Posted on 01/21/2010 10:44:05 PM PST by goldstategop
On January 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 January 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 against 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 Rasmussen, 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-incumbent 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 dis 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 senator Evan Bayh of Indiana, “there’s no hope of waking up.”
I say: Let them sleep.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find only things evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelogus
Amen brother. I still say it was the most important election for the nation in our lifetime in a stacked deck state,and he pulled it off with shoeleather politics.God bless Scott Brown.
bump
Good one. Global Warming is not the cause of rising sea level it,s Rats deserting the good ship Obama.
Priceless.
I almost missed the photoshopping too! LOL!
I will never forget what Scott Brown and his supporters did for this country. Maybe I will frame my charge card statement with the donation to Scott.
Hussein the fraud may have passed this nightmare because men or more like worms like Ben Nelson, Evan Bayh, Jim Webb and others were too cowardly and craven to stand up.
Thank you Scott Brown.
I’m still not convinced by Krauthammer that all of the voters were dialed into the details of the issues. Electorates are more superficial than that; witness Obama’s win in 2008 as evidence.
A good chunk of the folks were people who don’t understand the complexities of functioning capitalism, yet who sense something is seriously wrong. I’ve talked to too many people to know that they base their decisions at a rudimentary level. Not complaining, just observing.
It’s all the additional hot air from the radical Dems.
And the Democrats are delusional: Scott Brown won by running against Obama, not against 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.
Exactly!
LOL - great line!
This is what's scarey. These independents, these moderates put their fingers in the wind or are duped by the media all too easily. That they have the power to put a communist in the White House and then pull an eleventh hour Hail Mary against Obamacare is frightening.
They are rudderless, ungrounded in conviction. IOW untrustworthy.
Amen, Charles! Amen! :)
I talk to many people while I'm out on errands and they just simply DON'T know a thing about obamadeathcare or the taxes hidden in it, or about OBAMA's WAR on Seniors and our Retired Military
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