It looks like Elizabeth Brown Warren and Scott Brown will take their promise to skip outside ad buys quite seriously.
Republican US Senator Scott Brown has agreed to pay a fine to honor “The People’s Pledge,” the first such penalty since he and Democrat Elizabeth Warren agreed to mutually police advertising from outside political committees.
The infraction appears to be a small one. A group called CAPE PAC is running Google ads promoting Brown. The ads are linked to the group’s website, which solicits donations. The cost of the ad campaign will not be known until the group files its federal campaign reports, but the organization does not appear to have advertised extensively.
If, say, I worked for a Koch brother and wanted to grease my career trajectory a bit I might commit a couple million to a bunch of not terribly convincing pro-Warren ads.
John M. Burt
Don’t go givin’ them no ideas . . . .
Schlemizel
That is the next step in this decent to hell. Ratfuck PACs. It would be quite easy. I advertize my super pac – “Americans for what is right, good and true” and use that money to run ads ‘for’ my candidate. The ads would be either insulting, particularly nasty or designed to make the apparent position unappealing to voters. Ideally they would be all 3.
I assume the Kock Bros have already thought of this & are looking for morans to front the ratfuckPAC.
Egg Berry
I think you mean Warren.
Katherine H
first sentence : Elizabeth Warren not Brown
beergoggles
Any agreement with a republican is unilateral disarmament because they will always break their promise and like the good wife beaters they are – blame you for it.
m Quirk
And now I have, “If I Were A Rich Man” from Fiddler on the Roof stuck in my head.
“If I were a Wea-sel… da-da-da-dum-da-da-da-dum-da-da-da-dee…”
aimai
Hugely bad idea on Warren’s part. This is going to be a disaster. Brown isn’t that bright, but a lot of smart bastards are backing him.
aimai
deep
So far the progressive news paper The Boston Pheonix, is saying that Brown has “earned” his recent front-runner position, and describing him as focusing on constituent services. It even compares him to the late Ted Kennedy.
Rather interesting since the paper is usually rather hostile towards Republicans.
EconWatcher
What’s up with the recent polls showing Romney gaining on Obama (or even overtaking, though in a statistical dead heat)? I thought one was an outlier, but there seem to be several now.
I can’t think of what news or event could explain this. In fact, objective developments (improving economy, contraception meltdown, etc.) should be driving it the other way. No reason to panic, of course, but it does leave me scratching my head.
inthewoods
Seems like a terrible idea – Brown has raised something like $20m already, while Warren has much, much less – will make it tough for her to compete while making Brown look like an upstanding citizen.
AliceBlue
I’m not trying to be a concern troll, but I don’t have a good feeling about this race. If recent history is any guide, the people of Mass have an aversion to electing women to federal office.
middlewest
@AliceBlue: History has also shown that the DailyKos is not an effective base. She’s got troubles.
Yevgraf
@deep:
Translate that to “he’s actually doing the job he was elected to do, as opposed to being a grandstanding sockpuppet for weird, shadowy funders”. Has anybody considered that the guy is doing what northeast GOPers used to be good at?
At some point of time on the right, fiscal responsibility got warped into a stance beyond recognition. The past view that you could shift policy on a gradual basis, or that you could undertake social efforts based on reasonable cost-benefit analyses got thrown into the dumpster of fiscal austerity and personal/financial pain as a “pro-capitalism” teaching moment.
Brown may be trying to return to that model, and while I wouldn’t vote for him, I applaud the effort.
Zifnab
This seemed like something of a gaping flaw in the “SuperPACs are not affiliated *wink* *wink*” argument. Steven Colbert has already kinda picked up the ball and run with it. And “pro” candidate robo-calling is a popular trend in many states – “Hi, this is a call concerning candidate A, here to… *click*”, *ring* *ring* “Hi this is a call concerning candidate A…” Man do I ever hate candidate A!
:-p If you can sucker your opposition’s fund raisers to contribute money to the rat fucking cause, all the better.
Mnemosyne
@deep:
People really underestimate how important constituent services are for incumbents — one of the reasons Jesse Helms kept being re-elected was that he had extensive constituent services and was well-known for going the extra mile for his constituents regardless of party. My House district in California switched from R to D in large part because our R representative was spending all of his time grandstanding during the Clinton impeachment and ignoring constituent services. Needless to say, our current D rep has great services and is constantly doing outreach.
If Brown is smart enough to realize how important those services are to his re-election and focus on them, I agree that Warren’s campaign could be in trouble. She’s really going to need to make her campaign Massachussetts-centric and focus on what she can do for the people of her state to prevent Brown from portraying her as some kind of grandstanding carpetbagger.
JC
@EconWatcher: Supposedly, gas prices. For some reason, this always has a big impact on how people perceive how “the President is doing his job”, even though the President never has much ability to do anything about it.
Although, if the Koch Bros. and friends are doing a lot of speculating, maybe that particular dirty trick can be shut down immediately?
Satanicpanic
I never thought this was a good idea. No one cares.
JC
@Mnemosyne: Between Brown’s ability to be good with people, his good looks, Massachussetts problems with electing women, and if this is to be believed, his good constituent services, I’ve always said it’s unlikely Brown will lose.
KG
@Mnemosyne: it’s also one of the reasons why everyone likes their congresscritter (per polls, I know not everyone likes their critter) but dislikes congress generally.
Anya
@Mnemosyne:
Absolutely agree with this. Polls this early are not that important and an incumbent is expected to be ahead, unless he’s plagued by scandal. But Ms. Warren needs to emphasis issues that are important to the people of Massachusetts.
Hal
At the end of the day though, Brown will never really be that much of a tea party Republican simply because he can’t move that far to the right without alienating a large percent of voters.