New Congressman Likely For Mass.: Tisei Expected To Beat Tierney

wbur ^ | October 19, 2012

[SMGFan]

Few candidates enjoy the kind of “perfect storm” that enabled Sen. Scott Brown to win his U.S. Senate seat in a special election — powerful issues, a weak opponent and an anti-politician climate combining to create momentum and opportunity.

But Richard Tisei, a moderate Republican, is riding a similar wave in challenging Democratic Rep. John Tierney in the 6th Congressional District.

Last week, The Boston Globe’s Eric Moskowitz gave this update on the contest:

National Journal ranked it the 11th most likely to turn over among the 435 seats in the House. Last weekend, the Rothenberg Political Report, another nationally regarded nonpartisan observer, tipped the race to “Lean Republican” from “Toss-up.”

A poll last month by the University of New Hampshire gave Tisei a lead of 37 percent to 31 percent and since that time he’s continued to build momentum from advertising and news coverage. When an incumbent is under 50, he’s in trouble because undecided voters break for the challenger.

Brown won the 6th district with nearly 60 percent of the vote. Tisei might carry the district by a similar margin.

Tierney has been considered vulnerable for two years because of his family’s scandal. But due credit should be given to Tisei, a thoughtful and sincere man, and to his smart campaign. Even when members of Congress are plagued by scandal, it’s not easy to beat them. They are “entrenched” because for years they’ve used tax money and special interest campaign money to publicize that they are unusually dedicated public servants who use their clout selflessly.

Boston Herald columnist Margery Eagan wrote Thursday about the challenger:

[raccoonradio]

Yup, score one for the arrogant crook. I live in the district and am for the RINO over the arrogant crook. We take what we can here. (A college classmate of mine does say he knows Tisei and says he's a hard worker...controversial "bathroom bill" legislation, though. Anyway I can't wait to wipe the smile of Johnny Pocket's face.)

How Could Tierney Not Know

[raccoonradio]

>>It’s not as if an actual conservative could win and hold the seat anyway. MA is simply the wrong place to look for a socially conservative congressional vote. Better IMO to get someone who will caucus with the GOP and vote some of the time with them than to hold out for someone that district simply won’t elect. I shake my head likewise at Freepers who don’t realize that Scott Brown is absolutely a dream senator for us, considering the state that he’s miraculously representing.

EXACTLY

[raccoonradio]

You’re welcome and thanks for your thoughts.

Gotta say it again: talk to a lot of people in MA and they’ll say people like Brown, Tisei, and yes Romney are far right Rethuglicans who will starve children, kill old people,
rape women, money hungry bastards who are worse than Nazis.
I’m not kidding. This is how the moonbats feel. Ted Kennedy!
Barney Frank! Ed Markey! Deval Patrick! John Kerry! They got re-elected time after time.

I’d hope the people in the 4th could elect Bielat who gave
Frank a good run last time but remember he’s running against a Kennedy.

>>Nothing develops clear eyed pragmatism quite like defeat...after defeat...after defeat...after defeat.

Electing Brown was for me like Red Sox fans in 2004 who hadn’t seen a World Series win since 1918. FINALLY!!!

I’m a pragmatic conservative too.

[AuH2ORepublican]

I think that a greater risk comes from nominating closeted homosexuals rather than open homosexuals. Those in the closet are subject to blackmail, and we’ve seen how gay radicals have used the threat of outing to force closeted homosexuals to vote a certain way (Barbara Mikulski switched from opposition to support of same-sex marriage after a website announced it was going to out an unnamed senator who matched her description, and Mark Foley was pushed to vote more leftist for fear of being outed).

