BROWN WON!!!!
Bookworm on Jan 19 2010 at 7:31 pm | Filed under: Uncategorized
Coakley just conceded, with 75% of precincts reporting. I will blog tomorrow regarding this staggering sea change in American politics (and, yes, it is more significant than 1994 and 2008).
Related posts:
- To tweet is sweet
- Sanity and insanity amongst the Democrats
- Dems try to slam Brown for hinting that Obama was born out of wedlock
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Well, I’ve been wiping off my mental boots for the past few minutes after dropping in on MSNBC to check out Olberman and Matthews’ reaction to Brown’s election.
Most of the commentary was by Matthews as he sat in a Boston brew pub expounding on what he thought went wrong for the forces of light and goodness. As he was commenting, he couldn’t help but get in a swipe at Fox (quite understandable considering how many times that network has had him for lunch) and then declared that Brown was a superior tactician—whatever that means.
He said that he thought pent-up demand for a woman would have carried Coakley. Alas, those troglodyte Bay State voters! He also mentioned some Demo useful idiot who had made his mark with work on behalf of cap and trade that Matthews thought could have beaten Brown by 10 points if the Dems had strapped him to the sacrifical altar instead of Marcia.
Matthews restated his belief in big government’s role in improving our sorry lives, saying that the Democrats had failed to retail the concept of great musuems and roads brought to us courtesy of the government (but never mentioning the government’s coercive means of giving us great museums, whether we want them or not).
Anyway, I’m not the kind who gets much joy from watching my intellectual inferiors rationalize why reality keeps dropping bird splat on all their bien pensees. So, this will be my last visit to Fantasyland for the next few months.
Charles Martel, their reality checked bounced long ago.
Dateline: Monday January18, 2010
Digital history
was made on Monday when President Barack Obama became the first commander-in-chief to ‘tweet’ a message
Mr Obama’s 502,000 followers received an eagerly-awaited update on Wednesday with the focus on the economic climate
.
“One of my priorities as President is opening up the White House to the American people, so that folks can understand what we’re up to, and participate themselves”, he said.
Dateline: Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Digital history was made again today when the voters of Ma. gave Obama their ‘digital response’ – they flipped him the bird.
Dateline: Wednesday, January 20, 2010
The economic climate is projected to be very rocky if the President opens the White House – hot air meeting cold can create snow, thunderstorms, rain, hail and all hell breaking out.
A shout out to POTUS …they already participated!
Am I elated with the Brown win? Yes…of course. Here’s what worries me though. The voters have thoroughly repudiated ObamaCare. That’s good. In response, Republicans should win significant seats during the fall elections. That’s good. What isn’t so good is that we still face multi-trillion dollar deficits and an entitlement culture that we can’t sustain. Watching the election coverage, especially the FOX News voter polls, I got very nervous. I suspect that too many voters voted for Brown as a protest against Obama not for his policies but for the threat that he and his cronies pose to these voters’ own particular entitlements.
Are we getting to the point where the electorate will rise up against any party that threatens the sacrosanct entitlement programs of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, farm programs, welfare programs and the myriads of other entitlements to which we have grown accustomed? Well before Obama and his $-trillion deficits, these programs were collapsing under the weight of rising and unsustainable costs. Today, doctors are leaving Medicare in droves because they no longer feel that they get just compensation (do you see this in your medical environment, Deana?).
I hope that Brown and many other Republicans and Democrats have the courage to take on our entitlement society and somehow convince people that we have been living way beyond our means and that everyone…I mean everyone…is going to have to take a haircut. We can’t continue as a society where a majority of people expect the somebody “other” to give them something for nothing.
I just wish that I could be more optimistic about the outcome. I would hate to see Brown and the Republicans regain political power only to get hung by another voter backlash for not having fixed what can no longer be fixed without a lot of sacrifice all around.
That being said, tonight felt absolutely great. Help me out…am I just being too cynical?
snip from the AP. Worth noting that the ‘stoning’ has begun and will make the Taliban, Modesty Police Squads from Iran to Saudi Arabia blush with pride.
“Surprised and frustrated,” reported White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, promising more presidential reaction Wednesday. “Not pleased.”
Democrats could agree on the obvious: Somebody had taken the seat for granted, had underestimated the public’s anger over the economy, over the Democrats’ health care overhaul, over plain old arrogance in Washington.
Coakley pollster Celinda Lake acknowledged some missteps on the part of the campaign, such as failing to have enough money to go on the air early on to more sharply define Brown. But she said the problem was Washington and the Democratic Party. And she said the president’s effort to overhaul health care was not defined enough to earn the support of some voters.
