Scott Brown wins the special election to fill the Senate seat vacated by the late Senator Ted Kennedy. Following the race between Brown and Coakley this past week, it wasn't a big surprise – was it? The Coakley campaign turned decidedly desperate, dirty and more reliant on big names like President Obama at the last moment in an effort to pull out all the stops, only to fall 5 points short in the end. Scott Brown can look back on the last couple of months and know that it was his own personal work ethic that won out in the end. One can assume that most political analysts will probably declare that Scott Brown was in the middle of the "perfect storm" politically on Tuesday. They would be right.

There will be plenty of analysis on both sides of the isle and even the middle. To us here at The Somerville News, it's easy – Mike Capuano should have been the Democratic candidate. Is is that simple, really? No. Are we a little biased because Mike is a Somerville guy? No comment.

So, like it or not, Scott Brown is our new junior Senator and if the Democratic Party is smart, they will not hold up his swearing in. That will be tough to do, but we have faith that they will do the right thing.

Brown ran a predominately positive campaign and pressed a lot of flesh – and yes, had a lot of help in the end, but personally worked as hard the first day of the campaign as he did the last day of the campaign. Therein lies the basic difference between the two candidates in this election. One willing to talk to anyone, the other taking a vacation and assuming the hard fight was over when she beat out Capuano.

There are bigger issues at play, and not just the fundamental differences of Republican versus Democrat either – the biggest and most glaring issue to materialize from all this is that the Democratic Party needs to lick its wounds and eat a lot of humble pie to stop the bleeding of its image after the over the top display of "do anything to win" mentality that reared its ugly head in the last week of the campaign.

So now we get to send a Republican to the Senate. Regardless of how "independent" he claims to be, he still has the R in front of his name. That is worrying to some people, and for good reason. Basic Republican ideology is not very popular around here, so it will be interesting to see how middle of the road and "bi-partisan" Brown will be, or he will certainly have a strong opponent with a D in front of his/her name when it comes time for reelection.

One thing is certain – other states are looking at us and wondering what the Hell is wrong with us. We are arguably the most liberal state in the country, and yet we elect Republicans as Governor every once in a while in an effort to "appear" middle of the road. Is that it, really? One only needs to look at the history of elected members of the House and Senate from this state to see just how screwy we really are as an electorate.

In the last 100 years, we have only elected 4 women members to the House. We have never elected a woman to the Senate. Doesn't that seem strange for the most liberal state in the country? How about this Senate seat in the first place? Since World War II, there have only been two people "regularly" elected to fill the seat. The first was Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. in 1947, and the second was the man who defeated him – John F. Kennedy in 1953. That's it. Everyone from then forward was either appointed or elected via Special Election.

In case you are saying to yourself that Ted Kennedy was elected after his brother, history tells a different story – JFK resigned from the Senate because he was elected President in 1960, but couldn't appoint his brother Ted to fill out the remainder of his term, because Ted was only 28 at the time (you have to be 30 to sit in the Senate for those who missed civics in high school).

So is it really strange that Scott Brown beat Martha Coakley, really? No. All we can do is hope he works for all of us, regardless of party affiliation – we have faith, and so should you.