Meet Scott Brown, Massachusetts' Republican Senator-Elect

 

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Six years before he became the new darling of the national Republican Party, Scott Brown was running in a special election for the Senate -- the Massachusetts state Senate, that is.

He'd agreed to run under one condition: He would not, under any circumstances, miss any of his daughter's high-school basketball games.

So it was that on the Friday before Election Day, Dominick Ianno, then the executive director of the Massachusetts Republican Party, found himself shuttling then-state Rep. Brown between Boston and two different suburbs so Brown could wedge in a basketball game between two final campaign debates.

Watch: During Victory Speech, Brown Says His Daughters are 'Available'

With rush-hour traffic, he would barely make the second debate on time. But he wouldn't leave Ayla's game even a minute early.

"Making time for his daughter's games was a no-brainer. But I had more respect that it was his only caveat," Ianno said.

Brown, a 50-year-old lawyer and National Guardsman, Tuesday pulled off one of the great upsets in political history -- grabbing Ted Kennedy's old Senate seat in the Democratic bastion of Massachusetts, and handing Republicans a critical 41st Senate vote.

He did it with the same style he displayed by taking that state Senate seat in 2004, and a state House seat six years before that: With a relentless energy and blue-collar sensibility that belied his decidedly upper-middle class lifestyle.

Today, at his first post-election press conference, the man who ran on a promise to block President Obama's health care bill vowed to be an independent voice -- a "Scott Brown Republican," he said, echoing a common campaign refrain.

"I've already made it very, very clear that I'm not beholden to anybody," Brown said. "I've been asked many times what kind of Republican I would be, and I really didn't know how to answer that. So I said I'm going to be a Scott Brown Republican… maybe there's a new breed of Republican coming to Washington."

GOP Eager for Scott Brown's Conservative Brand

Prominent GOP officials, thrilled with the upset victory, proclaimed Brown to be something of a template for the candidacies they hope to run in 2010.

"No one believed it was possible -- especially in the bluest of blue states," National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman John Cornyn, R-Texas, wrote in a memo today. "But the political naysayers who discounted Brown's candidacy and anointed Democrat Martha Coakley after she won her party's nomination miscalculated one important factor: Voters' utter dissatisfaction with the status quo."

Before catapulting himself to national attention over the race's final two weeks, Brown was perhaps best known for a few pieces of tabloid-ready trivia.

He posed nude for Cosmopolitan as a law student in 1982; his basketball-playing daughter Ayla Brown was a semi-finalist singer on "American Idol"; he's married to a TV news reporter, Gail Huff, who works at WCVB-TV, ABC's Boston affiliate.

Though he shares a home state with a once and possibly future presidential contender, former Gov. Mitt Romney, R-Mass., his rise more closely resembles that of Sarah Palin, an aw-shucks populist who tapped into voter anger and frustration aimed at Washington.