Brown's Strategy Won't Work for Every Race
Scott Brown is not... exactly my kind of candidate. My kind of candidate is and remains Bob McDonnell; attractive and articulate, but with a blizzard of clever policy proposals that fit the era that they are being proposed in. I'm also a social conservative, and I like my candidates to have culture war theses instead of Cosmo pictorials in their past!
But, candidates need to fit their state, and Massachusetts is probably not the kind of state to run a McDonnell-type campaign. With continual education wars, Romneycare and gay marriage, Massachusetts has been through enough policy upheaval already, so a simpler message had to do. Of course, the really interesting part is how Scott Brown's campaign hearkened back to early Kennedyism; explicitly in the famous Kennedy tax-cut ad, but also in Brown’s foreign policy hawkishness and social issue triangulation. That's why I can't see this as being a libertarian tantrum; libertarians aren't known for their love of Keynesian justifications for tax cuts, and never mind foreign policy and social issues. If it's a tantrum, it's a conservative Democrat tantrum.
And that's what's so weird and unsettling about the whole thing, and that's why I think that the Scott Brown model may not be the solution for every race coming up this year. For the long-shot races like Connecticut, sure. But, the key to pickups in the House and the Senate -- lasting pickups -- will be largely via "infill" in states that are more Republican than Connecticut, and the things that Scott Brown did would have to be revised accordingly.
But for now... enjoy the moment. But I'm hoping there are some serious conversations going on in Mike Pence's Indiana office.