The Pickup Artist

The Nation's Pulse

By Christopher Orlet on 2.3.10 @ 6:07AM
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/

After "the people's seat," the most memorable line from the Massachusetts Senate race came when Scott Brown took umbrage at President Obama's disparaging comments about his truck: "Mr. President, you can criticize my record, you can talk about the positions I have, but don't ever start criticizing my truck."

As in all campaigns, there was a surfeit of throwaway lines, but truck lines are always keepers. Brown's retort was more evidence of the continuing importance of cultural artifacts like the pickup, which the Republican candidate made one of the focal points of his campaign -- even endowing his GMC Canyon with Hollywoodesque star power. "I love this old truck, it's brought me closer to the people of this state," Brown said in a popular television commercial. One result was that Canyon sales have soared as high as Brown's poll numbers.

So when President Obama came to Massachusetts in the 11th hour of the campaign, and said Brown's "truck may not get you where you want to go," it caused one wag to quip: "Like Teddy Kennedy's car?" Meanwhile, television host Neil Cavuto excoriated the president for "badmouthing" a "hardcore" truck made by one of the companies he had recently rescued with taxpayer money.

All of this came after Sen. John Kerry had warmed up the Prius and Volvo-owning crowd with more anti-pickup rhetoric: "I've got news for you, Scott: George Bush drove a truck, too, and look where it got us." Probably not something you want to say to a substantial and loyal percentage of the voting public. (That special bond between pickups and their drivers was mirrored in a 2009 poll of truck owners, of whom 64 percent said their truck is a reflection of their personality.)

Republican senatorial candidate Scott Brown arrives in his truck to cast his vote in the special election to fill the Senate seat of the late Edward Kennedy in Wrentham, Massachusetts January 19, 2010. Brown, who won the election and is now Senator-elect, crisscrossed the state in his 2005 GMC Canyon pick-up truck, with almost 200,000 miles on the odometer, and pressed the flesh at rallies in jeans and brown work-jacket. Picture taken January 19, 2010. (Reuters)

Sen. Kerry was right about one thing: George W. Bush did indeed tool around his Crawford ranch in a "Texas Cadillac," a white Ford F-250, not infrequently with Tony Blair or Vladimir Putin riding shotgun, and doubtless a cooler of Lone Stars on the seat between them.

No wonder some Republicans and Independents believe pickup truck ownership is a prerequisite for good leadership. Sen. Fred Thompson once charged his Democratic opponent was out of touch because he hadn't "spent enough time in a pickup truck."

OUT-OF-TOUCH CYNICS maintain the pickup is a symbol of male virility, or a lack thereof, though, in fact, pickups are the automotive equivalent of the old workhorse or mule. Our neighbors' pickups come equipped with truck bed rail-to-rail toolboxes. Often the beds are full of engine parts, scrap metal, or firewood. In other words, they are used to haul things. I am reminded of the scene from the movie Paper Moon when the flim-flam man, played by Ryan O'Neal, is fleeing the cops and attempts to swap his fancy roadster for an old rusted pickup. What good is a car, the yokels ask, when you "can't haul nothing with it?"

The pickup's place in American cultural history is noteworthy, in particular its supporting role in a number of iconic films. Who can forget the pickup-driving crackers in Easy Rider who send the hippies Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda to hell? Or the old pickup Sonny and Dewayne take on a road trip to Mexico in The Last Picture Show? Country music would be even more depressing without the pickup. Imagine Tom T. Hall's bittersweet classic "Pamela Brown" without the lines: "I guess the guy she married was the best part of my luck. She dug him 'cause he drove a pickup truck"? Or the Steve Goodman/David Allen Coe hit "You Never Even Called Me By My Name," where the ex-con narrator pulls out all the country clichés, including driving his pickup to the train station to meet his mother, only to find that she'd "got runned over by a damned old train." As for great American literature, there is novelist Larry Brown's entire oeuvre, while Michael Perry's idyllic Truck: A Love Story is an inspirational tale of midlife crisis, late-blooming love, deer-hunting, farming, country music, Roland Barthes, and, if that weren't enough, restoring a 1951 International Harvester pickup.