Disgust with Democrats runs so deep, Lake said, that the Coakley campaign was unable to persuade voters that the candidate had spent her career as a prosecutor going after Wall Street.
“People didn’t believe it, and they didn’t vote for her because they think the Democrats in Washington are not putting up economic policies that serve Main Street and working families,” she said.
Retorted a White House ally:
“If they thought there was a problem with health care or the nationalization of the race, why did they ask the president to come campaign for her?” asked the operative, who demanded anonymity to speak about internal party sniping.
For a week, high-level Democratic operatives panned Coakley’s performance as so weak that even a personal appearance by Obama couldn’t save her. The White House joined in Tuesday while people were still voting in Massachusetts, blaming Coakley and dismissing the notion that the toxic political environment had been a factor.
Coakley’s campaign fired back in a point-by-point memo that blamed that very environment.
And, her aides added, if Coakley took the seat for granted, so did the high priests of the national party — the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic National Committee. Her lead, Coakley’s supporters argued, dropped significantly after the Senate passed health care reform shortly before Christmas, and even more after the Christmas Day attempted bombing in Detroit that Obama himself said was a failure of his administration.
“DNC and other Dem organizations did not engage until the week before the election, much too late to aid Coakley campaign,” read one bullet point by a campaign operative brought in to work on the campaign. Please don’t pass this on, the adviser wrote.
“I’m not looking to get in a (fight) with the White House, but neither do I want to get steamrolled,” this adviser wrote.
Too late.
“A pack full of lies and fantasies,” shot back a senior national party official quoted by The Huffington Post. “The candidate in this race and the campaign have been involved in the worst case of political malpractice in memory and they aren’t going to be able to spin themselves out of this with a memo full of lies.”
For what my two cents is worth, I saw it as a vote against the hubris of DC. No real grown up wants key decisions in their lives being made by politicians, who have never shown a vested interest in the electorate. The Dems took all in the last election and have flaunted it in the face of independents and continued to pile up on the plate all the sausage that was made behind closed doors.
The Independents decided enough and went ‘kosher’.
Danny, I share both your joy and apprehension.
We are still in for perilous times. Debt and deleveraging stalk the land. The economy is fragile, the entitlement culture unsustainable, and the electorate volatile. This hard-left, Islam-appeasing administration is weak and reckless. Domestic turmoil and emboldened enemies make for a vicious feedback loop. And now we have the heart-rending disaster of Haiti on our doorstep. (Why does everything seem to be a bad replay of the Carter years — do you remember the political mischief created by the Cuban Mariel refugees?)
Brown’s victory is heartening because it shows that we the people can be heard, but by itself does not begin to address the structural disconnect between our political class and the consent of the governed. (I have in mind 98% re-election rates funded by earmarks and the selling of tax loopholes; regulation, rigor mortis, and the death of federalism.)
But today we celebrate; tomorrow we worry!
<B> That being said, tonight felt absolutely great. Help me out…am I just being too cynical?</b>
What you describe has been seen in such things as the People’s Republic of Haven, created by David Weber. An all encompassing Basic Living Stipend that the political classes, no matter how corrupt, can no longer reduce even if they wanted to.
Let me put the proposition differently: How do we make it in the politicians’ self-interest to limit their own power? I don’t think that the founders envisioned perpetual incumbency, let alone revolving-door lobbyists, regulatory capture, or the hydra-headed bureaucracy. I suppose we could wait until a true fiscal disaster and total seize-up, until the government runs out of money like a car running out of oil.
Or perhaps we can elect patriots like Scott Brown and hope that his victory inspires a better class of people to run for office.
I don’t think that the founders envisioned perpetual incumbency….
Average life expectancy was 35 in 1776 which kinda automatically set term limits. I am not proposing anything as harsh in 2010, but term limits would certainly be in order for all of them.
I don’t know, we’ve got term limits here in California, and I haven’t noticed it making much of an improvement. Nothing substitutes for an informed public that holds elected officials accountable. I’m worried too many think that just voting their chosen guy to the capitol is enough without keeping an eye on him once he gets there.
What a wonderful night! Grand, awesome, fantastic!
And what a speech Scott Brown gave! A great, pitch-perfect mix of populism and conservatism that is perfect for the political climate of 2010. I’d never heard him speak before. That was exciting. The give and take between him and the crowd got my heart beating faster. He was deliberately challenging the Democrat establishment, and so was the crowd. (“Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can!” – catch that one?) (“41! 41! 41!” “Seat him now! Seat him now! Seat him now!”) And throwing all the references to “the truck” right back into Obama’s face and teeth. Oh, how delicious! What a grand, grand challenge, preparing to seize the mantle of The People from The Chosen One. Stunning.