I could support an open homosexual if he or she isn’t someone pushing the gay agenda and if I agreed with him or her on the issues. In other words, I could support a conservative who happens to be gay. Another factor I’d consider is what office he or she is seeking, and what the electorate is like. For example, I supported Matthew Berry for the VA-08 congressional istrict (Jim Moran’s seat), since (i) I knew Matthew to be a pro-life social and economic conservative with a sterling academic and professional background and experience in policy positions in the public and private sectors and a first-rate thinker and debater, (ii) he was not someone interested in pushing a gay agenda and (iii) most voters in the VA-08 would actually see the fact that he’s gay as a feature, not a bug, and it would give Matthew a better chance of winning than for your typical conservative Republican, and (iv) the VA-08 is a liberal district in which national Republicans can’t break 40%, and Matthew would have a far more conservative voting record than anyone who could be expected to win there. It also helped that I went to school with Matthew (back when no one even suspected that he might be a homosexual) and could vouch for his conservative bona fides (although I made sure to ask him about his positions on important issues to make sure that his new “lifestyle” hadn’t changed him. So I had no qualms about supporting Matthew Berry for Congress and promoting his candidacy on FR and elsewhere.

Now, Tisei is another story altogether. From what I’ve seen and heard, he’s a liberal extremist on social issues, including abortion and gay marriage. I’m sure that he’d be a bit better on economic issues that Tierney, but there is no reason to nominate someone like that to Congress from a district that’s far less liberal than the VA-08 and is one of the less heavily Democrat districts in MA (why couldn’t Essex County Sheriff Frank Cousins have run?). I am pretty much agnostic as to that race, and have not endorsed or supported Tisei. One can make arguments both for and against the proposition that it would help the MA GOP if Tisei won: it would help the GOP in future recruitment and fundraising if the Dems no longer had an all-Democrat House delegation, but it could lead to some idiots to conclude that only a pro-abortion, pro-same-sex-marriage liberal can win. So I’m sitting that one out.

So my advice would be to be wary of closeted homosexuals seeking or holding office, and weigh candidacies for open homosexuals as you would for any other candidate.

[Little Bill]

Essex County Sheriff Frank Cousins have run...

I know Frank, good guy but not the brightest bulb in the Universe, he knows his limitations. Aside from that he pisses off all of the county hacks.

[campaignPete R-CT]

it is a smear on scott brown and the people supporting him to equate him to Tisei

Tisei: endorsed by Gay Lesbian Bisexual and Transgender Victory Fund.
useful tidbits on Tisei, endorsed often by NARAL
http://search.yahoo.com/search?toggle=1&cop=mss&ei=UTF-8&fr=yfp-t-701&p=mcfl+tisei

Scott Brown endorsed by Mass Citizens for Life
a ‘no’ vote on Elena Kagan
co-sponsor of Blunt Amendment
http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0oG7nDI4IJQoiMA.v9XNyoA?p=mass+citizens+for+life+scott+brown+mcfl&fr2=sb-top&fr=yfp-t-701&type_param=

[campaignPete R-CT]

http://nrlc.capwiz.com/bio/id/5485&submit.x=15&submit.y=14&submit=go

national right to life scorecard for scottie brown.
i dont know why the NO vote on Kagan aint included.

Sorry, Rinos. If ya want support from pro-lifers, do not nominate NARAL-backed candidates like Tisei and then come on here and say Scott Brown has been “pro-choice for 8 years”. Scott Brown has never been NARAL.

[9YearLurker]

From your own source:

“Although Fox said MCFL does not endorse Brown because he is not pro-life, the MCFL endorses Republican candidate Sean Bielat.”

[x]

It’s a better than even chance that Tisei could cause a scandal

He's less likely than Hinson or Bauman or Craig to get caught in a public men's room if he's open about his sexuality.

Given the politics of the gay community and the dual standard (tougher on Republicans), though, some kind of scandal may be drummed up whatever he does.

It is worth noting that Kolbe (and I think Gunderson) were reelected after their sexuality was revealed, so Tisei wouldn't be the first openly gay Republican congressman.

I'm not sure that either one of them was really a "disaster" -- they may have been the most conservative (on non-gay issues) candidates electable in their districts.

Sure, let's wait another 15 years for a Republican congressman from Massachusetts, and make it an even 30 years.

[9YearLurker]

Oh, and Scott Brown himself says he’s pro-choice—I’ll take his word for it.

