Against All Odds

by Scott Brown

  Our final debate was going to be held on Monday, January 11, just eight days before the election; it was sponsored by the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the U.S. Senate and held at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. Throughout the building, there were huge signs with Kennedy’s name all over them. We spent our last two hours negotiating to have the Kennedy signs taken off the podiums, but the two of us still stood under a giant sign with Kennedy’s name on it. It wasn’t subtle enough to be subliminal. It was like a neon sign saying “the Kennedy seat.” Longtime newsman, pundit, and presidential counselor David Gergen had been chosen as the moderator. That weekend, the Boston Globe released a poll showing me 15 points behind Coakley. That day, January 11, my campaign launched an Internet money bomb. The idea behind a money bomb is to try to reach a donation goal within twenty-four hours. Our goal was to raise $500,000. When we made that number, we upped the goal. In the end, on that single day, we raised $1.3 million from sixteen thousand donors around the country.

  It was a bitter cold January night, and outside the hall before our final debate, Coakley’s supporters and my supporters were standing around holding signs. I stopped at the bottom of the campus road and walked up the driveway to shake all their hands, including the hands of the guys with the Coakley signs. I told them, “You guys are heroes to be out in this freezing cold. I can’t believe you guys. Martha should be very appreciative, and I know I am for you guys just being part of the process. It’s been fun, hasn’t it?” And everyone on both sides said, “Yeah, it’s been fun.” And then almost to a person, all the Coakley sign holders, who were mostly union guys, said, “Scott, we’re voting for you. We’re here because we’re getting paid to hold these signs, but we’re voting for you.” I’ve been a union guy myself for twenty-five years, and I proudly walked in with their words echoing in my ears.

  Inside, I went back to meet David Gergen, whom I’d always admired and enjoyed when I saw him on television. When I said, “Hi, I’m Scott Brown,” he looked at me like, “Oh, are you the Democrat? Oh yeah, you’re the Republican.” He appeared preoccupied, as if he were just there to go through the motions and to get Martha through the debate. The message in the back room was clear: I was going to get crushed—so get ready. Get ready I did. I could tell immediately from the line of questioning what the tone would be: skeptical questions for me, less combative questions for Martha, and partly ignoring Joe Kennedy. The questions to Martha included, “President Obama has made a vow, no new taxes on any couples making less than $250,000. Do you join him in that pledge as senator?” and “There are some who wonder if you have sometimes been a little complacent as a front-runner, although now you’re sort of catching fire, and I wonder if now, looking back, you think it was the right decision to insist on three people at a debate?” For me, a typical line of questioning was, “To raise some concerns that have been out there on the campaign trail, starting with you, Mr. Brown. There are those who argue that you’ve been campaigning as a moderate Republican, more in the Bill Weld mold, but in fact you’re quite conservative on some issues.” And so I got asked about Roe v. Wade and climate change, or asked first whether I would cut entitlements, specifically Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid. It was a rather disparate style of questioning, underneath the Edward M. Kennedy Institute sign.

  One of Martha’s and my exchanges came over an amendment that I had offered in 2005 that would have exempted doctors and nurses in emergency rooms from a state law requiring that they offer emergency contraception to rape victims if it violated a “sincerely held religious belief.” If that were the case, another qualified medical professional could offer the drug, at no additional cost and with no waiting time, for the victim. It was a measure that Ted Kennedy, a committed Catholic, had supported when he was in the U.S. Senate. In 2009, less than a year before, he had written about his personal belief in a “conscience protection” for Catholics in the health field in a letter to Pope Benedict that was hand-delivered by President Barack Obama. My own amendment was thoroughly debated and received a lot of bipartisan support, but ultimately it was not accepted. However, I still voted for the final bill without the provision, and also voted to override then-Governor Mitt Romney’s veto. I started to answer the question and Martha began badgering me over the abortion issue. I turned to her and said, “Excuse me, I’m not in your courtroom. I’m not a defendant. I’d like to have a chance to answer the question.” She tried her same line again, and I said, “Martha, I am not a defendant here. Let me answer.” It was a devastating counterpunch to her strategy of trying to bait and bully me, like an overeager lawyer in a TV courtroom drama.

