What Brown's win means for the Dems

[DarrinS]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...012103500.html

On Jan. 14, five days before the Massachusetts special election, President Obama was in full bring-it-on mode as he rallied House Democrats behind his health-care reform. "If Republicans want to campaign against what we've done by standing up for the status quo and for insurance companies over American families and businesses, that is a fight I want to have."

The bravado lasted three days. When Obama campaigned in Boston on Jan. 17 for Obamacare supporter Martha Coakley, not once did he mention the health-care bill. When your candidate is sinking, you don't throw her a millstone.

After Coakley's defeat, Obama pretended that the real cause was a generalized anger and frustration "not just because of what's happened in the last year or two years, but what's happened over the last eight years."

Let's get this straight: The antipathy to George W. Bush is so enduring and powerful that . . . it just elected a Republican senator in Massachusetts? Why, the man is omnipotent.

And the Democrats are delusional: Scott Brown won by running against Obama, not Bush. He won by brilliantly nationalizing the race, running hard against the Obama agenda, most notably Obamacare. Killing it was his No. 1 campaign promise.

Bull's-eye. An astonishing 56 percent of Massachusetts voters, according to a Rasmussen poll, called health care their top issue. In a Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates poll, 78 percent of Brown voters said their vote was intended to stop Obamacare. Only a quarter of all voters in the Rasmussen poll cited the economy as their top issue, nicely refuting the Democratic view that Massachusetts was just the usual anti-in bent resentment you expect in bad economic times.

Brown ran on a very specific, very clear agenda. Stop health care. Don't Mirandize terrorists. Don't raise taxes; cut them. And no more secret backroom deals with special interests.

These deals -- the Louisiana purchase, the Cornhusker kickback -- had engendered a national disgust with the corruption and arrogance of one-party rule. The final straw was the union payoff -- in which labor bosses smugly walked out of the White House with a five-year exemption from a ("Cadillac") health insurance tax Democrats were imposing on the 92 percent of private-sector workers who are not unionized.

The reason both wings of American liberalism -- congressional and mainstream media -- were so surprised at the force of anti-Democratic sentiment is that they'd spent Obama's first year either ignoring or disdaining the clear early signs of resistance: the tea-party movement of the spring and the town-hall meetings of the summer. With characteristic condescension, they contemptuously dismissed the protests as the mere excrescences of a redneck, retrograde, probably racist rabble.

You would think lefties could discern a proletarian vanguard when they see one. Yet they kept denying the reality of the rising opposition to Obama's social democratic agenda when summer turned to fall and Virginia and New Jersey turned Republican in the year's two gubernatorial elections.

The evidence was unmistakable. Independents, who in 2008 had elected Obama, swung massively against the Democrats: dropping 16 points in Virginia, 21 in New Jersey. On Tuesday, it was even worse: Independents, who had gone 2-to-1 Republican in Virginia and New Jersey, now went 3-to-1 Republican in hyper-blue Massachusetts. Nor was this an expression of the more agitated elements who vote in obscure low-turnout elections. The turnout on Tuesday was the highest for any nonpresidential Massachusetts election in 20 years.

Democratic cocooners will tell themselves that Coakley was a terrible candidate who even managed to diss Curt Schilling. True, Brown had Schilling. But Coakley had Obama. When the bloody sock beats the presidential seal -- of a man who had them swooning only a year ago -- something is going on beyond personality.

That something is substance -- political ideas and legislative agendas. Democrats, if they wish, can write off their Massachusetts humiliation to high unemployment, to Coakley or, the current favorite among sophisticates, to generalized anger. That implies an inchoate, unthinking lashing-out at whoever happens to be in power -- even at your liberal betters who are forcing on you an agenda that you can't even see is in your own interest.

Democrats must so rationalize, otherwise they must take democracy seriously, and ask themselves: If the people really don't want it, could they possibly have a point?

"If you lose Massachusetts and that's not a wake-up call," said moderate -- and sentient -- Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, "there's no hope of waking up."

I say: Let them sleep.

[George Gervin's Afro]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...012103500.html

I stopped at Krauthammer

[DarrinS]

I stopped at Krauthammer

Suit yourself.

[TheProfessor]

i stopped at krauthammer

+1

[George Gervin's Afro]

Suit yourself.

I don't particularly care what conservatives say about what dems should do and not do.. if conservatives were so smart they would not be the minority in Congress.

[Marcus Bryant]

Popularity does not mean jack, either way.

[ElNono]

Yeah but, what can Brown do for you?

[TeyshaBlue]

I don't particularly care what conservatives say about what dems should do and not do.. if conservatives were so smart they would not be the minority in Congress.

I'm a in' genius primarily because I'm NOT in Congress.

[TeyshaBlue]

I don't particularly care what conservatives say about what dems should do and not do.. if conservatives were so smart they would not be the minority in Congress.

Will conservatives be smart again when they regain the majority? Will progressives suddenly become stupid because they're in the minority?

Parse that all you want, but that's pretty in' lame.

[jack sommerset]

It means the Obama machine is dead 9 months early.

[boutons_deux]

From what hear from the Stalinistically pure conservatives here, conservatives weren't in office 2000-2008, it was the Repugs.

I don't really care who's in power, as long as they run govt efficiently, seriously, and in good faith. Obviously, the govt-hating/destroying Repugs don't qualify. The Repugs are really anti-governing, not even policies, just all politics, all the time.

One silver-lining of Brown's win is that Magic Negro regroups and comes out fighting as nastily, smash-mouthedly, uncivilly as any Repug. But that won't happen.

[DarrinS]

I don't really care who's in power, as long as they run govt efficiently, seriously, and in good faith. Obviously, the govt-hating/destroying Repugs don't qualify. The Repugs are really anti-governing, not even policies, just all politics, all the time.

You are correct. We don't like government, especially huge govt that doesn't listen to the people

[Winehole23]

...unless it's fighting unnecessary, unpopular, unwinnable wars.

[Winehole23]

In which case you bow to it, applaud its obliviousness to the will of the people, and denounce those who don't do similarly as traitors, commies and a terrorist fifth column.

[DarrinS]

In which case you bow to it, applaud its obliviousness to the will of the people, and denounce those who don't do similarly as traitors, commies and a terrorist fifth column.

Not true. A lot of Dems were for it, before they were against it. I just like to point that out.

[Winehole23]

I was talking about you and all the other "conservative" internationalists.

[Winehole23]

Walking hand in hand to war with all the liberal ones, naturally. Of course the Dems were for it.

[Winehole23]

It's one big happy war party, as the foreign policy of Obama makes abundantly clear.

[Winehole23]

The antiwar emphasis in 2006 was an electoral expedience not really related to the core values of the party.

[Winehole23]

Too bad you can't see beyond the political duopoly. I guess that's why you seem to think pointing to Democratic Party support for the war in 2001-2003 moots the broad popular consensus against it now.

[Marcus Bryant]

Making Obama the frontman of the 'War on Terror' was, again, the best move the establishment has made in quite some time.

[Winehole23]

The antiwar emphasis in 2006 was an electoral expedience not really related to the core values of the party.

They proved it by pissing backwards on their own antiwar base.

[DarrinS]

Nobody is pro-war, especially not ill-advised, poorly managed wars.

[Winehole23]

(Retracted, with my apology, DarrinS.)

[Marcus Bryant]

They proved it by pissing backwards on their own antiwar base.

You wouldn't know that there are Americans dying on a battlefield somewhere today.