Former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown seems to have chosen his strategy for rebutting accusations of carpetbagging as he runs for senator in New Hampshire just two years after being defeated in Massachusetts. It's simple: Brown and his campaign are going to question Sen. Jeanne Shaheen's New Hampshire connections. Brown has been
test driving this line of attack for a while, but it
really flowered at Brown's campaign launch last week, courtesy of former New Hampshire Gov. John H. Sununu:
“She votes with Elizabeth Warren. She votes with [Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ed] Markey. She is the third senator from Massachusetts,” Sununu told supporters at the Portsmouth rally before introducing Brown. “Scott’s happiest days as a young man were in New Hampshire. …So it’s going to be great to have a senator that was born virtually in the state of New Hampshire. Jean Shaheen, by the way, was born in Missouri!”
"Virtually in the state of New Hampshire," of course, means "the neighboring state of Maine." (Massachusetts is also a neighboring state, but since it's where Brown actually spent his adult life and made his political name, apparently we're pretending that didn't happen.) And Jeanne Shaheen was born in Missouri, but moved to New Hampshire more than a decade before running for office there, having never run for office in Missouri or any other state than New Hampshire, the one in which she raised her children.
As Yahoo's Chris Moody notes, "It is also rather audacious to paint Shaheen as a 'senator from Massachusetts,' since Brown quite literally was, and very much wanted to remain, a senator from Massachusetts." But when it comes to convincing New Hampshire voters he's anything but a naked political opportunist, audacity is all Brown's got going for him.