America is “at a dangerous moment for our country and our friends,” said Scott Brown, the Republican candidate for Senate in New Hampshire, on Wednesday afternoon. In a speech at St. Anselm College near Manchester, Brown described the chaos that’s broken out across the world over the last year or so. Unrest in Ukraine with an aggressive and assertive Russia. Iran’s continued pursuit of nuclear weapons threatening America’s ally of Israel. The explosive growth of ISIS and the reemergence of Islamic terrorism in the Middle East that has killed thousands in Iraq and Syria, including America citizens. “It’s starting to feel like the world is on fire, with so many crises getting worse, so many adversaries gaining ground,” Brown said.
His address criticized Obama’s “maxed out” and “worn down” foreign policy. “This is what foreign policy looks like without clarity and conviction. This is what the world looks like without American leadership,” Brown said of the tumultuous state of global affairs.
“It’s hardly surprising that national security has become a central issue in the election of 2014,” Brown added.
What Brown might have said is that national security has become a central issue of his campaign against Democratic senator Jeanne Shaheen. Over the past few months, Brown has focused on two major, related issues—national security (specifically, Islamic terrorism), and illegal immigration. National security is theme of his latest ad. All the while, Brown’s been quietly moving up in the polls in a race that previously appeared out of reach for Republicans.
Shaheen, a former governor first elected to the Senate in 2008, leads Brown by 5 points in the average of polls. There’s plenty more for Brown to do if he hopes to win, but the gap has closed considerably since the summer, when Shaheen was regularly polling double digits ahead of the Republican. One recent poll from CNN showed the candidates tied, and five of the last six polls have Shaheen leading by six points or less. In only two of those polls does she earn the support of a majority those surveyed.
What’s changed for Brown? The polls aren’t clear, the former Massachusetts senator has capitalized on recent events that may be giving him a boost. In July, as unaccompanied minors began flooding across the southern border, Brown began to criticize the “pro-amnesty policies” of Barack Obama and Shaheen. He was one of the first candidates for Congress to mention the border crisis in a campaign ad. In another ad, he specifically mentioned Shaheen’s support for the Gang of 8 immigration reform bill that passed the Senate last year as a cause for “lawlessness on the border.” The lack of immigration enforcement became a signature part of Brown’s stump speech.
“I believe it’s one of the greatest threats affecting our country,” he told radio host Laura Ingraham on Wednesday.
Over the next month, Brown’s numbers against Shaheen improved. A June poll of likely voters by local news station WMUR, for example, had Brown down 12 points. In August, the WMUR poll had him just 2 points down.
With the Middle East aflame again, Brown is banking on foreign policy to put him over the line. Brown staffers tried to gin up plenty of interest in Wednesday’s “major” speech, sending excerpts to the media beforehand. The hype was enough that even Shaheen felt the need to preempt Brown’s criticisms. “I’m happy to put my foreign policy credentials up against Scott Brown’s any day,” she told National Journal in a story published Wednesday morning.
It’s a fight Brown seems eager to have—if he can successfully tie the popular Shaheen to the unpopular Obama. Nationally, Obama’s job approval on foreign policy is the lowest of his presidency. The CNN poll showing Brown and Shaheen tied also had Obama’s approval rating in New Hampshire at 35 percent, with 60 percent saying they disapprove of his job as president. Meanwhile, 54 percent had a favorable opinion of Shaheen.
“Senator Shaheen is a nice person, but that is not enough,” Brown said Wednesday. “As you know, she is the senior senator from New Hampshire, and a member of the Foreign Relations committee. She has been in that privileged position for nearly six years. And she has a record that is readily summed up in a single number: 99 percent. That is how often Senator Shaheen votes in support of any policy of the Obama administration, whatever it is.”
Brown’s campaign has sought to paint Shaheen as out of touch with the threat of radical Islam. She’s given them a few opportunities. In May, while the Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram held hundreds of young Christian girls captive and forced them to convert to Islam, Shaheen said in a Senate hearing that she agreed with a State Department official who said the group was not “Islamist.”
“Clearly, we need to make sure Islam is not confused with some of these horrible terrorist acts that have been and continue to be perpetrated by terrorists groups,” Shaheen said. Brown took the opportunity to remind voters that when he was in the Senate, he had sponsored a bill to designate Boko Haram as a terrorist organization. The bill went nowhere in the Foreign Relations committee, on which Shaheen sits. The State Department eventually gave the group the terrorist designation.
In another instance, Shaheen missed an April 2013 Foreign Relations committee hearing on U.S. policy in Syria, during which witnesses testified about the growing threat in that country of a terrorist group calling itself the Islamic State of Syria and the Levant. Shaheen was not listed as present on the hearing’s official transcript, nor did she ask a question during the proceedings. She was, however, scheduled to headline at a Democratic fundraising breakfast earlier that morning, and later she attended an Appropriations subcommittee hearing.
Shaheen’s started talking tough on ISIS and terrorism. Earlier this month she “distanced herself” from Obama’s lack of action in Syria and Iraq. It was at an appearance in New Hampshire with Shaheen that Vice President Joe Biden promised (a little more forcefully than the White House likely preferred) that the U.S. would follow ISIS “to the gates of hell.” Afterward, Shaheen made sure to tweet that she agreed with Biden on the gates of hell stuff.
But Brown is arguing his Democratic opponent is all talk and no action. He’s criticized her support of the 2011 U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq. In the St. Anselm speech, Brown said he and other members of the Senate’s Armed Services committee signed a letter to the president urging him to reconsider the troop withdrawal. “It was obvious to us, and to the commanders we had spoken to over there, that a residual force was essential to preserve America’s hard-won gains. Leave all at once, and right away, and that pullout would be seen as a victory by our enemies all across the Middle East. And all kinds of bad actors would move in, exactly as ISIS has now done,” Brown said.
Brown said Democrats like Joe Lieberman signed the letter, along with New Hampshire’s Republican senator, Kelly Ayotte. “One member who didn’t join us was Senator Jeanne Shaheen,” he said. “Then as now, she wasn’t in the habit of questioning the administration.”
With the war in Iraq ending and the Obama White House fueling the idea that al Qaeda and its imitators were “on the run,” not questioning the administration on foreign policy was a political winner for Shaheen at the time. Brown’s best hope is that the politics of national security have shifted in his direction.
