Mark Leibovich’s profile of Scott Brown is a good read, and a nice contrast with Liz Robbins’ effort from just before the special election. It’s prompted a few thoughts.

(1) Dig into anyone’s biography and you will find tales of woe, whether due to external circumstances — the scarring effects of poverty, growing up without a parent, mental illness or crippling self-doubt, drug or alcohol abuse — and in a sense, our fixation on the lives of celebrities and politicians only serves to train a lens on particular manifestations of these near-universal challenges. Imagine a VH1 Behind the Music episode covering the lives of everyone you’ve met who has somehow been brought low by a combination of personal demons and unfortunate circumstances. Then consider that most of the well-adjusted, high-functioning adults you know have overcome some unspoken or mostly unspoken misery.

One pattern you find is that some people can’t get over what they see as their own victimization at the hands of neglectful parents or broken institutions, and they feel a need to direct their anger and bitterness towards some outside force that serves as a stand-in for the evildoers. This often serves as a powerful motivation for political activists on all sides. Others who’ve had similarly difficult experiences embrace a different narrative, e.g., the parents and institutions faced problems and limitations of their own, and life is always uneven and occasionally tragic. You have to get on with your life and do your best, etc. Or the only person you ultimately have control over is yourself — your moods, your habits, your behavior can be shaped and disciplined, and if you make the right choices you can avoid making the same mistakes as those around you.

Perhaps the most admirable thing about Barack Obama, as far as I can tell from the biographical accounts and from his own words, is that his self-narrative really does seem to be about making the best of a life that’s had plenty of ups and downs. A friend of mine was telling me about her conservative Republican mother came to vote for Obama after reflecting on his biography, and of how proud she’d be if Obama were her son. Now, this isn’t how I tend to evaluate candidates, and we can all criticize it and with good reason. But this is worth thinking about. My rather strong disagreements with Obama aside, he does seem like an upstanding family man of strong character, and this reflects active choices that he made about what to do with his experiences.

Reading Leibovich’s profile of Scott Brown, I get the sense that he’s had a similarly remarkable life. I say surprised because, frankly, I’m as susceptible to stereotypes as the next guy. And though I’ve found him an impressive candidate from the start, the public image of Scott Brown made him seem like a prosperous suburban dad with a healthy sense of self. One could get the impression that Brown was politically motivated in large part by a desire to keep what he has. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that. But it doesn’t really resonate with larger themes about patriotism and service. This is an image that plenty of people — including many of my left-wing acquaintances friends who saw Brown’s victory as a profound tragedy — find very distasteful. The fact that Brown drove a large truck, a stunt one friend referred to as odious rich-guy populism, was the icing on the cake.

But it turns out that Brown had a long, hard road to his success. As Leibovich reports, Brown had an extremely difficult early life. His parents divorced when he was an infant, and he dealt with a parade of surrogate parents, not all of them pleasant characters. One is reminded of Andrew Cherlin’s book The Marriage-Go-Round on how the unstable partnerships of parents can impact the lives of children.

“I grew up fast,” Mr. Brown recalled. “I remember waking up in the middle of the night, and hearing the banging and the screams and having to be the 5- or 6-year-old boy having to save Mom.”
He grew his hair long, listened to Aerosmith and Kiss and, at 12, was arrested for shoplifting a bunch of albums (Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and Grand Funk Railroad) at a local mall.
He went before a judge, Samuel Zoll, who invited him into his chambers and asked him about his life. Mr. Brown responded by saying he loved basketball and had younger half siblings who looked up to him. “How do you think they would like to watch you play basketball in jail?” the judge asked, according to Mr. Brown’s telling. Judge Zoll demanded that Mr. Brown write a 1,500-word essay about the episode and eventually let him go.
Mr. Brown said that experience was a pivot point in his life, leading him to be more serious about school and sports.

And that’s roughly when he joined the National Guard, a decision that Brown credits with transforming his life for the better. During the campaign, Brown often mentioned his 29 years of service in the Guard, noting that he was just a few months shy of 30 years. There was something about Brown’s pride in his service that seemed — for a politician — strangely uncalculated. Sure enough, Leibovich’s profile suggests that Brown credits the Guard with turning things around for him. This helps provide some emotional context for Brown’s national security views.

The details of Brown’s rise to success are markedly different from Obama’s. The president flourished academically from a fairly early age, and the institutions that shaped him most seem to be the unions and community organizations he worked with as a young man in Chicago and Harvard Law School. Brown also attended elite educational institutions, yet you get the impression that the Guard has more to do with his self-perception than Tufts or Boston College Law School.

As many observed during the 2008 presidential campaign, our political divides map onto cultural or even psychographic divides. Barack Obama represented a way of life that many Americans identity with and aspire to — liberal, urban, cosmopolitan, tolerant. Sarah Palin, in contrast, represented a life defined by faith, family, rootedness, a strong sense of right and wrong. Though Brown is by all accounts a social moderate if not a social liberal, his biography resonates with a number of conservative themes. The need for strong, intact families is something that he can appreciate on a visceral level. His rootedness is different from that of a Sarah Palin, yet his Boston accent and Red Sox enthusiasm mark him as a proud product of his surroundings who hasn’t strayed far from home for long.

Martha Coakley, incidentally, was a similarly rooted person, yet like most people, she didn’t have the gift for connecting with people drawn from different circumstances. Obama’s great strength as an organizer may have come from his need to understand and adapt to new environments, the product of a somewhat itinerant childhood that often saw him forced into the role of newcomer. So despite Obama’s academic success, he could come to Chicago’s South Side and speak the language. For Brown, being the smartest kid in the class wasn’t at the core of his identity growing up — rather, it was being a long-haired shoplifting punk. So you can see why he can mix with people at places other than Tufts alumni gatherings.

The more I learn about Brown, the more I think that something very rare and significant has just happened. Chances are that he will fade from view, for better or for worse. But a political personality like his only comes to light very rarely.

(2) Leibovich writes:

Mr. Brown was considered a relatively conservative Republican in the Legislature, which would place him closer to the center among Senate Republicans in Washington.

This, of course, doesn’t jibe with Boris Schor’s analysis. Schor maintains that Brown is, according to one objective measure, more liberal than Dede Scozzafava. But perceptions count, and I assume that Leibovich interviewed many elected Republicans and Democrats to draw his conclusion.