For Brown, Mass. Senate race unfolding favorably

By Glen Johnson, Globe Staff

For Scott Brown, this US Senate race can’t be unfolding much better.

The candidate that analysts universally agree could knock him off - Governor Deval Patrick - will not get in the race. The same is true of another potential Democratic rival with what once seemed to be a formidable warchest, UMass-Lowell chancellor and former US Representative Martin Meehan. He still has about $5 million in his campaign account.

The field of declared Democratic candidates is hardly known across the state and has proven relatively weak in fund-raising. The best among them, City Year co-founder Alan Khazei, raised $930,000 during the past three months, and had to divert some of his new money to pay off lingering debts from his 2009 Senate special election campaign.

Another favorite of some top Massachusetts Democrats, Newton Mayor Setti Warren, raised just $122,000.

Brown, the Republican incumbent, raised nearly $2 million and has $9.6 million in the bank.

Then there is the open warfare in the Democratic camp.

That’s not talking about the candidates clashing among themselves over who is the best to challenge Brown when he seeks a first full, six-year term in November 2012. That’s what primaries are all about.

That’s talking about between local and national Democrats over who should be the favored candidate to challenge Brown. And like most civil wars, it’s taking casualties on all sides.

Democrats within the Beltway - and that includes Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senator Patty Murray of Washington state, who runs the Senate Democrats’ election committee - have made it clear they doubt Khazei or any of the candidates who have declared so far have the heft to mount a credible challenge to Brown.

Reid has met with one potential new entrant, Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren, and Murray has spoken openly about how she thinks her party will soon find a solid challenger - as if Khazei and a half-dozen others haven’t already announced their candidacies.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee, which is Murray’s counterpart and is charged with electing Republicans such as Brown to the Senate, is delighting in highlighting the Democrats’ own questions about their strength of their field.

Other prospective strong challengers, most particularly the state’s 10 US House members - all Democrats - have also eschewed challenging their junior Senate colleague for an array of reasons.

All of them are concerned right now about congressional redistricting. Some, likely US Representatives John Olver and Richard Neal, could conceivably be forced to run against each other as US Census results force Massachusetts to lose one congressional seat next year.

Some of the members are also political realists, seeing that one of their own - US Representative Michael Capuano, a pugnacious, vociferous, and liberal member of the delegation - foundered in the 2009 special election campaign held after Senator Edward M. Kennedy died.

Those House members know they have a strong chance of winning re-election in 2012, as do all incumbents. Why, they ask, should they give up a safe seat, especially for a campaign they skipped in 2009, when they had a chance to run in a special election where they didn’t have to risk their job at all?

Still other members, such as the dean of the congressional delegation, US Representative Edward J. Markey, appear to be eyeing a different route to the US Senate.

They think that Brown’s senior colleague, US Senator John Kerry, has a good chance of being tapped to serve as secretary of state if Obama wins a second term. If that were to happen, the governor would pick a temporary replacement and then, that person and any other challengers would participate in a special election.

Under that scenario, a Democrat could end up in the Senate without ever facing Brown. That is an appealing prospect to some, especially since the GOP bench is so thin in Massachusetts, even if Charles Baker were to come off and run for US Senate instead of possibly mounting another gubernatorial campaign.

Over the past several days, though, Brown has had even more reason to feel the race is breaking in his favor.

John Walsh, the chairman of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, appeared to drop his prior position of favoring a broad primary field leavened with frisky interaction among a bevy of local candidates; instead, in an interview with the Globe’s Joan Vennochi, he encouraged Elizabeth Warren to enter the race, appearing to adopt the steamroller, juggernaut approach to the nomination.

For the local Democrats, it was bad enough to have national Democrats undercutting them as they try to raise money and build and organization; now it seems that the chief local Democrat has done the same.

Perhaps the change of heart was no coincidence.

Obama announced yesterday that he was skipping over Warren and instead nominating Richard Cordray to serve as director of the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It’s a new government agency aimed at protecting the public from banks, mortgage firms, and credit card companies or other institutions considered to have caused or contributed to the housing collapse and recession.

Warren left Harvard to set up the CFPB, yet Obama passed over her for permanent director - and chose Cordray, a former Ohio attorney general who heads the CFPB’s enforcement division - because of doubts that Senate Republicans would approve her nomination.

“This agency was Elizabeth’s idea,” the president said in a statement, “and through sheer force of will, intelligence, and a bottomless well of energy, she has made, and will continue to make, a profound and positive difference for our country.”

Warren herself noted the politics surrounding the job, saying in her own statement: “In May, 44 Republican senators wrote a letter saying that they will block anyone from serving as CFPB Director. Many of them don’t like either the agency or the ideas that led to its creation. They lost that fight last summer in a straight up vote, but they have said they will use a filibuster over nomination to undercut the agency and its effectiveness.”

Then, sounding what is often one of Brown’s campaign themes, she added: “Partisanship may be the most important thing in Washington, but in the rest of the country, people expect their public servants to work together to learn from past regulatory failures and to put our energy into solving problems, not scoring political points.”

Massachusetts Democrats feel they have a strong chance of unseating Brown because, they think, the election math in a presidential year breaks in their favor. That may or may not be the case.

National - and now, apparently, local - Democrats may soon get that consensus candidate they want, but Warren is untested in elective politics.

And the last time Brown ran against an establishment Democrat, he won.