What Brown can do for you

Politics | Traditional values groups find Scott Brown as an imperfect candidate who could both win a blue state and advance their interests | Emily Belz

Zuma Wire West Photos

BOSTON and WASHINGTON—Toward the end of last year, Boston sports station WEEI was getting daily phone calls from a guy named Scott Brown. They brushed him off. Same story at WTKK, Boston conservative talk radio. "He would call on the hotline and we'd be like, 'Aw, it's Scott Brown again,'" said Tom Shattuck, a producer at the station. "Scott Brown made for bad radio. No one cared about the Senate race."

Shattuck related this story to me in a packed ballroom of sweating and exuberant Brown supporters in Boston minutes before Democrat Martha Coakley called to concede to the Republican state senator in one of the biggest political upsets in recent memory. Coakley, the state's attorney general, watched her 30-point advantage to inherit the late Ted Kennedy's seat evaporate in the space of a month as Brown, from Wrentham, Mass., a town of 11,000, surged to victory by 5 points. Coakley didn't lose because of bad turnout either—for a snowy election day turnout was as high as the 2006 election, when Kennedy won reelection and masses turned out to vote for the state's first black governor, Deval Patrick. Even Kennedy's hometown of Hyannis voted for Brown.