Mother Jones
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Illustration: Thomas Nast/Library of Congress; Scott Brown: Seamas Culligan/ZUMA
Scott Brown has a carpetbagging problem. On Monday, the former Republican senator from Massachusetts—who is now running for Senate in New Hampshire—defended his Granite State bona fides by taking a page from Lisa Simpson: “Do I have the best credentials? Probably not. ‘Cause, you know, whatever.”
At this point, it’s the rare Brown story that doesn’t at least allude to the dreaded c-word. “Carpetbagger or Comeback Kid?” asked the Washington Examiner‘s Rebecca Berg. “Scott Brown’s first hurdle in the Granite State will be addressing the carpetbagging charge,” argued US News & World Report‘s David Catanese. Respondents to a March poll from Suffolk University, a plurality of whom disapproved of Brown, used words like “carpetbagger” and “interloper” to describe the ex-senator. His opponent in the Republican primary, former Sen. Bob Smith, has even offered to buy Brown a road map to the state—although Smith has run for Senate in Florida twice in the last decade.
If Brown wants to go back to Washington next winter, he should probably come up with a better response than “whatever.” But his critics in Washington have it all wrong. For more than a century, carpetbaggers have gotten a bad rap for all the wrong reasons.
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