  We tangled over health care, and at one point, David Gergen jumped in and asked, “Are you willing under those circumstances to say, ‘ I’m going to be the person, I’m going to sit in Teddy Kennedy’s seat, and I’m going to be the person who’s going to block it [health-care reform] for another fifteen years?’ ” For months, all I had heard was that this was the Kennedy seat. Even my wife would sometimes refer to it as “the Kennedy seat.” I respected Ted Kennedy. I didn’t always agree with him, but I respected him. Still, this was not his seat. And I was getting pretty ticked off. I turned to Gergen and I said, “With all due respect, it’s not the Kennedys’ seat, and it’s not the Democrats’ seat; it’s the people’s seat.” And then I kept on with my discussion and my answer regarding health care. As I finished, I looked out into the crowd, and on more than half the faces of the people in the audience was the look of total shock. Toward the front, my campaign team just smiled.

  From there, we moved on to terrorism. Twelve days before, there had been a suicide bombing attack on a crucial CIA base in Khost, near the Afghanistan–Pakistan border. Seven CIA officers and contractors, including the base chief, had been killed by the bomber, an al-Qaeda double agent, and six others had been seriously wounded. One of the dead was from Massachusetts. Intelligence officials called it a “devastating blow” to U.S. counterterrorism operations. Gergen asked a question about Afghanistan, and Martha said that al-Qaeda was no longer in Afghanistan: “They’re gone. They’re not there anymore.” I glanced out and my team members looked stunned and started slowly shaking their heads. The people on her team were also shaking their heads and furiously bending over their BlackBerrys. Gergen gave her a chance to fix her gaffe, and instead she put her foot deeper into her mouth. I looked into her eyes and I said to myself right there: it’s over; this race is over. That was the moment. The combined impact of “It’s not the Kennedys’ seat; it’s the people’s seat,” “I’m not in your courtroom,” and the statement that al-Qaeda was “gone” from Afghanistan would be too devastating to overcome. Martha and I also sparred over giving terrorists Miranda rights and treating them as ordinary criminals. I said we need to treat them like enemy combatants and interrogate them using our applicable laws to learn whatever we can about what they might be plotting next.

  After the debate, I went upstairs to take a quick look at the postdebate news coverage, and the first negative ad against me by Martha Coakley was already on the air. It was a vicious attack ad and a total distortion of my position and my votes, including my views on emergency contraception for rape victims. We had always known that Coakley would go negative. Anticipating that she would unleash a string of attacks, two weeks before, we had taped a response at the kitchen table in my home. It began, “By now, you’ve probably seen the negative ads launched by Martha Coakley and her supporters. Instead of discussing issues like health care and jobs, they decided the best way to stop me is to tear me down. The old way of doing things won’t work anymore. Their attack ads are wrong and go too far.” We had our response on the air in a matter of hours.

  But it wasn’t Coakley’s ad that grabbed the spotlight; it was the line “It’s the people’s seat” that went viral. We had already gotten national media attention. On January 4, CNBC’s Larry Kudlow filmed a segment with me while I was at the Colonial Inn in Concord, Massachusetts
, the place where the first shot of the American Revolution—“the shot heard round the world”—was fired back in 1775. Not long after, we started to see homemade signs with the words “the Scott heard round the world.” It wasn’t quite that dramatic, but four days later, Sean Hannity invited me on for a segment on his major nightly Fox News program, and a week or so later, I was a guest on Greta Van Susteren’s show. People across the country were taking notice. And just when we really needed it, money began to pour in.

