This much is worth remembering: When he entered the national consciousness, he was considered something of a lightweight. Sure, he was camera-ready – a handsome, fit guy surrounded by an attractive family. But as someone asking the people to send him to conduct the serious business of the United States Senate, he had little in the way of a legislative record. On the podium, he was more than a bit wooden, delivering halting lines like a high school jock going through the motions in his run for student council. And the jock label fit. Even though he graduated from a competitive college, he had distinguished himself on campus as an athlete, not a scholar. In the special election to fill the seat of Massachusetts’s most famous senator, his main obstacle was a credentialed Democrat who had earned a reputation for competence as the state’s attorney general. The prospect of this neophyte ascending to the Senate threw members of the intellectual class into fits of apoplexy.
The Life of the party: Scott Brown
BOSTONIAN OF THE YEAR: 2010
Yet in the art of retail politics, the agreeable guy with the handsome face was a star, quickly establishing himself as the superior candidate. It was more than just the stamina he showed in shaking hand after hand after hand. It was the pleasant doggedness and smiling ease with which he did it. He clearly liked campaigning because he clearly liked people. And people clearly liked him.
So the people of Massachusetts sent that perceived lightweight, named Ted Kennedy, to Washington. In that special election of 1962, Kennedy was able to leverage his likability (and his connections) to cream Democratic Attorney General Edward McCormack in the primary en route to assuming his famous brother’s Senate seat.
It was nearly half a century later when Scott Brown did the same. In the special election of 2010, the candidate stunned the anointed but flat-footed Democratic attorney general, Martha Coakley – and the nation – to win what he referred to as “the people’s seat,” but which everybody else continued to call “the Kennedy seat.”
Ted Kennedy’s second and third acts loomed so large – the scandal-soaked survivor of Camelot, the liberal lion of the Senate – that people tend to forget his first act. Back then, Kennedy had been discounted by everyone around him, including his own brothers, and derided by a Harvard professor as “a fledgling in everything except ambition.”
Improbably, that fledgling grew into one of the most effective if polarizing senators in the history of that old man’s club. And when Brown won his election in January and took over the seat that had long been held by the embodiment of the American left, he, just as improbably, became a figure of national importance.