I hated to start another thread about MA-SEN, but I thought this worked better as an OP.
Now that we’ve had time to lick our wounds from yesterday’s loss, I think the Democrats can take comfort in a few things.
–If Brown wants to keep his job, he’s going to have to please a constituency in Massachusetts, which despite all this remains fairly liberal. He’s going to have to live up to that whole “independent” thing he pushed so hard instead of walking in lock-step with the GOP leadership. It’s still going to be a net movement to the right, of course, but if one person breaks rank every now and then others might follow.
–While Brown ran a terrific campaign and deserves credit for it, the big story in the race (for me, anyway) was how profoundly and in how many ways the Democrats managed to screw it up. It really is astounding and embarrassing.
BUT, the colossal screwup happened in a special election in January, which gives them plenty of time to get their shit together. They could have just as easily been caught with their pants down in November, ignoring “safe” races until the challenges were too strong to overcome. Now they know they have to fight for every seat and not take ANYTHING for granted.
They’re still going to lose seats, but if they take the right lessons from this they might not lose as many as they would have. Then again, that’s a mighty big “if”. I’m afraid the lesson they’ll take away is that they need to be more like Republicans.
So what do you think? What can we salvage from this train wreck of an election?
Seriously, I live in a state (IL) in which even the dumbest voters of both sides manage to figure out the value of a bicameral government, as long as some part balances Richie Daley against their interests. But no more than balance, as that is the underlying force in Hippie Politics.
As a result we may have once had a bozo running who tried to argue Seven of Nine into performing in a public sex show or, if anyone the slightest bit aware could imagine it, Alan Keyes paying his own money to get his ass kicked by Obama.
I’ve had some slight exposure to New Orleans politics. It’s 5:00PM report fun. Most everybody else is a sad exposure to upbeat winners in countywide seats and to the people they lost to, though the loss is scarcely personal (did she really think she could win?) vs the countywide loss (do they really think she, an unnamed candidate, mattered?)?
I prefer not having to keep a coalition together if all that coalition can accomplish is the kinds of reform the senate produced. Now maybe they can force things through via reconciliation. They won’t, but at least now we don’t have to kiss up to Conrad, Baucus, Lieberman and the rest.
Big bills are camels, catering to special interests with huge inequities built into them to buy the votes needed to pass.
I will be very glad to see the healthcare bill go away.
The Democrats should have used their absolute majority to get rid of the most pressing concerns in healthcare itself, one by one, and saved the big overall “let’s cover everyone” til last.
We have to fix the problems in healthcare that make it so ridiculously expensive first and then roll it out to everyone. When we try to roll out our ridiculous system to everyone first and then fix the things that make it so expensive we’ll just end up with a giant inefficient and expensive system that is still horrible.
The Democrats need to stop looking for silver linings, and start listening to what people are most worried about. They were swept into power on a wave of anti-Bush sentiment, but Bush is yesterday’s news now. It’s no longer enough to be not-Bush.
The people of Massachusetts didn’t vote on healthcare reform. They voted for a truck. I think that people are attributing way too much significance to the result, when the fact is that the only reason the yahoos who think that owning a truck makes one a man of the people even made it to the polls is that the Patriots’ season is over, so they had nothing else to think about.
The silver lining is that since most elections happen in November, we won’t need to worry about these particular people again. Their political attention spans have officially expired.
Based on what? The majority of voters when polled support medicare for all, a public option, drug reimportation, medicare negotiations for pharmaceuticals and/or government efforts to provide health care for all.
The reason reform can’t be had is because the pharma industry, private insurance industry and hospital industry do not want meaningful reform that will reduce their market share or profitability. However any meaningful reform is going to have to do that.
A basic outline of Obama’s plan was online back when he was campaigning for president. It wasn’t hidden. Universal coverage. A public option. A health exchange. Subsidies. New regulations to limit rescissions and pre-existing condition bans. Mandates. It was all laid out 2 years ago.
Part of why the dem leaders wanted to block specifics is because they did what they said they wouldn’t do. They said it wouldn’t involve catering to ‘special interests’. However deals were cut with the pharma industry and (I believe) insurance industry. They did the opposite of what they ran on. And they moved to the right, which pissed off democrats.
Combined with a GOP that only wants to obstruct and has no interest in passing health reform, and no it didn’t work.
This is exactly how Democrats lose elections-- by dismissing a loss by blaming the people for being to stoooopid to vote for them. But not to worry. The people will magically become not-stooooopid in the next election.
So you’re saying that the dems are the Nice Guys of the political world? Hmm. At least they won’t go onto message boards to whine about how voters only vote for jerks.
Except that I only applied that logic to this particular election. You’re welcome to think it’s incorrect, but first I’d advise you to check Scott Brown’s facebook “fans”. Seriously. Check what else they’re “fans” of. Read the comments, if you can decipher them with all the misspellings. Read the Globe and Herald comments. Get to know the yahoos of Massachusetts. They’ve always been there, they just don’t usually organize anything more complicated than a tailgate.
There was good turnout in this election, and there is no reason to believe that the people in MA are any more or less superficial in their voting patterns as the rest of the country. Look at the exit polling on what people were concerned about, and you’ll see that Health Care was the number one priority. Just heard in on MSNBC awhile ago, but couldn’t find a cite on the website.
I can believe health care was important, but if this is a vote saying the current proposed plan goes “too far” down the path to “socialized medicine” why isn’t it duplicated in MA state elections? After all, they have a plan in the state significantly further down that road than the one the Senate passed.
So, we have possible solutions for how MA people are thinking:
[ol]
[li]They think the plan works for MA but not for the rest of the country[/li][li]They think the plan doesn’t work for either the country or MA, but have chosen not to express such sentiments at the ballot box in an election where it can actually change anything[/li][li]They intend at the next MA elections to vote out everyone who supported the state health plan, and just hadn’t thought of doing it before[/li][li]The election was about things other than the health care plan[/li][li]Much of the opposition to the health care plan is about it not going far enough, and much of the reaction to Obama is from the left complainign that he has sold out their expectations[/li][/ol]
It just doesn’t make sense to me that people assume MA people turned out to vote against health care when they don’t do that locally.
