Noonan on the Brown phenomenon

 Of Nuts and Creeps


Speaking broadly: In the 2006 and 2008 elections, and at some point during the past decade, the ancestral war between Democrats and the Republicans began to take on a new look. If you were a normal human sitting at home having a beer and watching national politics peripherally, as normal people do until they focus on an election, chances are pretty good you came to see the two major parties not as the Dems versus the Reps, or the blue versus the red, but as the Nuts versus the Creeps. The Nuts were for high spending and taxing and the expansion of government no matter what. The Creeps were hypocrites who talked one thing and did another, who went along on the spending spree while lecturing on fiscal solvency.
In 2008, the voters went for Mr. Obama thinking he was not a Nut but a cool and sober moderate of the center-left sort. In 2009 and 2010, they looked at his general governing attitudes as reflected in his preoccupations—health care, cap and trade—and their hidden, potential and obvious costs, and thought, "Uh-oh, he's a Nut!"
...
In a telephone conversation Wednesday night, Mr. Brown spoke of what's ahead. The conversation turned to the movie "The Candidate," to the moment Robert Redford wins the election and takes a top strategist aside to ask: "What do we do now?"
Mr. Brown laughed: "I know what I want to do: Go down there and be a good person, a good and competent senator. I have huge shoes to fill, the legacy is just overwhelming. I'm a consensus builder. . . . I can disagree in the daytime and have a coffee or beer later on. Everyone's welcome to their opinion."
He said he thought the president "inherited a lot of problems," that "he's doing a great job with North Korea, a nice job with Afghanistan." A centerpiece of Mr. Brown's campaign was opposition to the president's health-care plan, but he stressed that he opposes high spending wherever it comes from. "I've criticized President Bush for his failure to use his veto pen. There's plenty of blame to go around. The question is how solve problems. It's not bailouts. What made America great? Free markets, free enterprise, manufacturing, job creation. That's how we're gonna do it, not by enlarging government."
The next morning he took the 7 a.m. shuttle from Boston to Washington for his first trip to the Capitol. On the plane, after they took off, the pilot came on and said, "Senator Brown is on board, on his way to Washington." The plane erupted in applause.



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