  We raised more money online the day after our money bomb than the day of it, and that was probably nearly all due to the January 11 debate. By week’s end, when we got the final tally, we learned that the campaign had taken in $2.2 million in a single day. We didn’t want to announce the final figures; we didn’t want the Coakley people to know what was coming in and how much the momentum was shifting. The preelection polls were all over the place. Some had the race in a 2–3 point spread; one poll even had me up by 1. In a huge boost during the final weeks, the Republican Senatorial Committee had arrived and set up phone banks with preprogrammed, automatic dialers, which were an enormous time-saver, and they were pulling in volunteers from all over the country. The people who came were excited to make phone calls and it was contagious. Tea Party activists came from other parts of the country to rally behind my message of cutting taxes and returning fiscal responsibility to Washington. We even had Democrats coming over to make calls too. Across the state, in Holyoke, Plymouth, Boston, Needham, Danvers, Worcester, and Wrentham, our phone banks were packed with volunteers. We took over the top floor of a warehouse building in Worcester, and people were standing in line just to be able to take turns to make calls.

  I received the endorsements of the State Police Association of Massachusetts and a number of local police unions, two in Worcester—the New England Police Benevolent Association Local 911 and the International Brotherhood of Police Officers Local 504—as well as the Cambridge Patrol Police Officers Association, which was the union that Martha Coakley’s husband had belonged to when he was a Cambridge cop.

  In those final weeks, I also got some unexpected help from the Boston Globe and some of the Boston TV stations. Every Boston Globe poll that came out had Coakley vastly ahead, which in our view, inside my campaign, only served to make her supporters complacent and to hide the level of real trouble she was in. And others in the local media also couldn’t imagine that I could win. Over at Channel Five, Gail’s station, the regular on-air political consultant Mary Ann Marsh had already concluded that the race was over. When the Kennedy family endorsed Martha two weeks before the election, Mary Ann kept up her negative barrage and called it the final blow to my campaign, noting that Martha Coakley had received an extra $100,000 in online donations as a result of that endorsement. What she and others didn’t bother to pay attention to or to report was that we had $100,000 coming every hour or two on the days surrounding our money bomb. And we had money coming in after that, checks that were for $25 and $50; our average donation was just $88. I had people showing up at headquarters who would say, “I’ve driven in from Winthrop,” or “I’ve driven in from Sturbridge”—or Pittsfield—“to bring you this check.” People dropped off $1,000 checks and all they wanted in return was a smile and a handshake. And whether people gave $5 or $1,000, we treated them the same.

  Coakley had her attack ads and her endorsements and was rallying Democratic leaders. As the Boston Globe put it in a profile that ran on January 13, “she had little time for the hand-shaking and baby kissing of a standard political campaign.” On January 12, the day after our final rough-and-tumble debate, she didn’t make a single public appearance, and instead flew to Washington, D.C., for a fund-raiser, to try to get a big infusion of special interest money for her campaign. Of the twenty-two-person host committee for the fund-raiser, about fifteen of the hosts were federally registered lobbyists with health-care clients.

  But that was only part of her campaign’s strategy. For weeks now too, the Democrats had been following me around with “trackers,” people who filmed my stops and my events, trying to catch me making some gaffe. I would see them riding behind my truck in their cars. I easily recognized the main tracker, and I used to say hi to him during almost every stop. I’d say to the crowd, “Excuse me, I would like to introduce you to the tracker for the other candidate. The other side actually has someone following me around everywhere I go. I see him first thing in the morning. I’ve seen him follow me in a car. I just want to say, ‘Thank you very much, Mr. Tracker, for being so respectful and courteous. You’ve been a fantastic tracker. I’m just hopeful that at the end of the race, maybe I could get copies of what you have, so I can watch the videos when I’m old and I retire.’ ” My tracker worked for the Democratic National Committee, and he was a nice guy who laughed when I made my jokes. They were looking to catch me, just as they had tried to catch me in the fall when the race started. During the election, they sent teams to scour my legislative and municipal voting records. They combed through town hall to see if I went to town meetings, if I had paid my real estate taxes, if I had registered my cars, if I had even gotten the proper licenses for our two dogs, Snuggles and Koda.

