Meet Scott Brown, Massachusetts' Republican Senator-Elect
Shades of Sarah Palin and Barack Obama in meteoric rise of new GOP star.
Jan. 20, 2010 -- 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."
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