As Scott Brown prepares to ditch Massachusetts and challenge Jeanne Shaheen for her New Hampshire Senate seat, Kevin Mahnken defends the practice of carpetbagging:
There is a great deal that is silly about the politics in the United States, but nothing more fatuous and bizarre than the widely-held belief that an elected representative must somehow form a lasting relationship with a place, or embody its character and traditions, to ably work on behalf of its people. This expectation forced ex-senator Richard Lugar to go to extreme lengths to prove his residency in Indiana—a state that, in normal circumstances, no sane person would willingly claim as their home—and allowed his primary opponent to successfully paint him as absent and out of touch, costing him reelection and millions of Hoosiers a skilled and popular lawmaker. Even now,
Mary[Liz] Cheney must dodge accusations of carpetbagging in her own Wyoming Senate race. But that (truthful) designation couldn’t possibly be more important than her manifest insanity. A candidate’s policy preferences matter infinitely more than which college football team he roots for. If Brown, like Robert Kennedy and Hillary Clinton before him, were to run and win in a state he hadn’t lived in, it would go a long way toward proving that point.
The Dish 