  Now they were trying everything. They sent out actors to my campaign events who dressed as Wall Street millionaires and walked around carrying glasses of wine and champagne, shouting taunts and attempting to harass me, trying to tie me to a bailout that then-Senator Barack Obama had voted for and to imply that I was backed by Wall Street tycoons. On the podium, I would simply say, “Hey, guys, Halloween was months ago,” and proceed to ignore them. We put together what I called the truth squad, the Brown Brigade, of people who monitored Web sites and wrote letters to the editor to counter the often vicious and wrong things that were said about me and my campaign. We also had a way for people who supported me to link up via social networking.

  Meanwhile, I had been driving my truck into South Boston.

  South Boston is best known for being a working-class, largely Irish-American neighborhood of solid, unadorned row houses and small businesses, mom-and-pop places, old-style barbershops, and luncheonettes that still serve regular coffee in cream-colored stoneware mugs. I would go there early in the morning, when the commuter traffic was coming in, and I’d stand in the four-corners area off Broadway and hold my large “Brown for U.S. Senate” sign, a cup of hot chocolate in one hand, and I’d wave at the people who drove past. But not everyone was passing. People were stopping their cars to shake my hand; they were giving me thumbs-up; they were asking for bumper stickers; they wanted signs; they brought me coffee and hot chocolate. They offered their help. I would come back to our small offices and tell my team that I thought we were doing really well in South Boston. My campaign advisers weren’t big fans of going out and holding up signs, but after the third time I went out there, they were curious and they came along with a video camera. It was just how I had described it—people coming up to me, engaged, excited; my being mobbed to shake hands. I spent some other mornings in front of the South Station train station in Boston, greeting commuters coming in from all over the state, and the response was phenomenal.

  By the last week of the campaign, we didn’t have enough signs and bumper stickers to give out, so people in and around Boston and the rest of the state started making their own. They Scotch-taped handmade signs to their car windows and on their trucks, even making homemade floats that they pulled along the road, all to show their support. Some people even took our signs off the front lawns of supporters and moved them to more high-traffic areas—or to their own houses.

  I had picked up endorsements from Steve DeOssie and Fred Smerlas, formerly of the New England Patriots, and was thrilled to earn the backing of both the great football quarterback Doug Flutie and Curt Schilling, the famed Boston Red Sox pitcher who had played with a bloody sock in Game Six of the 2004 American League Championship series against the Yankees. His white sock soaked with blood, Shilling pulled in t
he win. It sent the championship to Game Seven, and ultimately earned the Red Sox a place in the World Series, for the first time in nearly twenty years. Schilling pitched with a bloody sock to help win that series too.

  Martha Coakley’s reply was to dismiss Curt Schilling by calling him “another Yankee fan.” Live, on the radio, on Dan Rea’s show. When Dan, sounding completely incredulous, asked, “Curt Schilling, the great Red Sox pitcher of the bloody sock?” her reply was, “Well, he’s not there anymore,” a statement that was completely unbelievable to almost anyone from Massachusetts. She also mocked me for standing outside in the cold to shake hands with people going into Fenway Park for the Winter Classic. “In the cold? Shaking hands?” she told the Boston Globe. “This is a special election. This is about getting people out on a cold Tuesday morning.” What she did do was tell a meeting of ten local officials, “There is no way in hell Massachusetts is going to send a Republican to Washington.”

  While Martha brought Bill Clinton in to campaign for her, I went to the historic North End of Boston, home to many hardworking Italian-Americans, and hosted a rally with Rudy Giuliani. With help from the Riccio family, Joe Ligotti, and Peter Marano, we had an incredible turnout. It was standing room only; there were so many people that the entire street was closed. The feeling was overwhelmingly uplifting, and that was the type of race I wanted to run. When Republican entities or outside special interests put up negative ads, I told them to take them down. I wasn’t going to go that route. I had committed to running a positive campaign, to talking about the issues, to not making negative, personal attacks. Martha Coakley and the Democrats went completely negative. Some Democrats sent out a mailer, based on the UPS slogan, “What Can Brown Do for You?” It attacked me and my positions. UPS was furious.