However Danny Lemieux is right above, I think. Our long-term problems will likely remain unaddressed.
In the end all politics is local, and it is about the economy, and people’s pocketbooks. Massachusetts voters rightly saw that the National Health Care plan offered by the Democrats would bring them zero in benefits, and much in pain instead. It would hurt them worse than the rest of the entire country.
But there are many other themes that Scott Brown hit upon that will resonate strongly; and health care may not resonate with the total power it resonated with in Massachusetts, but it too will still resonate.
Some Democrats already have gotten the message from New Jersey and Virginia and now, Massachusetts. But the leadership of the Democrat establishment most definitely has NOT gotten it yet. There’s already enough evidence out there for them to get it; but idealogues are notoriously blind and deaf. They might shift in time to save themselves from a debacle in November 2010, or they might not. The shifts among the electorate – anti-Republican establishment in 2006 and 2008, and clearly anti-Democrat establishment now in 2010 – are breathtaking in the wildness of the swings, aren’t they? I just can’t believe people are shifting from conservative to liberal to conservative that quickly. They’re in rebellion. If the Democrats see this clearly enough, they can make a move and retain (too much) control in 2010.
I actually hope the Democrat establishment leadership remains tone-deaf and blind, and doesn’t listen. Double down on health care! Keep driving that far-left agenda as deep as you can possibly go! Go for it! Go! Go! Go! The Democrats, as of tonight, still have large majorities, and their leaders are idealogues. Clinton got his wakeup call in 1994 with the national sweep of many, many seats; tonight there is only one seat. Clinton’s ruthless pragmatism lead him to abandon all the idealogical positions and focus like a laser beam on the economy and jobs. We’ll see what today’s current set of Democrat idealogues do.
Danny and Mike: The way I see it, either everyone takes a haircut, or everyone gets a haircut.
It may seem like the same thing, but it’s not. Because if you do not (voluntarily) reduce credit spending, accept lower-paying jobs, budget more wisely, then there will come a time when the economy will absolutely crash and burn, and you will (involuntarily) be doing the same things… only in a more extreme fashion.
It’s too bad most Democrats can’t comprehend basic economics.
52% to 47%. Republican over Democrat. In Massachusetts. Fifty years after Camalot and fortyfive years after the Great Society. And looking at the photographs of Brown’s supporters, it was young adults who helped put him over the top. The same young adults whom the Libs want to saddle with crushing future debt.
Brown told the voters the truth. The healthcare bill, whatever form it rots into, will cost them (us) their lives. Their freedom. Their choices. The voters heard and they acted. Now, those Massachusetts voters were already primed to listen because they are living under a state run “healthcare” system which is increasing the cost and reducing the availability of medical care. This is the blueprint for national action.
For reasons of myopia, laziness, or cowardice, the national Republican leadership has not told the voters the truth. They have not chosen to educate the electorate, to state the obvious economic disaster we are headed for if we do not change direction, to connect the dots between increasing governmental programs and decreasing individual wealth and freedom.
Scott Brown connected the dots for the Massachusetts voters. We must do the same on the national level.
And then we can discuss Jihad.
Al
socratease:
Pelosi has represented California’s Eighth District in the House of Representatives since 1987.
I am confused, just how long is a term in Caifornia? My point about term limits would be no longer than two – period, just as it has been set for POTUS.
Al #13:
> For reasons of myopia, laziness, or cowardice, the national Republican leadership has not told the voters the truth. They have not chosen to educate the electorate, to state the obvious economic disaster we are headed for if we do not change direction, to connect the dots between increasing governmental programs and decreasing individual wealth and freedom.
Al, I think everyone knows about it. In particular the politicians do, so it’s not myopia. But no one wants to deal with it. Any solution will be painful, and voters haven’t (yet) indicated that as a group, they’re ready to accept a tough solution. However, you’re right – we need to bring it up, and bring it up. Repeatedly. Float some of the very difficult choices. Sometimes you have to lead, and if we *talk* about it as though we’re serious, when the time comes to deal with it, I would hope that the voters would remember.
What am I talking about? Let’s look at an alternative case: George W. Bush and the housing and investment collapse. I saw President Bush repeatedly on TV, praising and praising the rising rates of home ownership as a wonderful thing he wanted to take credit for. ”Home ownership is on the rise!” ”More Americans own homes than at any time ever in our history!” He did this over and over.