Just who gets credit for creating the first pickup remains a matter of conjecture and intense drink-fueled debate. The top contenders are Gottlieb Daimler (1896) and Henry Ford (1900). Of course, few American pickup owners want to accept that a foreigner invented the pickup, but upon further consideration one remembers that Germans also invented beer and the world's best acoustic guitars, and what good would a pickup truck be without beer and guitars? I say, we let the Krauts have it: when you drive an American-made pickup you can afford to be generous.

Christopher Orlet is a freelance writer based in Columbia, Illinois.

Brown's truckin', Obama shifts into reverse

By MARK STEYN
Syndicated columnist
The Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/sections/opinion/
January 22, 2010

So what went wrong? According to Barack Obama, the problem is that he overestimated you dumb rubes' ability to appreciate what he's been doing for you. "That I do think is a mistake of mine," the president told ABC's George Stephanopoulos. "I think the assumption was if I just focus on policy, if I just focus on this provision or that law or if we're making a good rational decision here, then people will get it."

But you schlubs aren't that smart. You didn't get it. And Barack Obama is determined to see that you do. So the president has decided that he needs to start "speaking directly to the American people."

Wait, wait! Come back! Don't all stampede for the hills! He gave only (according to CBS News' Mark Knoller) 158 interviews and 411 speeches in his first year. That's more than any previous president – and maybe more than all of them put together. But there may still be some show out there that didn't get its exclusive Obama interview – I believe the top-rated "Grain & Livestock Prices Report – 4 a.m. Update with Herb Torpormeister" on WZZZ-AM Dead Buzzard Gulch Junction's Newstalk Leader is still waiting to hear back from the White House.

But what will the president be saying in all these extra interviews? In that interview about how he hadn't given enough interviews, he also explained to George Stephanopoulos what that wacky Massachusetts election was all about:

"The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office," said Obama. "People are angry, and they're frustrated, not just because of what's happened in the last year or two years but what's happened over the last eight years."

Got it. People are so angry and frustrated at George W. Bush that they're voting for Republicans. In Massachusetts. Boy, I can't wait for that 159th interview.

Presumably, the president isn't stupid enough actually to believe what he said. But it's dispiriting to discover he's stupid enough to think we're stupid enough to believe it.

So who's panting for that 412th speech? Not the American Left. As Paul Krugman, The New York Times' "Conscience of a Liberal," put it: "He Wasn't The One We've Been Waiting For."

Not the once-delirious Europeans, either. As the headline in Der Spiegel put it: "The World Bids Farewell To Obama."

And not any beleaguered Democratic candidates trying to turn things around in volatile swing states like, er, Massachusetts. The Barack Obama who showed up last Sunday to help out Martha Coakley was a sad and diminished figure from the colossus of a year ago. He had nothing to say, but he said it anyway. As he did with his Copenhagen pitch for the Olympics, he put his personal prestige on the line, raised the stakes, and then failed to deliver. All those cool kids on his speechwriting team bogged him down in the usual leaden sludge. He went to the trouble of flying in to phone it in.

The most striking aspect of his performance was how unhappy he looked, as if he doesn't enjoy the job. You can understand why. He ran as something he's not, and never has been: A post-partisan centrist transformative healer. That'd be a difficult trick to pull off even for somebody with any prior executive experience, someone who'd actually run something, like a state, or even a town, or even a commercial fishing operation, like that poor chillbilly boob Sarah Palin. At one point late in the 2008 campaign, when someone suggested that if Gov. Palin was "unqualified" then surely he was, too, Obama pointed to as evidence to the contrary his ability to run such an effective campaign. In other words, running for president was his main qualification for being president.

That was the story of his life: Wow! Look at this guy! Wouldn't it be great to have him ...as community organizer, as state representative, as state senator, as United States senator. He was wafted ever upwards, staying just long enough in each "job" to get another notch on the escutcheon, but never long enough to leave any trace.

The defining moment of his doomed attempt to prop up Martha Coakley was his peculiar obsession with Scott Brown's five-year-old pickup:

"Forget the ads. Everybody can run slick ads," the president told an audience of out-of-state students at a private school. "Forget the truck. Everybody can buy a truck."