[fieldmarshaldj]

"Gay marriage and the like are inevitable, and hardly IMO therefore a reason to want a (pro-gay marriage) Marxist/Democrat to have the seat instead given the state of the nation and that we’re in an era in which someone like BHO could be elected president."

Congratulations. You've just made the argument for why there shouldn't even be a Conservative/Republican opposition party at all. Why vote for Tisei when we've already got a leftist advancing depravity in Tierney ?

[fieldmarshaldj]

If that is all that the GOP can come up with in Massachusetts, then there is no need for their existence. It’s just a mirror image of the Democrats. The single biggest problem we have in states like that is that the power structure doesn’t get behind actual Conservative candidates all the way down to the grassroots, with those that keep the party moribund or dead insisting on running leftists that almost inevitably lose. Massachusetts deserves better, and it’s time we start offering them an actual choice of ideologies.

[9YearLurker]

I don’t think you know Massachusetts very well.

[BlackElk]

raccoonradio:

So you live in the same Massachusetts that Ronaldus Maximus carried twice? Are you sure that moderate mushballism is necessary in GOP candidates even in the Springfield area? When was the last time that a moderate mushball was elected to Congress from Springfield? Much less a pro-baby murder, fudge-packer candidate bearing a GOP label? Isn't it the word "Republican" that is generally disreputable in Taxachusetts and not the notion of socially normal family values???

The Commonwealth elected a series of moderate mushballs as governors from William Weld up to and including Willard and it did nothing but provide an arguable balance to the solidly corrupt machine Demonrat General Court (your legislature) and to utterly destroy the meaning of the Republican brand name in the Commonwealth. Scott Brown was elected as a demonstration that even the Commonwealth had a bit of a problem swallowing Obozo's radicalism although the spoiled social revolutionary brat wing of the Commonwealth's "GOP" has settled the public down to accept radicalism as usual as a norm. As a result, Brown may lose to Fauxcahontas. If Brown loses, Massachusetts may never have another GOP US Senator. If Tisei wins, Springfield will likely never have another GOP US Congressman after Tisei is defeated in 2014.

As a Red Sox fan, you knew the sting of no World Series victories from 1918 until 2004. 86 years! During many of those years, the Red Sox looked like they were not trying much like the Massachusetts "GOP" has looked like it was not really trying for many of the years from 1948 to date. As a Red Sox fan, you deserve a sense of compassion from those not so afflicted.

Maybe, if the Massachusetts "GOP" were to spend less time cultivating the ohhhh sooooo fashionably liberal Cabots, Lodges, Saltonstalls and the Codfish aristocracy and get down in the streets and slug it out for the social conservatives who supported Democrats like Billy Bulger, Ed King, John McCormack and others like them, the Massachusetts "GOP" might learn that Taxachusetts liberalism, like all liberalism, lives in a fiction bubble of its own making, successfully peddling the myth that its victories are inevitable.

Corruption is in the DNA of the Demonrats and it just infuriates the snobs down at the polo club. In the last analysis, corruption is somewhat endemic to all human societies in our fallen world. Blame Eve. Baby-killing and fudge-packing are not endemic to all human societies and will do far more damage in the short and long run than the trite objects of Howie Carr's delightful lampooning of Massachusetts' hackarama. If the GOP in your state does not want to slug it out for the votes of social conservatives, then go down to the yacht club and weep copius rivers of tears inconsolably into your Chateau Lafitte Rothschild '29 over the refusal of social conservatives (the actual GOP Base) to support your baby-killing and rump-ranging candidates like Tisei just because our social "betters" think we should be "open-minded."

Frank O'Connor's fictional Frank Skeffington was a far better Republican than Tisei as was Skeffington's real life inspiration: James Michael Curley.

[x]

The votes just aren’t there in Massachusetts. There are a few Republican towns in the district, but there just aren’t enough conservative voters to win the seat — or other seats in the state.

[fieldmarshaldj]

For folks who know me, that’s a very hillarious comment.