Contrast that with the one measly letter he sent out in 2005 or 2006 – a letter we never heard about – warning that the home loans financials crisis might very well be looming and we should do something about it. How unwise he now looks to us – well, to ME – in retrospect, with all those public praisings while all those people who couldn’t afford those homes rode the bubble… and all those OTHER richer folk bought many such houses and condos in bulk, turning them over purely for profit, riding the boom again…
Imagine how wise he would have looked had he repeatedly told us, “… and while the home ownership rates are great, there is significant danger here. It appears many people have bought homes they cannot afford, and they will be at risk if they face bad times. Barney Frank and Chris Dodd are blocking me from doing anything to protect them! Because they are blocking action on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the source of the problem. Remember these names! Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, and Nancy Pelosi. I want to fix the problem, and they won’t let me!”
Get THAT on camera in 2004-2006, and you’d look far less the fool when the crap hit the fan. You’d clearly be leading the wave. We should do similar things for our long-term problems in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. If the Democrats protest we’re scapegoating them, challenge them to start coming up with ideas, and float a few of your own. Show wisdom in looking ahead. I think voters would remember – as long as it is on camera. One silly letter is politically completely meaningless. It’s got to be on camera, you have to risk putting some skin in the game.
“In the U.S., the call is for government control, through regulations, as opposed to ownership. Unfortunately, it matters little whether there is a Democratically or Republican-controlled Congress and White House; the march toward greater government control continues. It just happens at a quicker pace with Democrats in charge.” – economist Walter E. Williams
<B>Get THAT on camera in 2004-2006, and you’d look far less the fool when the crap hit the fan.</b>
That’s called CYA.
Whomever named CBS, was a genius. For it truly is seeing BS, is it not.
Bush would 1. have to be capable of CYA or 2. be capable of setting up subtle traps for political enemies. Bush would have to be a different person to have those things. Some of his decisions may be changed, and theoretically you could get him to adopt something like this. But he couldn’t run it well because his personality is incompatible, so you’d have to get a subordinate. And most likely, in DC, that subordinate does not have either the power or the competence to pull it off with success.
I caught snippets of Rachel Madow through the evening, watching her search for what she thought would be an appropriate spin on yesterday’s disaster for the Democrats.
After trying out several possibilities, she seemed to settle on this gem of logic: Coakley lost because the Democrats haven’t actually accomplished anything — especially because they have not yet passed the health care bill! She went on to pronounce that if Democrats want to hang onto their seats in November, they must pass Obamacare!
How can you reason with people who are that determined to delude themselves?
What part of “NO” do they not understand?
Voters in Massachusetts, having had a taste in their own state of what Obamacare would be like nationally, have spit it out
I’m reading that this was a great victory for conservatives. This may be a great tactical victory, but as been stated by others, the financial cliff we are facing (or may have already gone over) is El Capitan compared to the sand dune we’ve negotiated today.
I’m not sure Scott Brown is even a conservative. Sure, he’s against the current health care obamanation, but so is Olympia Snowe. No doubt, Brown is conservative to Massachusette voters and it gives hope that the American people, even those reflexively liberal have limits.
I’m not even sure why many Americans are against Obamacare. To the extent it’s a reaction to the medicare cuts in the bill, that’s not much cause for celebration, since medicare is unsustainable as currently configured. We may have to recognize that medicare is welfare, not insurance and treat it as such.
The solution may not be the tea party movement, but it is becoming clear to me it will have to come outside the two parties. I’m not suggesting third party candidates, except as a last resort. Even with its dangers a dose of populism may bring the two parties back to reality– since it’s becoming clear to more and more people that neither party is representing American interests.
John McCain had one thing right. Washington is awash in money and even decent people succumb to the corruption over time. What McCain got wrong was the solution.
Sadie,
California term limits applies to California offices only, such as Assemblyman or State Senator. It doesn’t apply to federal offices. In the 1990s, several states passed referendums applying term limits to its federal representatives. It was taken to court and thrown out for lack of jurisdiction by the Supreme Court in “U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton,” so federal term limits would require a federal law change, or perhaps even a Constitutional amendment.
Is it just me or did anybody else notice that all of the leftist pundits and politcos, including the wymyn, were wearing brown pants today?
Kind of a Matthewsian “reverse tingle?”
socratease:
Thank you for the details. I hold out no hope that either option will see the light of day.