How they laughed! But what was striking was the thinking behind Obama's line: that anyone can buy a truck for a slick ad, that Brown's pickup was a prop – like the herd of cows Al Gore rented for a pastoral backdrop when he launched his first presidential campaign. Or the "Iron Chef" TV episode featuring delicious healthy recipes made with produce direct from Michelle Obama's "kitchen garden": The cameras filmed the various chefs meeting the first lady and then picking choice organic delicacies from the White House crop, and then, for the actual cooking, the show sent out for stunt-double vegetables from a grocery back in New York. Viewed from Obama's perspective, why wouldn't you assume the truck's just part of the set? "In his world," wrote The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes, "everything is political, and everything is about appearances."

Howard Fineman, the increasingly loopy editor of the increasingly doomed Newsweek, took it a step further. The truck wasn't just any old prop but a very particular kind: "In some places, there are codes, there are images," he told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. "You know, there are pickup trucks, you could say there was a racial aspect to it one way or another."

Ah, yes. Scott Brown has over 200,000 miles on his odometer. Man, he's racked up a lot of coded racism on that rig. But that's easy to do in notorious cross-burning KKK swamps like suburban Massachusetts.

Whenever aspiring writers ask me for advice, I usually tell 'em this:

Don't just write there, do something. Learn how to shingle a roof, or tap-dance, or raise sled dogs. Because if you don't do anything, you wind up like Obama and Fineman – men for whom words are props and codes and metaphors but no longer expressive of anything real.

America is becoming a bilingual society, divided between those who think a pickup is a rugged vehicle useful for transporting heavy-duty items from A to B, and those who think a pickup is coded racism.

Unfortunately, the latter group forms most of the Democratic-media one-party state currently running the country. Can you imagine Bill Clinton being so stupid as to put down pickup trucks while standing next to John Kerry? And what's even more extraordinary is that those lines were written for Obama by paid professionals.

But fine, have it your way. Tuesday's vote was really a plea by a desperate people for even more Obama. We're going to need even more Obama teleprompters, even more Obama speeches, even more sonorous banalities unrelated to action, even more "Let me be clears..." prefacing even more tinny generalities, on even more reams of even more double-spaced paper. And we're gonna need a really heavy duty rig to carry all that verbiage.

Maybe Scott Brown can sell 'em his truck.

©MARK STEYN

What Scott Brown's win means for the Democrats

By Charles Krauthammer
The Washington Post
Friday, January 22, 2010; A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com

On Jan. 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 Jan. 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 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 a Rasmussen poll, 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 diss 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 Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, "there's no hope of waking up."

I say: Let them sleep.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com

Democrats on the precipice of failure

By George F. Will
The Washington Post
Thursday, January 21, 2010; A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com

"We are on the precipice of an achievement that's eluded Congresses and presidents for generations."

-- President Barack Obama, Dec. 15, on health-care legislation

Precipice, 1. a headlong fall or descent, esp. to a great depth.
-- Oxford English Dictionary

Trying to guarantee Americans the thrill of the precipice, the president dashed to Massachusetts on Sunday, thereby conceding that he had already lost Tuesday's Senate election, which had become a referendum on his signature program. By promising to cast the decisive 41st vote against the president's health-care legislation, the Republican candidate forced all congressional Democrats to contemplate this: Not even frenzied national mobilization of Democratic manpower and millions of dollars could rescue one of the safest Democratic seats in the national legislature from national dismay about the incontinent government expansion, of which that legislation is symptomatic.

Because the legislation is frightening and unpopular, Democrats have had to resort to serial bribery to advance it. Massachusetts voted immediately after the corruption of exempting, until 2018, union members from the tax on high-value health insurance plans. This tax was supposedly the crucial component of what supposedly was reform's primary goal: reducing costs.

The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) thought Bill Clinton's presidency was crippled by the 1993 decision to pursue health-care reform rather than welfare reform. So slight was public enthusiasm for the former that Clinton's program never even came to a vote in the House or Senate, both controlled by Democrats. There was such fervor for welfare reform that in 1996, after two Clinton vetoes, he finally signed the decade's most important legislation.

