…for a non-lunatic Massachusetts Senator. Send whatever you can afford to break the back of the wreckers in DC.
Incidentally, I would note that Jack Kennedy would probably feel a lot more political affinity to the Republican than the Democrat in that race. I doubt if he’d even recognize his party today.
[Update a few minutes later]
Even in Massachusetts, support is weak for health-care deform.
…just 43 percent of Massachusetts voters support the Democratic national health care plan now making its way through Congress, versus 36 percent who oppose. In one of the bluest states in the country — and one with up-close experience with a state health care regime that resembles the plan under consideration for the nation as a whole — that is strikingly weak support. And that support is pretty much limited to Democrats; independents and Republicans are opposed.
And there are a lot of independents in MA.
If Brown pulls this off, it will be the sweetest political victory for the American people in a long time. It might break the back of the so-called “progressives.”
Speaking from the very belly of the beast, I tell you not to get your hopes up. No matter how much dirty baggage and clear disdain for the electorate Coakley has, you’d need a literal tsunami to wash enough Dems (and their political machinery) out of the state for her to lose.
She’s impatient enough as it is about having to actually go through this formality of an election.
In any other state I’d give Brown at least a good shot at this point. Here? A nice daydream, but I refuse to let myself get disappointed yet again. I’ll be happy if he gets within 10 points.
Even if Brown wins, it may not matter in the health care debacle. According to this Boston Herald article:
Few have considered the Jan. 19 election as key to the fate of national health-care reform because both Kirk and front-runner state Attorney General Martha Coakley, the Democratic nominee, have vowed to uphold Kennedy’s legacy and support health-care reform.
But if Brown wins, the entire national health-care reform debate may hinge on when he takes over as senator. Brown has vowed to be the crucial 41st vote in the Senate that would block the bill.
The U.S. Senate ultimately will schedule the swearing-in of Kirk’s successor, but not until the state certifies the election.
Friday, a spokesman for Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin, who is overseeing the election but did not respond to a call seeking comment, said certification of the Jan. 19 election by the Governor’s Council would take a while.
“Because it’s a federal election,” spokesman Brian McNiff said. “We’d have to wait 10 days for absentee and military ballots to come in.”
Another source told the Herald that Galvin’s office has said the election won’t be certified until Feb. 20 – well after the president’s address.
Since the U.S. Senate doesn’t meet again in formal session until Jan. 20, Bay State voters will have made their decision before a vote on health-care reform could be held. But Kirk and Galvin’s office said Friday a victorious Brown would be left in limbo.
In contrast, Rep. Niki Tsongas (D-Lowell) was sworn in at the U.S. House of Representatives on Oct. 18, 2007, just two days after winning a special election to replace Martin Meehan. In that case, Tsongas made it to Capitol Hill in time to override a presidential veto of the expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.
Ex MA refugee in NH here. I contributed to Brown in an attempt to strike at the beast across the border that has infected NH politics. Coakely is the worst possible candidate, excepting her gender which is like a Survivor immunity award to the electorate. If she can’t be defeated, no R is gonna win national office in MA for the next generation. Sadly, odds are that she wins albeit not by a ‘landslide’.
I sent some money Brown’s way.
Even leaving aside the question of the 60th vote for Obamacare, Martha Coakley is a monster unfit for association with human beings for her cynical and inhumane treatment of the Amirault family. Even hard-core liberals should be appalled by her.
Don’t be so cynical, larry j. Believe me, if Brown pulls off this upset, it would be a fission bomb in the heads of any Democrat other than those in safely liberal citadels. If Christy wins in New Jersey, and Brown in Massachusetts — Massachusetts! — by nationalizing the race, then almost no Democrat is safe. If Brown wins, there will be a tidal wave of Democratic Senators abandoning the S. S. Obama before the iceberg claims them, too.
Don’t be so cynical, larry j.
I find it almost impossible to be cynical enough about the Democrats. There’s nothing too low for them.
I’m not saying that a Republican win of Ted Kennedy’s old senate seat won’t rattle the Democrats. The article suggests outright corruption on their part to prevent his victory (should it happen) from interferring with their health care plans.
The article suggests outright corruption on their part to prevent his victory (should it happen) from interferring with their health care plans.
Yes, I don’t understand why Mass Democrats said that. Statements better guaranteed to push independents towards the Brown camp could hardly be imagined.
The only thing I can suggest is a Pauline Kael moment of intellectual denial. The mind of these folks simply can’t wrap itself around the concept of reasonable men not on their side. They probably instinctively feel that they are reassuring the voters that they won’t let some weird plot of the Illuminati that strangely results in Brown’s election derail the progress demanded by the progressive majority.
