Nice Guy Scott Brown goes snarky in debate with Elizabeth Warren

By E.J. Dionne Jr. WashPost

What happened tonight to the Scott Brown who had endeared himself to a lot of Massachusetts voters by being a nice guy? The incumbent Republican senator, who has fallen behind Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren in some recent polls, opened tonight’s debate in Boston by attacking her, and he stayed on the attack all night.

My hunch is that whatever points he scored off Warren were more than wiped away by a tone that Rep. Barney Frank, a Warren supporter, accurately described on Rachel Maddow’s show as “snarky.” In his effort to derail Warren in a debate, Brown may have undermined one of the most important aspects of his get-along-with-everybody brand.

The fact that he opened the encounter by dredging up a story that had been in hibernation since the spring about Warren’s claim of having some Cherokee background suggests that Brown is far less confident now than he had reason to be last summer, when he was running ahead in the polls. “Professor Warren claimed that she was a Native American, a person of color and as you can see, she’s not,” Brown said. In fact, many people in Oklahoma, where Warren grew up, have Cherokee blood. Warren told the story about her father and mother’s relationship to explain her belief that she is part Cherokee and parried by insisting that she had never used any claims of minority status to gain admission to university, or to get a job. Brown kept demanding that she release her personnel records to prove it. There was something strange, even offensive, about Brown’s making an assumption about Warren’s background on the basis of her skin color.

(More here.)