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Massachusetts Senate: WTF?
Jan. 20th, 2010 09:31 amMany of you may be looking at the Senate race results we just had here in Massachusetts and be asking, "What the fuck?". Others of you, being more articulate, may be asking, "What the fucking fuck?".
Let's remember Link's Law: "Politics takes place in the middle of the bell curve". When a Democrat starts with a 30% advantage and loses by 5%, that's a whopping 35% of the electorate (here represented by 2.25 million votes; less than 11/2008, but that was a record high) in the middle to account for.
So what got 700,000 people to go the other way?
First and foremost: the economy. Now, some of you may consider it ironic that a candidate who espouses the worst of neoconservative economics managed to win by touting same, and that the Coakley campaign managed to shoot itself in the foot by equating Brown with Bush/Cheney in their ads, but that's what happened. And the reason why it happened? The Democrat hubris of focusing on the health care mess when the economy was still in the crapper.
Let me say that again, because it's a lesson that President Clinton [learned the hard way], but that President Obama [has not yet]: when you're elected primarily because your predecessor screwed up the economy, your A #1 top priority is to address the economy. And you don't get to start spending your mythical mandate until you've done so. And you especially don't get to pile onto a massive deficit with a program whose expenses are measured in the trillions when the unemployment rate is above 10%.
And let me make this clear, because it looks like I'm blaming "health care": the primary mandate of the election was to fix the economy, and the big block of voters in the middle of the bell curve believed that they were being ignored. It's perfectly possible that, in better times, these exact same voters would be all for this health care plan, and would even buy the notion that it would be good for the economy in the long run. But candidate Brown was able to pound home a "lower taxes, lower spending" platform, even tho his voting record supports the opposite.
Now, that explains why such a large bloc of voters in the middle were willing to listen. But the primary wasn't all that long ago, and Brown (and the RNC) were able to make up that ground in a short period of time. Why was that even possible?
In short: the Democrat party machinery here in Massachusetts was blind-sided. They had a vital four-way primary, garnered all of the attention, and the party machinery picked Coakley to win, and the party voters in the primary went for it, and Coakley then went out of her way to act as if the Senate seat were already hers.
Brown's campaign slogan that stuck the most was, "It's not the Kennedys' seat; it's the peoples' seat!".
And Coakley kept campaigning on "We're going to finish Ted Kennedy's work", amplifying her opponent's message.
The Democrats didn't wake up to the fact that they were in a real race until it was far too late. And because this was a special election, the RNC was able to draw on national resources to focus in one place, and they were able to use the far-left mouthings of the Democrats' primary to scare up donations from all around the country. The Democrats should have been able to do likewise, but they didn't think it necessary.
Well, they've got two years to figure out how to pick a candidate to run for this very same seat in November of 2012.
Let's remember Link's Law: "Politics takes place in the middle of the bell curve". When a Democrat starts with a 30% advantage and loses by 5%, that's a whopping 35% of the electorate (here represented by 2.25 million votes; less than 11/2008, but that was a record high) in the middle to account for.
So what got 700,000 people to go the other way?
First and foremost: the economy. Now, some of you may consider it ironic that a candidate who espouses the worst of neoconservative economics managed to win by touting same, and that the Coakley campaign managed to shoot itself in the foot by equating Brown with Bush/Cheney in their ads, but that's what happened. And the reason why it happened? The Democrat hubris of focusing on the health care mess when the economy was still in the crapper.
Let me say that again, because it's a lesson that President Clinton [learned the hard way], but that President Obama [has not yet]: when you're elected primarily because your predecessor screwed up the economy, your A #1 top priority is to address the economy. And you don't get to start spending your mythical mandate until you've done so. And you especially don't get to pile onto a massive deficit with a program whose expenses are measured in the trillions when the unemployment rate is above 10%.
And let me make this clear, because it looks like I'm blaming "health care": the primary mandate of the election was to fix the economy, and the big block of voters in the middle of the bell curve believed that they were being ignored. It's perfectly possible that, in better times, these exact same voters would be all for this health care plan, and would even buy the notion that it would be good for the economy in the long run. But candidate Brown was able to pound home a "lower taxes, lower spending" platform, even tho his voting record supports the opposite.
Now, that explains why such a large bloc of voters in the middle were willing to listen. But the primary wasn't all that long ago, and Brown (and the RNC) were able to make up that ground in a short period of time. Why was that even possible?
In short: the Democrat party machinery here in Massachusetts was blind-sided. They had a vital four-way primary, garnered all of the attention, and the party machinery picked Coakley to win, and the party voters in the primary went for it, and Coakley then went out of her way to act as if the Senate seat were already hers.
Brown's campaign slogan that stuck the most was, "It's not the Kennedys' seat; it's the peoples' seat!".
And Coakley kept campaigning on "We're going to finish Ted Kennedy's work", amplifying her opponent's message.
The Democrats didn't wake up to the fact that they were in a real race until it was far too late. And because this was a special election, the RNC was able to draw on national resources to focus in one place, and they were able to use the far-left mouthings of the Democrats' primary to scare up donations from all around the country. The Democrats should have been able to do likewise, but they didn't think it necessary.
Well, they've got two years to figure out how to pick a candidate to run for this very same seat in November of 2012.