In their joyless, tawdry slog toward passage of their increasingly ludicrous bill, Democrats now cling grimly to Robert Frost's axiom that "the best way out is always through." Their sole remaining reason for completing the damn thing is that they started it. The Democrats seem to have convinced themselves that they lost control of Congress in 1994 because they did not pass an unpopular health bill in 1993. Actually, their 1994 debacle had more to do with the arrogance and malfeasance arising from 40 years of control of the House of Representatives (e.g., the House banking scandal), a provocative crime bill (gun control, federal subsidies for midnight basketball) and other matters.

With one piece of legislation, President Obama and his congressional allies have done in one year what it took President Lyndon Johnson and his allies two years to do in 1965 and 1966 -- revive conservatism. Today, conservatism is rising on the steppingstones of liberal excesses.

Between FDR's reprimand by voters in the 1938 midterm congressional elections (partly because of his anti-constitutional plan to enlarge and pack the Supreme Court) and LBJ's 1964 trouncing of Barry Goldwater, there was no liberal legislating majority in Congress: Republicans and conservative Democrats combined to temper liberalism's itch to overreach.
In 1965 and 1966, however, liberalism was rampant. Today, Democrats worrying about a reprise of 1994 should worry more about a rerun of the 1966 midterm elections, which began a Republican resurgence that presaged victories in seven of the next 10 presidential elections.

The 2008 elections gave liberals the curse of opportunity, and they have used it to reveal themselves ruinously. The protracted health-care debacle has highlighted this fact: Some liberals consider the legislation's unpopularity a reason to redouble their efforts to inflict it on Americans who, such liberals think, are too benighted to understand that their betters know best. The essence of contemporary liberalism is the illiberal conviction that Americans, in their comprehensive incompetence, need minute supervision by government, which liberals believe exists to spare citizens the torture of thinking and choosing.

Last week, trying to buttress the bovine obedience of most House Democrats, Obama assured them that if the bill becomes law, "the American people will suddenly learn that this bill does things they like." Suddenly?

If the Democrats' congressional leaders are determined to continue their kamikaze flight to incineration, they will ignore Massachusetts's redundant evidence of public disgust. They will leaven their strategy of briberies with procedural cynicism -- delaying certification of Massachusetts's Senate choice, or misusing "reconciliation" to evade Senate rules, or forcing the House to swallow its last shred of pride in order to rush the Senate bill to the president's desk. Surely any such trickery would be one brick over a load for some hitherto servile members of the Democratic House and Senate caucuses, giving them an excuse to halt their party's Gadarene rush toward the precipice.
georgewill@washpost.com

The Lost Liberals

The Current Crisis

By R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. on 1.21.10 @ 6:08AM
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/

WASHINGTON -- With Scott Brown's election to the senatorial seat held by Edward Kennedy for 47 years, a few things are suddenly clear. Americans in large numbers fear a further government encroachment on our private healthcare system. There are other means of reforming it. Americans do not want to bear higher tax burdens, more profligate government spending, and crushing deficits to be borne by future generations. One other thing is clear. For the most part, the American press is not very informative.

When Bill Clinton went up to Massachusetts to campaign for the Democratic candidate, not one mainstream news organization reported what is a matter of cold fact, to wit, when Bill Clinton campaigns for others they lose. In fact when Clinton was president the Democratic Party mostly lost. In 2004, as I reported in my 2007 book on Clinton in retirement, of the 14 Democrats Clinton campaigned for 12 lost. He was not even able to campaign successfully for his pal, Terry McAuliffe's gubernatorial bid in Virginia last year. Equally unhelpful is outside campaigning from the Prophet Obama. He was no help for Democratic candidates in the recent midterm elections in New Jersey and Virginia. Right now Obama's presidency is a failed presidency. Nowhere in the mainstream media is that reported in their one-year assessments of his presidency. Yet it is now thunderously clear.

There are still wisenheimers out there who will say that this very clever president will now recalculate and change course. He will steal to the center. His Democrats will follow. Truth be known, the Democrats led by Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid, are no more likely to change course than the artistes of the Grateful Dead were ever likely to take up aerobics, join Alcoholics Anonymous, and resort to golf before they all died years short of the average longevity for an adult American male. The Democrats vote the way they do because they are captives of a culture, the youth culture of the 1960s, a culture that has endured, aged, but never smartened up.