Ymar #17:
>> <B>Get THAT on camera in 2004-2006, and you’d look far less the fool when the crap hit the fan.</b>
> That’s called CYA.
Ymar, I don’t believe so.
I think of it as warning the American people what is coming; looking ahead, predicting and being right. Outlining what you’d like to do to protect us from it. This is similar to Churchill warning about the rising German storm. It’s important.
Bush did send one letter, but it never mentioned the specifics of the problem. He simply didn’t see it coming. It seems none of them saw it coming. And they’re supposed to be in charge. In 2004-2005, economists were warning that they saw all the signs of a speculative housing frenzy that couldn’t last.
Who in Washington even thought: “What if this is a boom? What happens when it crashes. Let’s try to run some models and see what we’d be facing.” Apparently, no one. They were all asleep at the wheel. Republicans, Democrats… just playing all their usual games. Maybe they couldn’t have penetrated the Credit Default Swaps imbroglio, but I think the over-leveraged banks and investment firms might have caught their eye, and the rules on requiring cash debt payments for the insolvent funds leading to the liquidity problem should have been seen.
Smart enough to send the one letter, which was not specific enough. Not smart enough to get out in front of a camera. Today politics is visual, and it’s all about the video. I’m certain of that much. If it’s not on video, it practically does not exist. If you’re going to send a letter, and you want to make an impact, the purpose of the letter can be only to generate enough comment to then get a video made that will make an impact. The letter alone is utterly useless. You could in fact call the letter the CYA… if you’re simultaneously out in front of a camera extolling the virtues of home ownership while privately you’re worried.
Mike, #15,
I had not known of Bush’s letter. But of course it never was picked up.
My point is that the American citizen needs to be relearn the responsibilities of living in a democracy. To keep our democracy, we must be responsible for ourselves economically, politically, and individually. We need to pay attention. That is difficult with the MSM obfuscations and the stiffling blanket of political correctness. But, we can do it.
Beyond the Massachusetts voters’ concerns about healthcare, there may have been another issue which they responded to. Yesterday the AT mentioned ads run for Brown in the days prior to the election discussing Obama’s security failings. Any one see those?
Al
Absolute must read by Daniel Henninger in today’s WSJ. Apologies in advance because I can’t seem to get the formatting right.
EXCERPT:
The central battle in our time is over political primacy. It is a competition between the public sector and the private sector over who defines the work and the institutions that make a nation thrive and grow.
In 1962, President John F. Kennedy planted the seeds that grew the modern Democratic Party. That year, JFK signed executive order 10988 allowing the unionization of the federal work force. This changed everything in the American political system. Kennedy’s order swung open the door for the inexorable rise of a unionized public work force in many states and cities.
This in turn led to the fantastic growth in membership of the public employee unions—The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the teachers’ National Education Association.
They broke the public’s bank. More than that, they entrenched a system of taking money from members’ dues and spending it on political campaigns. Over time, this transformed the Democratic Party into a public-sector dependency.
They became different than the party of FDR, Truman, Meany and Reuther. That party was allied with the fading industrial unions, which in turn were tethered to a real world of profit and loss.
The states in the North and on the coasts turned blue because blue is the color of the public-sector unions. This tax-and-spend milieu became the training ground for their politicians.
(SNIP)
But here’s the party’s self-destroying kicker: Feeding the public unions’ wage demands starved other government responsibilities. It ruined our ability to have a useful debate about any other public functions.
Massachusetts’ spending fell for mental health, the environment, housing and higher education. The physical infrastructure in blue states is literally falling apart. But look at those public wage and pension-related outlays. Ever upward.
Enter the Obama administration, the first one born and raised inside this public bubble, with zero private-sector Cabinet members. Act one: a $787 billion stimulus bill, which they brag mainly saved state and local jobs. Then came the six-month odyssey for Obama’s $1 trillion health-care bill, dripping with taxes. Independent voters felt like everything was being sucked into a public-sector vortex.
END
Read the whole thing!
<B>I think of it as warning the American people what is coming; looking ahead, predicting and being right.</b>
I’m saying from Bush’s perspective, that isn’t so. Even if he has a position on this, he won’t use the bully pundit to propagandize things. If this wasn’t so, his handling of the WMD portrayal would have been different and the Left couldn’t have convinced Americans that his administration had lied or mislead the public so quickly.
<B>This is similar to Churchill warning about the rising German storm. It’s important.</b>
It is important, I don’t disagree, but President Bush was not very capable at this.
The ones that are good at creating and massaging illusions, using deception as it was intended to be used in diplomacy, are mostly on the enemy’s side.