Some Quick Thoughts on Massachusetts
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Nate Silver sees 3:1 odds favoring Brown, the Republican. Chris Bowers sees 2:1 odds favoring Brown.
It’s looking uglier and uglier for the Democrats by the day in Massachusetts, and if you believe what the party says, a Republican win means health care insurance reform is in deep trouble.
I have to admit, I am less than hysterical over this turn of events because, let’s face it, the Democrats haven’t gotten all that much done with their 60 vote supermajority, the one they said was needed to pass any important legislation. And if they lose, they can go back to their favorite pastime: blaming the Republicans for stymying legislation that the Democrats refused to pass (or watered down to the point of meanignlessness) when they had the upper hand.
Am i oversimplifying things? I don’t think so. Paul Krugman:
The Obama administration’s troubles are the result not of excessive ambition, but of policy and political misjudgments. The stimulus was too small; policy toward the banks wasn’t tough enough; and Mr. Obama didn’t do what Ronald Reagan, who also faced a poor economy early in his administration, did — namely, shelter himself from criticism with a narrative that placed the blame on previous administrations.
Krugman points out that “[I]n December 2008 Mr. Obama’s top economic and political advisers concluded that a bigger stimulus was neither economically necessary nor politically feasible.” How’s that worked out? Well, let’s see: people are still out of work, the economy’s still in the shitter, and the president may have to come back and ask for another injection of money. Meanwhile, the banks that taxpayers rescued are making out like the bandits they are, showering their executives with million-dollar bonuses. Tell me, how does that imbalance look to the man on the street who voted for change?
Let’s talk about health care insurance reform for a moment: polls keep showing that support for any reform is contingent on a public option. But the Senate Democrats, geniuses millionaires that they are, opted to cover their insurance industry funders, not ordinary Americans, cobbling together a bill that drops a public option, forces people to buy high-deductible insurance from the same companies that have been profiting by denying coverage, and for good measure restricts women’s access to reproductive services because abortions are yucky and people shouldn’t be taxed on things they don’t support, the same way I don’t have to pay for the war in Iraq. Is that any way to energize and excite the Democratic base?
And then there has been the unnecessary fetish of “bipartisanship”, which has been a waste of time. Zero Republican votes for the stimulus. Zero Republican votes for health care. Even Harry Reid grasped that much.
You know, I understand that not everyone reads blogs, so I have to disagree with the statement that a lot of what I’ve seen in the progressive blogosphere this year has been more effective at demoralizing and dividing the troops than it has been in persuading anyone not on the left to do what we want or advise”. People know when they’re out of work. People see when massive corporations get treated with more respect and dignity than working families. People can tell when they’re getting screwed, and EVERYONE can tell when a politician’s parsing the definition of “is”. They don’t need a blog to tell them THAT (although watching Jon Stewart sure helps).
So if Martha Coakley is losing in Massachusetts, the Democratic leadership has no one to blame by itself. Voters reward success. They punish failure. And they REALLY punish politicians they voted for who openly broke their promises.
So color me unsurprised by the collapse in Massachusetts. It’s the inevitable result of a Democratic Party that, since the 1990s, has ceased to be the party of working people and instead become a reflection of the business-friendly, socially moderate Rockefeller Republicans, which has been dead for decades.
Act like a Democrat, win with Democrats. Act like Republicans, win with nobody. It’s literally THAT FUCKING SIMPLE.
