I don’t see what he brings to the table other than time on the relevant Senate committee, and his presidential campaign* convinced me that he’s a loser in general. It’s an important position and Clinton leaves huge shoes to fill.
It’s never been anything else. Bush and Obama even appointed Republicans to the same cabinet position- Transportation, which nobody except the appointee’s mom really cares about. (Obama also kept Robert Gates from Bush’s administration.) Which is not really surprising. If the Republicans want to reinvent Medicare and the Democrats want to expand it, it’s hard to justify appointing a Republican to HHS.
Giving Scott Brown another opportunity seems kind of stupid, but no, it’s mostly Kerry.
*Everything looks different in hindsight, but still: is it me, or in hindsight did Democrats get extremely lucky when Kerry lost? They weren’t very excited about him to begin with, and if Kerry had been elected in 2004, where is Barack Obama right now? If you assume other things stay the same, Republicans definitely would’ve won the White House in 2008 in the wake of the financial crisis that happened “on the Democrats’ watch.” Assuming VP Edwards was still brought down by his own dick as he was in real life, that gives you a possible 2012 Clinton-Obama ticket running against a Republican incumbent in this economy, and that’s the same extremely difficult position Mitt Romney was just in.