Scott Brown in his own words

The Boston Globe interviews:

How do you fit into that calculation, and the pressure to vote the Republican line.

"I already spoke to the leaders, I already spoke to them, and the whip. I told them, I said, 'With all due respect I really don't know a lot of you people and you don't know me, but maybe that's good because I'm gonna vote how I want to vote. But I'll be respectful and I'll tell you why and how and you can certainly let me know your thoughts and maybe I'm missing something, but I'm gonna just vote how I feel is important to vote. And they were cool, they said, 'OK, do whatever you want. You could probably do whatever you want right about now, Scott, so that's OK.' So they were very respectful, and they understand, they understand that all eyes are on me."

On the face of it, this is encouraging--the kind of senator I want to see. But we'll have to see how he actually votes.

You pride yourself on being a multitasker, but you can begin to answer all that mail and e-mail?

"I did already. I already answered them. And the letters, obviously, I open them, I read them, and then I give them to a staff person to respond, but I sign them all and personalize them. If somebody's gonna take the time to write me a letter or write me an e-mail I'm gonna do my very best to write them back. It may not be today but it will definitely be within a couple of days. That's what makes our office so good. When we get e-mails or phone calls, I pick up the phone and call them up. I don't e-mail them back, I don't write them, I call them. And that's what's gonna set us apart from every other office down there. We're so psyched. We're gonna have a constituent office second to none. That's our no 1 priority."

It doesn't sound like he's aiming to be a one-term senator.

Along those lines, past and present, who are your political role models?

"Well first of all, I haven't read that book, I'm looking forward to it. I said it during the debate, and during that thing when Dan Rea said, 'Give me one person,' well, I can't give you one person. You know, different decades. Obviously JFK, everyone -- he was, everybody's president. Ronald Reagan, what he did with the Iron Curtain. You know, President Bush in terms of what he did after 9/11, in terms of our security. I didn't agree with hardly anything on what he did on domestic fiscal issues. And you know Senator McCain and Senator Lieberman."

Fuck you, man. What Bush did to this country in response to 9/11 is one of the worst tragedies of the last half century.  McCain and Lieberman, ick. Can't the Northeast give us someone better than another Giuliani-style hack?

On immigration, you sounded excited about the aide you hired. Is that a big issue for you?

"It's huge, it's huge now, especially with Haiti. It's huge, it's the no. 1 issue affecting -- that will affect my office, and I have the best person in place to handle it. And I'm so honored -- I'm just like overwhelmed, I almost, like, you know, cried when she said yes, she'll stay. Especially, you know, there are a lot of single kids, kids that are being adopted, people -- Americans and citizens that are still there trying to get home, they're not getting help with the embassy. When I met with the ministers, they actually gave us some names which we forwarded off to try to find out the status. So yeah, immigration is important, but my policy hasn't changed with regard to how we deal with the immigration issue. It's just a question of, we have to immediately provide the resources to process these people quicker. It's immoral to let them wait in line so long. If we can find money for the banks, we can find money to process people through immigration quickly."

Well, I suppose that's somewhat encouraging.