Floating in the river of commentary on the Massachusetts Senate election is the claim that it mostly reflects anti-incumbency mood and that Bay State voters were just as angry at Republicans as they were at Democrats.
If that's true, they have a peculiar way of showing it. Scott Brown was no watered-down, greened-up Republican lite. On the economy, he's for across-the-board tax cuts — the Ronald Reagan kind — and against the current wave of big spending. On defense, he wants a military "second to none," and no constitutional protections for enemy captives. He even said waterboarding is not torture. On the environment, he's skeptical man is warming the planet and he flatly opposes the cap-and-trade bill being pushed by the president and congressional Democrats. And of course, he's against the centerpiece of the Obama agenda: the health care reform bill.
Those are positions usually heard from Republicans running in conservative states. But Scott Brown ran on them in liberal Massachusetts and won a convincing victory, because tens of thousands of people who normally vote "D" voted "R."
President Obama said Wednesday that the anger that elected Brown is the same anger that elected him, and it goes back eight years. In other words, Massachusetts has elected its first Republican senator since the 1970s because it was still mad at George W. Bush. Wow.
— Brit Hume is the senior political analyst for Fox News Channel.
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