RI-SEN: Conference call with Matt Brown
I just got off the phone (update: six hours ago!) from a conference call with Rhode Island Secretary of State and current U.S. Senate candidate Matt Brown, who I've discussed here, here and here. My quick take is that I really like the guy (and prefer him in the Senate race) not just because I like him on the issues and he seems smart, but because I honestly think he's going to be a force in the Senate, a Russ Feingold type who won't follow the conventional wisdom simply because that's how it's done and will stand alone if he has to. He talked about a variety of topics on the conference call, and I'll go through what I found most compelling.
First off, he talked about the campaign's major jump in recent polling. I forget the exact numbers, but according to him he's leading his primary opponent Sheldon Whitehouse (who he never mentioned by name) and he's statistically tied with Lincoln Chafee. Now, the Brown campaign recently tried a bit of a bank shot of a campaign strategy. As the philosophy goes (I'm assuming), Brown was never going to raise as much money as Whitehouse, plus he was down in the polls with less name recognition. He could put his money in TV ads in August (for the September primary) and hope for the best, but he'd probably lose. What he did now was he put a bunch of TV ads on the air this winter, which would theoretically deplete his funds. It would boost his name recognition, though, which at this early stage would mean a boost in the polls. It's a pretty risky move, and most political folks seem to think that early TV ads are a bad idea, since you're not trying to peak in February for a September primary, and funds are limited. For someone like Matt Brown, it's still a risk, but if you can shake up conventional wisdom it might be the way to go. Either way, it's a bold move.
Since it's so hard to say at this point where the candidates will be in terms of polling and fundraising around August, it's hard to draw sharp conclusions. Matt Brown made a pretty solid argument in the conference call, though, for why he's not simply blowing all his money now. First off, he jumped around 25 points in the polling, yet his name recognition only went up 8 points. That means something else is going on. Second, this massive TV buy to get him here apparently only cost $200,000, which is certainly a hell of a lot of money, but also not everything he's got. His fundraising has got to be doing pretty well given his new poll position (he didn't say, also, pun intended), so he may have gotten the best of both worlds: a boost in the polls and enough money to compete in the summer. So far, it looks like a good move.
Still, that raises the question of how he's jumping so much in the polls with a smaller-than-expected ad buy and no corresponding jump in name recognition. Matt says "the reason that we have moved so dramatically in the polls at this early stage is that people here understand that the stakes are very high," which is kind of a politicized answer. I think in future cycles we should start pools on which candidate will be the first to say that the stakes are high or that this is the most important election of our lifetimes. Although I'm sure Rhode Island is looking for "very different and very new kinds of leadership," I'm still not sure that gets us there. I understand that Congress has a terrible approval rating, but is that enough to buck the political axiom that people support the candidates they've heard of?
To tell the truth, I have no idea how his polling has bounced so much. Some of it is his TV ads, some of it is broad dissatisfaction with career politicians, and I think a lot of it is good fortune with his background. When Brown won election as RI Secretary of State, the first thing he did was clean up the lobbying scene. He mandated that lobbyists disclose their interactions and financial arrangements with elected officials. As Matt Brown says, there's a 'very old, very corrupt machine in this state." When lobbyists didn't comply, he hounded them, and if they still ignored him, he posted their names as "delinquent lobbyists" on the Secretary of State website, which of course got those lobbyists negative press coverage. Apparently someone punched him in the back his first week when he fired that guy's cousin; the Secretary of State's office had been a patronage center and Brown got rid of everyone he thought was "incompetent." So now that "lobbyist" has become a swear word in national politics, Brown has run ads talking up his background of limiting lobbying influence. Again, I don't know why Matt Brown is suddenly so successful. But that's my guess.
As for the actual campaign, he talked a lot about leadership. In terms of particulars, he talked about how it was a mistake for the DC establishment to recruit a series of "anti-choice" Democratic Senate candidates (which, personally, I think was a coincidence). He says that the reason we lost in 2004 and the last 30 years is people's "sense that we don't believe in much of anything" and that changing opinions on our core beliefs will give the GOP the permanent majority they've been hoping for. He talks about this in terms of issues, like pointing out that he was the first Senate candidate in the country, back in August 2005, to advocate a timetable for getting our troops out of Iraq. Now it's not that ridiculous a position to have, but as he says, "at the time, I was alone." Apparently at the time Sheldon Whitehouse said having an exit strategy would endanger our troops, "buying the George Bush line on this, which is absolutely absurd." Now he claims that Whitehouse did a poll, and the day after the poll results came out Whitehouse changed his position. (I don't know if that's true, but if Whitehouse released the results of the poll and changed his position the next day, that would be true. And hilarious.)
So it's great that Matt Brown is a leader on the issues. But what really gets me when I hear him speak, and the reason I'm so proud to support him, is how he views the concept of leadership. First off, when he was talking about abortion, he says it's one thing to say what you believe, it's another to stand up for it when it's tough. This is so, so true, and it's one of the things that drives me crazy about national politicians: they can always point to a committee vote or something to pretend support, even if they did nothing when it mattered. (This is true of Joe Lieberman and Lincoln Chafee opposing Alito while not voting for the filibuster. Way to take a stand after you've already lost. Chafee even voted for Roberts.)
So this is how Matt Brown frames leadership: people want to know not just where you stand on the issues, but what you're going to do about it. It's hard to say that Lincoln Chafee really agitates for much of anything in the Senate, but Matt Brown seems like a true rabble-rouser. He talks about how he's taken on the establishment, and that he's glad he did it. More importantly, though, he talks about not just the good fight, but the fights he's won: when he challenged a Democratic incumbent for Secretary of State, when he won lobbying reform in RI, and even starting up the City Year program and expanding it cross-country. In days like these, it's easy for Democrats and progressives to pretend that standing up equals winning. It doesn't. We only win when we make things happen, and I'm very glad to see that Matt Brown is so dedicated to the cause.
In fact, that was one of his most endearing points. He has a four-month-old daughter, and he says he was taken aback when he wondered what the world would be like when his daughter became a grandmother. He says the real factor for success in a campaign is the energy and dedication and conviction the candidate brings to it. After telling us about his daughter, he says he has "no shortage of energy and determination to win this race." We've still got a long way to go, but I think he just might make it.
