SCOTT BROWN turned up at yesterday’s Martin Luther King 40th anniversary breakfast, a bastion of liberalism in Boston, sat down and tucked into pineapple and melon chunks, followed by omelette and ham. The Republican Party candidate had not been invited, but he turned up anyway.
Some of the 1,000 guests at the table with him were Democratic officials and sympathisers, who had trudged through the snow to commemorate King. They may have been surprised and uncomfortable at finding him in their midst, but this was the biggest event in Boston yesterday and Brown was not going to miss it. “I wasn’t invited. I bought a ticket,” he said.
By his presence, he succeeded in upsetting once again Democratic Party campaign planning, as he has been doing for the last fortnight.
His Democratic rival, Martha Coakley, sat among other party dignitaries on the platform but the guests showed little enthusiasm for her, greeting her speech with barely polite applause. In contrast, this predominantly Democratic-voting audience queued up to have their pictures taken with Brown, who has achieved celebrity status.
They do not necessarily like him and most will not vote for him. But he has at least brought excitement to what until a fortnight ago was a sleepy little race, which Coakley expected to easily win, the Senate seat left vacant by the death last year of Ted Kennedy, a seat held by the Democrats since JFK took it in 1952.
Organisers in both parties suggest that the race is now too close to call. Public Policy Polling, in its final survey of the campaign published yesterday, put Brown on 51 per cent to Coakley’s 46 per cent. And this is Massachusetts, long one of the safest – maybe the safest – Democratic state in the US.
Irish immigrants and their offspring created a party machine that have delivered Boston for the Democrats decade after decade. The governor, the mayors and most of the state-elected representatives today are still Democrats.
It is not that Democrats are switching: it is just that they appear to be indifferent, while grassroots Republicans are fired up. Even if Brown fails to win today, he has delivered a shock to Barack Obama and the Democratic Party. If Massachusetts is vulnerable, then so is every Democratic seat in the country in November’s mid-term elections.
William Bows (68) a committed Democrat, was among those at the breakfast table not happy to find himself sharing it with Brown. An African-American who had travelled from Boston to Washington last January to stand in the Mall to see Obama’s inauguration, he remained solidly behind the president and said he felt that much of the support that Brown was attracting from groups such as the Tea Party was racially motivated.
But although he will vote for Coakley today, Bows will do so without enthusiasm. “I think Martha Coakley is underwhelming.”
Coakley has an easy manner but is a poor orator, and has a poor political touch. The Democrats, assuming the seat was safe, had initially spent little on it in terms of staffing, finance or energy. They have attempted to undo that over the last few days.
Brown's appeal to grassroots Republicans is they see him as the insurgent, taking on the establishment, a truck-driving National Guardsman who supports waterboarding of Guantanamo detainees. – ( Guardianservice)