Every active National guardsman must partake in a two-week training program each year. U.S. Senators are not exempted.
Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.), a lieutenant colonel, said he’d like to conduct his annual training in Afghanistan.
“As a Lieutenant Colonel in the Massachusetts Army National Guard, I have service obligations that I fulfill each year,” Brown said in a news release.
The Senator is not the first lawmaker to want to go overseas. Illinois’ own republican Sen. Mark Kirk, at the time a congressman, traveled to Afghanistan twice. (One of those stints led to a challenge about Kirk’s military record, but that’s another story.)
Brown’s reason to leave the country? “Doing so will help me to better understand our ongoing mission in that country, and provide me first-hand experience for my duties on the Senate Armed Services, Homeland Security, and Veterans Affairs committees,” he said.
According to The New York Times, the 51-year-old first-term Senator “has never been deployed to a combat zone,” but traveled “with the National Guard [to] Paraguay in 2005 and Kazakhstan in 2007.” Brown trained last year in Massachusetts.
There’s no question Brown loves to serve his country, he’s a senator and an active guardsman, after all, but can the plan to train overseas be equated with political theater? Brown’s first term is up next year (he filled the late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s seat and therefore had a shortened term), and Brown is likely looking for ways to campaign.
“It sounds like the Senator is capitalizing on all the Osama bin Laden hype and is planning to put this arrow in his future ‘Brown for President’ quiver,” said Kandie Stroud, a Democratic consultant and president of Stroud Communications, a political and media strategy firm. “Brown’s Guard service probably would have gone largely unnoticed if the Bin Laden assassination hadn’t captured the attention of the entire globe.”
Former Chairman of the Democratic Party of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Lester Hyman, said there’s no point in playing politics on this one.
“It’s a no-win situation to question the Senator’s motivation, I’ll leave that to the psychologists,” Hyman said. “In the meantime, good for him for going to Afghanistan to see for himself what’s happening there. And if he’d like to sign up for a longer stay there, we Democrats won’t be at all upset.”
No word yet on what kind of exercises are involved in his training in Afghanistan.
