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" Tom Williams/Roll Call via Getty&amp;quot;Well, I don&amp;#039;t want to characterize any of his politics because then I get in trouble,&amp;quot; Gail Huff said in her first press interview about her husband&amp;#039;s campaign, &amp;quot;but we have \u2014 I&amp;#039;m just going to say \u2014 we have very, very, um, we have a lot of conversations about issues.&amp;quot;    Why is Scott Brown a Republican? As I followed him around Massachusetts this January (for a profile in the April issue of Esquire), that was the question that kept coming to my mind. It&amp;#039;s a tough place for members of the party that opposed John F. Kennedy, but people seemed to love Brown. If he&amp;#039;d just put a D after his name, they&amp;#039;d probably name the courthouse after him. And he doesn&amp;#039;t seem all that Republican, especially when he&amp;#039;s bragging about being the most bi-partisan senator in Washington or saying how much he admires President Obama. Culturally he seems downright liberal, a Mr. Mom who took care of the kids while his journalist wife did the hard-charging career thing. And given his history as a disco-era male model given to lavender leather shorts and visits to Plato&amp;#039;s Retreat, he&amp;#039;s certainly no Santorum when it comes to sexuality. When I asked him, he said he believed in hard work and a strong national defense. And when I asked if Ronald Reagan was an influence, he declined to rhapsodize about Reagan. &amp;quot;Sure, I liked Reagan&amp;quot; was about as far as he went. Like I said, he doesn&amp;#039;t seem all that Republican. So I asked his wife, Gail Huff. &amp;quot;Is his father Republican? Is that where this comes from?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Yes,&amp;quot; she answered. &amp;quot;But that&amp;#039;s not why. It&amp;#039;s his grandfather.&amp;quot; I waited for her to continue. &amp;quot;Because his grandparents basically raised him,&amp;quot; she added. Famously, Brown came from a broken home, spending much of his early years with his grandparents. Huff said his grandfather wasn&amp;#039;t politically active but he was definitely an old-school conservative in many ways. He was from New Hampshire, an engineer who trained at MIT, and just as sober and careful as a you&amp;#039;d expect a flinty New England engineer to be. &amp;quot;Scott just thought the world of him,&amp;quot; Huff said. &amp;quot;Scott didn&amp;#039;t have any role models in his life, and this is a man who had gone to college, who was very analytical.&amp;quot; In Brown&amp;#039;s autobiography, his grandfather emerges as a distant and somewhat odd character who discouraged his wife from &amp;quot;face painting,&amp;quot; wore ties under his sweaters even on weekends, and whiled away long hours with crossword puzzles and solitaire. He didn&amp;#039;t sleep in the same room with his wife, but shared his room with his grandson for years. It was this personal restraint and rectitude that gave Brown a vision of how to live a more orderly life than the one his parents had modeled for him.  But even when, armed with this knowledge, I asked Brown about his political influence directly, Brown seemed to bristle. &amp;quot;Well, he was a great guy. He was there for my mom and me growing up, always the rock and truly the Victorian saver and thinker, very thoughtful and methodical. So yes, he gave me that work ethic and that saving that I&amp;#039;ve been doing since I was 17, 18 years old. He&amp;#039;s the guy behind it, yeah.&amp;quot; Work ethic wasn&amp;#039;t what I meant though. Believe it or not, there are liberals with the work ethic. Surely choosing a political party went deeper than that? I tried again. &amp;quot;And did he talk to you about political philosophy as well?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;No, not really.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;So how did you get the idea that he was a Republican?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Well, because he was a Republican.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;But how did that, how did you choose, how did that become politics for you?&amp;quot; The question seemed to annoy him. &amp;quot;Well, because I know the value of a dollar, and I felt the Republican Party appreciates the value of the dollar more. That&amp;#039;s, I think, initially how it happened.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s it? Not &amp;quot;Obama is a socialist, the Real America\u2122 is ending&amp;quot;? Just work ethic and &amp;quot;appreciates the value of a dollar&amp;quot;? This is supposed to get people out to the polls? You see the problem. If Brown only votes with the Republicans 54 percent of the time, as he bragged at one point during our interviews, why be a Republican? Especially at a time when most people who use the word mean something so very different by it. But in the end, Brown&amp;#039;s reticence didn&amp;#039;t seem like a mere campaign tactic, the effort to avoid being identified as a conservative in a liberal state. I believe it goes as deep as things can go, deep into the workshop of the heart \u2014 and that&amp;#039;s why Scott Brown, too stubborn and too loyal to change his political affiliation but trapped in the a bizarro-world state where a Republican dare not say his name, reveals more with his silence than all the other Republicans can with words.  (For the full story, &amp;quot;The Agony of the Massachusetts Republican,&amp;quot; pick up the April issue of Esquire \u2014 on sale any day now.) PLUS: Who Is Scott Brown, Really? The Esquire Interviews &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; Follow The Politics Blog on RSS and on the Twitter &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a13285/gail-huff-interview-esquire-7455200/>