I would say Any state can implement a healthcare system; there’s no need to send hard earned revenues to the Fed. gov. to waste and squander on things state residents don’t want and can’t afford. US Gov. healthcare is a hostile takeover!
It might break the back of the so-called “progressives.”
Nothing will break the back of the so-called “progressives.”
The communitarian impulse is a human impulse. It is wired in. The desire for strong rulers is a human impulse. It is wired in. We will always have lots of human beings who want to be ruled by strong rulers according to communitarian principles. And lots of human beings who want to be the strong rulers.
Of course the liberty impulse is also a human impulse. It is also wired in. We will also always have lots of human beings who don’t want to be ruled by strong rulers according to communitarian principles.
This is why Bush was right about everyone wanting to be free and why freedom isn’t free.
Adam Smith’s invisible hand is also a non-intuitive hand. There is also an invisible, totalitarian, communitarian hand reaching out from all of our hind brains.
This makes life interesting, both in the scientific way and the interesting times way.
Yours,
Tom
P.S. Many times a given human being will be in all these groups. Our hind brains are not purely logical.
Our hind brains are not purely logical.
I disagree, Tom. They are in fact remorselessly logical, their tendencies having been honed and harrowed by 5 million years of hominid evolution. If we have tendencies towards both individual liberty and collectivist fascism, it must be because these traits enhanced the survivability of our ancestral tribes.
The interesting questions are: first, why? Why is it sometimes advantageous for a tribe to turn into a fascist dictatorship? And second, is it stil true? Given advances in technology and communications, is it still sometimes advantageous, or is this tendency as outmoded as the appendix?
My answer to the first is to point at warfare, a common occurence in our history. In a war for survival, you do want to live in a fascist dictatorship, where individuality is subsumed in the greater whole, and everyone owes total allegiance to the Leader. This is how successful armies work, no?
My answer to the second is, maybe so. The problem is that our natural and reasonable tendency to turn towards collectivist dictatorship only in the face of existential crisis has been hijacked by parasites who attempt to portray all kinds of things as equivalent to an existential crisis — and hence as justifying the return to fascism, where coincidentally, ha ha, they will be part of the command structure.
I mean, the left cries about the “War on Terror” as being a bogus existential crisis cooked up by the right to impose its dictatorship. The right then cries about the War on Bad Healthcare as being an equally bogus existential crisis cooked up by the left for the same purpose.
In a war for survival, you do want to live in a fascist dictatorship, where individuality is subsumed in the greater whole, and everyone owes total allegiance to the Leader. This is how successful armies work, no?
Yes, you are correct. The U.S. military is our most socialist / least free institution for very good reasons.
My first answer to the second is that females all want their children in particular to survive, not just the community’s children. The community IS a great way to do that, but not if it squashes the inidivual brilliance of her children. So women have always been thus conflicted. Since males and females are so genetically similar (and since pleasing females is such a good strategy), males are similarly conflicted.
My second answer to the second is that the beta males also want to reproduce, not just alphas. The institution of monogamous marriage was the bargain to get beta males to be productive citizens. It also promoted individualism.
Of course I pulled these ideas out of nowhere. It’s just as fun to write evolutionary just so stories as it is to write the creationist kind!
Yours,
Tom
I dunno, Tom. I’m underwhelmed in general by arguments based on the aspirations or even ideal outcomes for individuals. Mother Nature and Papa Natural Selection don’t give a damn about individual happiness — so long as the gene groups in the tribe survive.
Consider the differences in natural sexual behaviour of men and women. What’s up with that? Certainly as individuals we’d be far happier with tendencies that match each other’s hopes and wishes better. But apparently that does not lead to as successful a tribe. Our intense sexual anxiety about getting and keeping mates is apparently useful — drives us to productive behaviour, of some kind.
I’m vaguely reminded of the eternal debate between socialism and a free market. The proponents of a planned economy never tire of pointing out how anxious it is to be part of a free market in labor. You can lose your job any time! You have to be always worried about being compettive, the best there is at your job, prepared and alert and quickly responsive to any threats to your job security, like a younger more motivated applicant, changes in technology, et cetera and so forth.
But of course it is just that anxiety, on the part of the individuals, that makes the free market such a mighty engine of wealth. Anxious about our security, we work harder and smarter, and, willy nilly, that means we are more productive, we become as both individuals and a society far more wealthy, and, ironically enough, our actual job prospects and those of our children improve far more than in the safe, anxiety-free socialist model.
It’s coming to blows out there.