She doesn’t have Scott Brown’s truck, but she’s got his spirit. She is veteran Republican political operative Beth Lindstrom of Groton, who is seeking to unseat Democrat U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren in the upcoming 2018 election. First she must get through a contested GOP primary.
The truck in question is the battered old pickup Republican candidate Brown — now U.S. ambassador to New Zealand — drove across the state when he defeated then-Democrat Attorney General Martha Coakley for the U.S. Senate in 2010. That was a special election to fill the remaining two years of the late U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy’s term. Kennedy died in 2009 at age 77.
Brown, an obscure Republican state senator from Wrentham, magically caught lightning in a bottle when he and his beat-up truck came out of nowhere to upset the heavily favored Coakley and take the “Kennedy seat.” Beth Lindstrom managed that legendary campaign, and now she would like to do for herself what she did for Brown. And that is the almost impossible task of recapturing lightning in that bottle.
Lindstrom, who was the state’s secretary of consumer affairs under Romney, wants to take on Warren, who’s become a national figure among leftists and is considered by some as a possible candidate for president in 2020. Maybe it can’t be done, but you never know unless you try. Some political observers believe Warren has many of the same problems Coakley had — mainly that people do not warm up to her and that the more she campaigns, the more she turns people off.
Lindstrom is a successful businesswoman who has founded several startup companies. She also once ran the Massachusetts State Lottery, and is the mother of three grown sons. Her husband is a lawyer. To get to Warren, however, Lindstrom must first beat two primary opponents. They are state Rep. Geoff Diehl of Whitman, an early Donald Trump supporter, and John Kingston, a wealthy businessman from Winchester. All three will seek the Republican Party endorsement when the GOP meets in convention in Worcester on April 28. The GOP primary is Sept. 4.
While Diehl is considered the favorite to win the party endorsement, Lindstrom and Kingston are expected to each win the necessary 15 percent of the delegate vote to appear on the September primary ballot. Some Republicans at the convention will remember that Lindstrom was the first female executive of the Massachusetts Republican Party. Some won’t care.
Diehl is Trump’s man in Massachusetts. So his vote at the convention will be a poll on how well Trump is doing among activist Republicans.
While Hillary Clinton clobbered Trump in the 2016 election in Massachusetts, Trump did get one million Bay Staters to vote for him. Lindstrom was one of them. She generally supports the president on issues like immigration, tax reform and deregulation. However, she has some misgivings — as many Trump supporters do — about his governing style.
She lists these misgivings as the “Three T’s — tone, temperament and Twitter.” Lindstrom could be Warren’s worst nightmare. She’s well-spoken and has accomplishments both in government and in business. She has confidence in what she is doing because she has lived the issues she is talking about.
Maybe more important, however, is that Lindstrom has the “likable” factor, which Warren, like Hillary Clinton, does not. You don’t have to like someone to vote for them, but it helps.
If a key issue is jobs, then Lindstrom knows what it takes to create them. “Senator Warren thinks government creates jobs. I think people do. That’s the difference,” she said. “Remember when Warren said, ‘You didn’t build that’ to people who created businesses and companies? Well, yes, I did build that,” Lindstrom said.
It is a different time and a different race. But Lindstrom has a lot more going for her today than Scott Brown did in 2010 — except for the truck, of course.
