Brown tells PAC to stop calling him lobbyist

CONCORD, N.H. — Republican Senate hopeful Scott Brown is demanding that a political action committee stop calling him a Washington lobbyist.

Mayday PAC, which aims to get big money out of politics, is backing Jim Rubens, one of Brown's rivals in New Hampshire's GOP primary. Brown's campaign manager, Colin Reed, wrote to the PAC's founder on Sunday demanding that he stop sending a flier that calls Brown a lobbyist and publicly retract what the campaign calls a ''flat-out lie.''

Brown, a former Massachusetts senator, is not a registered lobbyist though he was hired last year as counsel to the international law firm Nixon Peabody, where he was involved in business and governmental affairs.

''Your willingness to trample the truth for your own partisan political agenda has added to the coarseness of our politics,'' wrote Reed, Brown's campaign manager. ''You have turned your super PAC — which you publicly stated was formed to fight the existence of super PACs — into just one more negative message machine that exists to launch unethical and untrue attacks.''

Mayday PAC spokeswoman Allison Bryan said Brown was a lobbyist in practice, if not in name.

''For most people, common sense dictates that a former senator who joins a lobbying firm and sells his relationships in order to affect business and government is a lobbyist. We're not talking about legal definitions,'' she said. ''We're talking about those who use their position of influence to earn money and change laws that affect real Americans. That's what Scott Brown has done at Nixon Peabody.''

Brown, Rubens, and eight others are competing in Tuesday's primary.