Who the heck is Scott Brown?

Who the heck is Scott Brown? Start with this: He’s Joe Six-Pack with a law degree and 30 years in the National Guard. A lieutenant colonel with the Army’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps, he is also a triathlete and a Mr. Mom to his busy wife, Boston TV news reporter Gail Huff. The couple has two daughters, one of whom, Ayla, was a 2006 “American Idol” semi-finalist and is a star basketball player on a four-year scholarship at Boston College. The other, Arianna, is a pre-med student at Syracuse…

In any case, Brown’s more compelling package concerns issues, his positions on which are not so easily categorized along party lines. He supports a woman’s right to choose, for instance, though he opposes partial-birth abortion and federal funding for abortion and believes in strong parental notification laws. He opposes same-sex marriage but believes the decision should be left to states. He would not vote to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act but does not favor a federal constitutional amendment declaring marriage as between a man and a woman…

One political observer describes Brown as a “JFK Republican.” A Brown ad, in fact, features a 1962 Kennedy speech in which the president called for broad-based tax cuts to create jobs and stimulate the economy. Brown’s campaign advisers apparently felt confident enough in the message to risk the obvious Lloyd Bentsen rebuttal: “I knew Jack Kennedy. . . . You’re no Jack Kennedy.”