A very good friend of mine emailed me today wondering what I thought of the $15 billion dollar jobs bill, which recently passed in the U.S. Senate. She also wondered if I thought Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown was a RINO, Republican in name only.
I’ll tell you what I told her.
I don’t think Scott Brown is a RINO, but he also isn’t the second coming of Ronald Reagan, either. Brown’s Tea Party fans were quick to anoint him as the next Ronald Reagan and were even getting ready to start his presidential campaign before he even cast his first vote as a Senator.
But it only took Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown three votes to end his honeymoon with conservative fans.
What I reminded my very good friend, and what I would remind all of Brown’s Tea Party fans, is that Brown was elected to represent a very blue state. And while the voters of Massachusetts liked him more than the incredibly weak Democrat he ran against, it was not like they suddenly wanted Rep. Ron Paul to cast votes for them. Let’s get real, their other Senator is John Kerry and they were replacing the late Ted Kennedy.
As for the “Jobs Bill”, it’s a good idea to keep it in perspective.
The $15 billion dollar proposal that earned Brown a scarlet letter on the Drudge Report actually represents less than 10% of the original House stimulus package that was passed in late 2009. Most of the new proposal will be spent on highway construction and some quasi-tax breaks for new hires in the private sector. This wasn’t exactly the passage of the New Deal, if you know what I mean.
Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of things that make this bill “imperfect” for folks on both sides of the aisle, but this was not the Benedict Arnold moment for Brown that his Tea Party fans are ranting about.
While I am not shocked at the reaction from his Tea Party fans, I am surprised that those same Tea Party folks don’t see any similarity between themselves and the liberal activists that helped elect President Obama.
Many leftist progressives that supported Barack Obama honestly believed that he was the one man that could change politics in Washington and usher in a new era of post-partisanship, whatever that means. Now that they have seen Obama’s ambitious agenda become mired not by intense GOP pressure, but by his own party, they are disenchanted and are threatening to stay home in November.
Tea Party fans of Scott Brown have taken even less time to experience the same disenchantment. Did they honestly expect Brown to sweep into D.C. and immediately issue some sort of Reagan Berlin Wall type speech saying, “Mr. Obama, tear down this Health Care Bill!”?
You can see the flawed and over-optimistic logic in both cases.
The bottom line on Brown is this. He’s not the next Ronald Reagan, but he will continue to make the Senate deal with the GOP since he is one of 41 votes that can usually threaten to filibuster. Will they filibuster everything? No. Will they make Sen. Harry Reid make deals that he probably doesn’t want to make? Yes.
Welcome to Washington D.C. Senator Brown. If you thought the reaction to your first three votes were fun, then you’re going to love the reaction to your next 1000 votes. And for the record, I wouldn’t hold my breath to be booked as next year’s Tea Party Convention keynote speaker, if I were you.