My weekend Op-ed on the Coakley/Brown election in Massachusetts.
The Meaning of Massachusetts
On Tuesday, the people of Massachusetts elected Scott P. Brown a Republican, to the U.S. Senate in a special election held to fill the seat vacated by the death of Sen. Edward Kennedy.
Let that sink in for a minute.
In Massachusetts, Republicans hold only 16 seats (10 percent) in the State House of Representatives, and five (12.5 percent) in the State Senate. The state has no Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives, and hasn’t elected a Republican U.S. Senator since 1972.
State Attorney-General Martha Coakley, twice elected to statewide office, had the endorsement of Kennedy’s widow, a last-minute visit by President Barack Obama, and once led Brown in the polls by 30 points.
Both sides have suggested reasons for Coakley’s staggering defeat by an obscure state senator, who had previously won only district elections.
Candidate Coakley came off as arrogant, elitist, and dangerously ignorant on foreign policy and terrorism. When criticized for not campaigning harder, she disdainfully asked if she should stand outside of Fenway Park in the cold shaking hands, then referred to Red Sox star pitcher and Brown supporter Curt Schilling as “another Yankee fan.”
Worse, she’s scary. During the height of the “recovered memory of child abuse” hysteria she helped ruin the lives of the Amirault and Souza families on obviously bogus charges, then refused to prosecute a real but well-connected child rapist. (Now serving two life sentences.)
Coakley played dirtier than you can get away with in the Internet Age, when she made easily-checked claims Brown wanted hospitals to turn away all rape victims, and suggested Roman Catholics shouldn’t work in emergency rooms, in a state with a huge Irish population!
President Obama didn’t exactly help when he disdainfully referred to Brown’s pickup truck no less than six times in one speech. Some people just don’t get that a pickup, like a Harley, is as much a lifestyle statement as a ride.*
That’s how some Democrats would like to pass off the loss. But the unpleasant truth is, that’s only part of the problem. The election was also a referendum on the Democratic Party leadership.
According to a recent poll by the Washington Post, 58 percent of respondents claimed they preferred smaller government with fewer services, with only 38 percent favoring a larger government with more services.
In an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, only 33 percent of respondents said the administration’s health care proposal is a “good” idea, 46 percent consider it a “bad” idea, and 55 percent disapprove of Obama on health care in general.
Both parties have extreme wings, which exercise influence on the national parties way out of proportion to their numbers. Because extremists are more passionate and committed than moderates, and willing to devote more of their lives to a cause. People whose own business is worth minding rarely have any interest in minding other people’s business.
The extreme wing of the Democratic Party is Hard Left, ranging from European-style Social Democrats to outright socialists.
The extreme wing of the Republican Party are big government theocrats who want the state to enforce a reign of virtue. But both meet at the authoritarian end of the political spectrum. Both want a busybody government, different only in the specific ways they want to run your life.
Leadership of the national Democratic Party has been captured by the Hard Left. Their problem is, most Americans aren’t that far left – including the majority of Democrats. That has to worry Democrats at the state level. It wasn’t just Republicans who elected Brown, who is only moderately conservative at most.
Either party can be captured by their extreme wing, but never both at once. When extremists, left or right, take over leadership, they marginalize the extremists of the other party. Right-wing extremists can safely be ignored by Republican leadership, because they have no place else to go on election day.
Flushed with success over huge electoral victories in 2008, the national leadership of the Democratic Party seem bent on snatching defeat from the jaws of victory by trying to force a Hard Left agenda on a moderate-to-slightly-conservative country with a strong libertarian streak.
If I were the Republican leadership, the only thing I’d worry about is Democratic leadership returning to their moderate-to-liberal core constituency.
*Yes. I drive a pickup. And it’s got four-wheel drive to boot.