Quotes of the Day

The morning after Massachusetts state senator Scott Brown pulled off an election upset for the U.S. Senate seat left vacant by Ted Kennedy, which shocked the political world, TIME political correspondent Karen Tumulty caught up with him to talk about why it happened and what it might mean:

TIME: You told a story at your victory celebration about the first moment you realized that you had a real shot at winning this race. It was when you saw a homemade sign with your name. Can you tell me where you were and when that was?
Brown: I drive around a lot. It was in central Mass., I think up near the Lunenburg area.

So at what point in the campaign was this?
It was probably about, I'd say, a week, a week and a half after the [Dec. 8] primary. They were popping up all over the place because there was a point when we actually ran out of signs. We ran out of signs, I think, three times, and we just told people, Listen, we ran out. If you want to do something, you can maybe download something or make your own. And all of a sudden, we saw these amazing signs. When we had our first snowstorm, people actually went out and made signs out of the snow. It was incredible. On snow banks they actually would do almost snow art, and on the highways and people's trucks, and gradually we saw more and more and more handwritten signs, T-shirts, hats.

One thing I was really struck by, listening to you the past few days, is the degree to which the themes that you're talking about are so much like the themes that President Obama was talking about 15 months ago: I'm going to change the way they do things in Washington. Why do you think he hasn't been able to achieve that? And why do you think you can change Washington, as opposed to Washington changing you?
First of all, I have a wife and kids, and they keep me very grounded, and I've always had that balance. Just like with [his daughter] Ayla when she was on American Idol. Gail [Huff, his wife, a local television reporter in Washington] and I would always notice when she was getting a little too full of herself. My family regularly says, "You know, Dad, do you want us to enlarge the door and open up the double doors so you can come in?" So I have a good check and balance system. We all do as family members, kind of keep an eye on each other.

That being said, I'm a man, and I can only do so much. But I know as the 41st Senator now [that] every Republican is the 41st Senator now [in their ability to deprive the Democrats of the 60 votes they need to shut down a filibuster].

To think that a majority party would use the ability to have the super-majority to kind of push things through is leaving a bad taste in people's mouths, especially as you noted the fact that President Obama made [changing the way business gets done in Washington] one of his campaign themes. You knew he was going to be transparent, he would post all these bills on the Internet, and you'd have three days to comment on them. None of that's happened. So people are disappointed in that regard.

As you listen to people talk about the health care bill, what is your sense of what they object to? Is it what is in the bill, or the process of putting it together?
Let me ask you a question. What's in the bill?

Well, I've been covering it for a year, so I kind of know.
What's in the bill now? What's the final version of the bill? No one really knows what's in the bill because every time we turn around, there is a new backroom deal with a carve-out. I've read the bills too.

You have to look at it two different ways. I have to look out as the United States Senator for Massachusetts as to what we've done [in the state]. We have a [law achieving near universal coverage] that passed unanimously. Bipartisan. Voted for it, worked on it, happy to do it. We passed it. We went from paying over almost $1 billion to the hospitals in the uncompensated health care pool to paying much less and now providing — when people walk in the door, they get a form of insurance.

So why would we take a bill that we have that has great plans, top to bottom — everyone gets exactly what they want, and if they are not covered, they go to a hospital — why would we take that plan and then [accept] a one-size-fits-all plan where the Federal Government is going to take and potentially hurt jobs, tax medical devices? We're talking about 220,000 jobs potentially being affected, cutting half a trillion from Medicare, affecting Tricare for veterans, having potentially longer lines in competing plans and subsidizing Nebraska and other types of situations.

Can you tell me, can anyone please tell me, how that is good for us?

But people say the health care bill is the Massachusetts plan taken nationally.
It's not. That's not true. There are certain component parts of it, of course. The fact that we have made an effort to insure everybody. But we passed our plan without cutting Medicare. We didn't raise taxes. It was all self-sufficient. It was done through a free-market system where people could go in and [comparison shop] for a plan, and if they couldn't afford it, they would get a form of government subsidy.

But this plan that they are pushing has so many special-interest carve-outs right now [that] people have lost faith in it. There is no tort reform in it. There's certainly the cuts in Medicare and the taxes on medical-device companies. It's totally different as to how they get to the final product.

But ultimately you say the primary objection people have is not so much the substance of the bill; it's the process as much as anything else.
No. The primary [concern] for the average voter — and I've met hundreds of thousands of people since I've been [campaigning] — the biggest problem that I have heard is that No. 1, we can't afford it, and No. 2, they don't like how it's been done behind closed doors. They don't like the political maneuvering now.

It's not even a conference committee. They are bouncing it back and forth pursuant to a special maneuver. That just says to people [that] it's automatically "Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding." It's raising red flags, and people don't trust it. We can bring it back to the drawing board and do it again.

One possibility that people in Washington are talking about now is to ask the House to pass the Senate bill.
That's what I was talking about, the political maneuvering.

If they try that, what do you think the fallout will be?
I think they'll pay for it dearly in 2010. I think people will be outraged, regardless of party, if they let that happen. And right now, the majority party seems to be the party pushing it through. What's the hurry? I mean, really, if we are going to do something, let's do it right.

• Karen Tumulty
• Scott Brown, the GOP upset victor in the Massachusetts Senate race, warns that Americans are tired of the political maneuvering over health care