[fieldmarshaldj]

I’ve written on the subject endlessly. The Conservative movement and the MA GOP needs to start from the grassroots. Why the party is in the shape that it is in is because left-wing statists got control of the apparatus and killed it (look at the continuous decay from majority status in the 1950s up through to today). They wanted no reformists, no outsiders, no Conservative activists, period. Those that tried to change that equation, the party establishment would expend its resources on stopping them... ironically painting them as “extremists” who would “harm” the party, which they themselves were and already accomplished.

Tisei is just another typical example of that disease. Defeating him should be of paramount importance (as was his Lt Gov candidacy in 2010 along with Charlie Baker, more leftist statists).

[BlackElk]

9 YearLurker:

Fieldmarshaldj, if you follow his posts, knows a lot more than you may imagine he knows.

My father's family came from Massachusetts (Southie and Cambridge and Arlington and Somerville). I have plenty of relatives there and well know the state. The GOP raised a permanent flag of surrender long ago rather than offend the snobocracy within by, well, social conservatism.

The GOP SHOULD have recruited Louise Day Hicks, Pixie Palladino, Billy Bulger, Dapper O'Neill, John Collins, Ray Flynn and any other Democrat like them. If necessary, Republicans should have become Democrats by registration, abandoned the snobocracy altogether as the irrelevancy that it is and always has been and always will be, and joined such socially normal and patriotic American Democrats in an effort to resist within the Democrat party the Kennedys, the Kerrys, the Barney Franks, the Robert Drinans. It is the principles and not the party label that counts.

Thirty years ago and more, Massachusetts was one of the most socially conservative states in the US. In 1978, the General Court adopted (by a massive majority) a resolution memorializing Congress to pass a pro-life amendment to the US Constitution. The Mayflower remnants were just appalled and, using the usual means of $$$, trampled the socially normal conservatives in the GOP. As a result, Massachusetts is now the baby-killing, rump-ranging moral cesspool that the Mayflower crowd prefers.

Will Southie and the spirit of James Michael Curley prevail or will it continue to be Brookline and Michael Dukakis that prevails?

[Dr. Sivana]

So you live in the same Massachusetts that Ronaldus Maximus carried twice?

Of course 1984 was legit, but RR received a LOT of help from John B. Anderson in 1980. Reagan only got 42% of the vote, winning by under 4,000 votes. You and I both know folks in CT that had no use for Reagan, but couldn't vote for Carter, so they voted for "The Anderson Difference". I am of the mind that Jimmy Carter's residual southern demeanor played into this. The Obama who strives for urban chic, and would never ever mention "ethnic purity" doesn't suffer on that score. On the other hand, the sizable Jewish vote in the northeast, normally inclined to vote Democrat, may have had one slight too many. Finally, almost 30 years have past. Much as I would have supported a Palin or Santorum, I couldn't imagine either carrying MA, even with an establishment lefty safety valve third party candidate.

Very recently, one of the last "good" Democrats passed away, John Silber, who would have been a far better governor than William Weld or Mitt Romney. I agree with you that the social conservatives in MA had been Democrats (check Wallace's primary numbers in '72 and even '76, when forced busing was the issue) and the Republicans had no inclination to welcome them to the party. These social conservatives did not change the environment, and their children grew up to be Dems like their parents, minus the social conservatism, because that had been pumped out of the atmosphere. (The Catholic Church in Boston is complicit in this.)

Today's Springfield is 52% Dem and 9% Republican. It is going to have to get worse before it can get better. I'd just as soon have a Congress that doesn't need to rely on votes at all from New England except maybe NH.

Presidential
Candidate

Vice Presidential
Candidate

Political
Party

Popular Vote

Electoral Vote

Ronald Reagan

George Bush

Republican

1,057,631

41.90%

14

James Carter

Walter Mondale

Democrat

1,053,802

41.75%

0

John Anderson

Patrick Lucey

And. Coalition

382,539

15.15%

0

Edward Clark

David Koch

Libertarian

22,038

0.87%

0

Other (+)

-

-

8,288

0.33%

0

Map Key

[9YearLurker]

Even Southie isn’t really Southie any more.

(And yes, you’re right, there were times when the MA Dems were more conservative than the MA GOP. Maybe most recently Silber vs. Weld.)