Scott Brown Won't Run in Mass. Senate Race

Impact

“U are the first to know,” Scott Brown texted the Boston Herald in announcing his choice not to run for the U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts vacated by Secretary of State pick John Kerry, who is leaving to becoming secretary of state.

This leaves Democrats and U.S. representatives Stephen Lynch and Edward Markey as the only two declared candidates for office. The news comes as an interesting turn of events is an interesting development, especially after it had been speculated that the GOP derailed UN Ambassador Susan Rice's possible nomination in order to goad Obama into picking Kerry, thus leaving the seat open for Brown. conspiracies of Republican disapproval against U.S. ambassador Susan Rice claimed deliberate in order to keep Rice out of the Secretary of State race, place Kerry instead, and then have Kerry replaced by a Republican.

In statement, Brown said,

“…I was not at all certain that a third Senate campaign in less than four years, and the prospect of returning to a Congress even more partisan than the one I left, was really the best way for me to continue in public service at this time,” Brown said in a statement this afternoon.” 

In Kerry’s place Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick selected former chief-of-staff William “Mo” Cowan, 43, an African-American to serve as an interim senator after rumors of a female African-American or Vicki Kennedy  pick took root.

Cowan is an alumnus of Harvard Business School, Northeastern University Law School, and Duke University.

He will become the first African-American to represent Massachusetts in the Senate since Republican Edward W. Brooke held the seat from 1966 to 1978. Cowan will join Republican Tim Scott as one of the only two African-Americans currently in the U.S. Senate.

“The reason I am standing here is not because I am a person of color, an African-American,” Cowan said in response to the race question.

“I believe the governor, as he has indicated, has the confidence I will do the job he is sending me to do.”