and world view. He tried running for the presidency in 2000 and got angry when no one was interested so he quit the GOP and joined a series of fringe parties. But no one was interested in seeing Bob become president in any of them so he finally withdrew-- and re-joined the GOP. He was defeated in the next New Hampshire primary by John Sununu and then moved to Florida and ran for the Senate there in 2004 and 2010. Still: no one interested.

So now he's back, metaphorically, hoping to run against extremely popular New Hampshire Democrat, Jeanne Shaheen. New Hampshire Republicans have had a hard time recruiting a viable candidate, especially because everyone was so afraid of Scott Brown's gigantic Wall Street warchest when he said he might relocate to New Hampshire to run there. Smith still has a summer home in Tuftonboro, so technically, he's still a Granite Stater, although he's been voting in Florida.

"I am giving it serious consideration," Smith said Friday, but "I have not made a final decision. I have not."

He said he expects to make a decision in the next two to three weeks.

...Smith said the biggest issue for him is the country's huge debt, which both parties helped create. He said he is also concerned about a push for national health care, government spying on private citizens and deficit spending.

"We need leadership to try to head that off," Smith said. "I did have a voting record over 18 years of anti-deficit, anti-debt. I lost that battle, but now we need to turn it around before it is too late."

He said while he has been out of politics for 10 years, he does not want to be a "sunshine patriot" and believes he still has something to contribute to the debate. 

Smith said he has been meeting with people, including a small gathering Friday evening, to hear what they have to say, pro and con.

Several other candidates have said they are interested in the Republican nomination, and one, conservative activist Karen Testerman, has announced she will seek the nomination.

Others exploring a run include state Senate Majority Leader Jeb Bradley, R-Wolfeboro, and former state Sen. and gubernatorial candidate Jim Rubens of Etna.



Former U.S. Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., has also been mentioned as a possible candidate, often appearing in the Granite State and refusing to rule it out, although he is also considering a run for governor of Massachusetts. His family owns a summer home in Rye.

Apparently Brown didn't find the reception he was looking for in Iowa and told the Des Moines Register, rather than any Massachusetts (or New Hampshire) news papers that he'll be announcing his campaign for governor (of Massachusetts, presumably) “in a week to 10 days.”

Between stops for bacon-wrapped ribs and a hammy photo with the super bull, Scott Brown didn’t introduce himself to many Iowans.

Brown, a Republican former U.S. senator from Massachusetts, strolled for over two hours today through the Iowa State Fair, an annual 11-day event that’s a magnet for politicians who might want to run for the White House.

Few Iowa fairgoers recognized him as he ate his very first corn dog, drank a couple beers at the Bud Tent, shot a bunch of photos of his wife, Gail Huff, posed in front of the fair’s main attractions (the butter cow, a deep-fried Oreo stand, the Big Boar) and did three local news interviews.

...Brown was voted out of the U.S. Senate nine months ago in Massachusetts, where there are three times as many Democrats as Republicans. He’s now on the buzz list for several possible political offices--  the Senate again, the Massachusetts governor’s office and, as of this weekend, the White House. He told the Des Moines Register on Saturday that he’s scoping out whether Iowa would be favorable to his brand of Republicanism-- fiscally conservative, open minded on social issues, dedicated to bipartisan problem-solving... "I’m here, seeing if there’s any interest.”

Remember New Hampshire Senator Bob Smith? Oh-- Nevermind

Yesterday in our chat with Barney Frank over at Crooks & Liars, Congress' wittiest member caught my attention with this response:

First, let’s not make a bad situation worse than it is-- Patrick McHenry and Michele Bachman do sit on the Financial Services Committee, but Virginia Foxx is not one of those guarding this particular chicken coop. As to the very conservative Members who do serve on the Committee, excessive partisanship is part of the motivation, but even more prominent is their passionate commitment to a very extreme form of conservatism. This hard lined ideological rigidity according to which the market is never in need of intervention and regulation is in all cases to be opposed is what keeps them from participating in a constructive way in our work. When you hear Members of the Committee condemn the socialist tendencies of the President and the failure of the President and his appointees to show any understanding of the capitalist system, and you realize that they are talking about George Bush, you get sense of how removed they are from reality.

Well, good news for Florida extremists who buy into the idea that "the market is never in need of intervention and regulation is in all cases to be opposed" because one of its most strident and ridiculous advocates, ex-Senator Bob Smith (R-NH) is running for the US Senate seat being abandoned by Mel Martinez (in Florida) so he can keep "from participating in a constructive way in" congressional work. When Chairman Frank talks about Members who "condemn the socialist tendencies of the President and the failure of the President and his appointees to show any understanding of the capitalist system, and you realize that they are talking about George Bush," he could well have been referring to Bob Smith, a lunatic fringe sociopath who claimed the GOP had drifted so far to the left that he changed his party registration and ran for president as an independent.

While serving his two Senate terms representing moderate New Hampshire, Smith's greatest claim to fame was that he was the furthest right of any member of the Senate. He decided to run against George H.W. Bush in the Republican presidential primary but no one paid any attention so he quit the GOP in anger and decided to run on the U.S. Taxpayers Party ticket. Now they are insane, but not loopy enough for Smith, who a few weeks after joining quit their party too and ran as an independent instead. The only attention he ever got on the hustings was as a freakshow and he withdrew in disgust and endorsed the man he had been reviling for half a year: George Bush. New Hampshire Republicans immediately put him out of his misery by defeating him in the 2002 primary, giving the nomination to John Sununu. At that point Smith renounced New Hampshire and politics and moved to Sarasota, Florida to sell real estate. (Still angry with the GOP he wound up endorsing John Kerry against Bush, Jr in 2004 and then fellow lunatic fringe rightist, Duncan Hunter, in 2008.

The real estate market in Smith's Sarasota area has crashed-- even worse than in the rest of the country. The 13th congressional district, which encompasses all of Sarasota County, had the 13th most foreclosures of any CD in the nation-- with over 18,000 foreclosures so far. Clearly in need of a new job, the hapless Smith filed to run-- as a Republican-- for the Florida Senate seat. (He had been talking about running for the open New Hampshire seat if the hated Sununu tried.) Presumably he wasn't referring to himself when he declared, in a letter to a New Hampshire newspaper that he's running in Florida, needs money and that "It's time for Republicans to start acting like Republicans again!" Well, he's one that's never really stopped acting like one. Maybe he should run in Pennsylvania too; he's always hated Arlen Specter and he'd have a better chance of winning the GOP primary there than Specter does.


UPDATE: How Could I Have Forgotten Smith's Prescience!

Bob Fertig reminded me this evening that it was Senator Smith, before New Hampshire Republicans decided he was too beyond the pale even for them, who first alerted America to the GOP-Military-Industrial complex's intentions in Iraq. Date line: Saturday, April 13, 2002

MANCHESTER, N.H. -- The United States should no longer buy oil from Iraq, but steal it, U.S. Sen. Bob Smith, R-Wolfeboro, told hundreds of New Hampshire Republicans gathered last night at a party fund-raiser.

"Why don't we just take his oil?" Smith bellowed to the crowd during a fiery 13-minute speech, referring to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. "Why buy it? Take it!"

I think there's a specific Geneva convention devoted to that.