This week in a very funny segment of his radio show Rush Limbaugh made a very pertinent point. He did so after playing what he called "patriotic music," in this case the Venezuelan national anthem, which sounded as though it were being performed by a large orchestra of kazoos. Then Rush referred to the "1960s hippies who govern us." Given to amusing hyperbole as he is, El Rushbo was not far off. Most of the real 1960s hippies are either doddering around in early retirement (retirement from life spent on a park bench) or long ago they served as crepe suzettes for the worms. Sure one or two of the left-wing Democrats in Congress might have once been hippies -- one can envisage a long-haired Henry Waxman shuffling through Haight Ashbury in bell bottoms and Jesus sandals -- but today's dominant Democrats in Congress, for a certitude, were hippie fellow-travelers since their troubled youths in the 1960s and early 1970s. They have ever since lived in a closed society, closed to the realities of the Reagan and post-Reagan years.

The Prophet Obama may be a bit too young to have joined what in the late 1960s and early 1970s was called the New Left, but his mentors, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the late Saul Alinsky, were true believers. They saw America as a failed state years ago, and the president agrees. Remember his extraordinary statement last April to 2,000 Europeans at his Strasbourg Town Hall: "In America, there's a failure to appreciate Europe's leading role in the world. Instead of celebrating your dynamic union and seeking to partner with you to meet common challenges, there have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive." This is vintage 1960s left-wingery. Just as Jimmy Carter was the first former president to speak ill of a sitting president while on foreign soil. Obama has now surpassed him. He is the first sitting president to speak ill of America while on foreign soil, and he has done so repeatedly.

Most probably the president sees nothing wrong with this sort of diminishment of his country. Most probably the Democratic leadership sees nothing wrong with it either. Liberals like them get elected not because they understand Americans but because they understand American journalists, who also are part of their 1960s culture. Yet it is a culture from an America of long ago. As even Massachusetts demonstrated this week, most Americans believe Americans know how to solve their problems through initiative, limited government, and hard work, not through the nanny state.


- Bob Tyrrell is founder and editor in chief of The American Spectator. His books include the New York Times bestseller Boy Clinton: the Political Biography; The Impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton; The Liberal Crack-Up; The Conservative Crack-Up; Public Nuisances; The Future that Doesn't Work: Social Democracy's Failure in Britain; Madame Hillary: The Dark Road to the White House; and The Clinton Crack-Up.

He makes frequent appearance on national television and is a nationally syndicated columnist, whose articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun, Washington Times, National Review, Harper's, Commentary, The (London) Spectator, Le Figaro (Paris), and elsewhere.

THAT OLD OBAMA MAGIC IS BACK

By Ann Coulter
http://www.anncoulter.com/
January 20, 2010

Once again, the people have spoken, and this time they quoted what Dick Cheney said to Pat Leahy.

Less than two weeks ago, The New York Times said that so much as a "tighter-than-expected" victory for Massachusetts Democratic Senate candidate Martha Coakley would incite "soul-searching among Democrats nationally," which sent Times readers scurrying to their dictionaries to look up this strange new word, "soul."

A close win for Coakley, the Times said, would constitute "the first real barometer of whether problems facing the party" will affect the 2010 elections.

But when Coakley actually lost the election by an astounding 5 points, the Chicago boys in the White House decided it was the chick's fault.

Democratic candidate Martha Coakley may be a moral monster, but it's ridiculous to blame her for losing the election. She lost because of the Democrats' obsession with forcing national health care down the nation's throat.

Coakley campaigned exactly the way she should have.

As a Democrat running in a special election for a seat that had been held by a Democratic icon (and another moral monster) for the past 46 years in a state with only 12 percent registered Republicans, Coakley's objective was to have voters reading the paper on Friday, saying: "Hey, honey, did you know there was a special election four days ago? Yeah, apparently Coakley won, though it was a pretty low turnout."

Ideally, no one except members of government unions and Coakley's immediate family would have even been aware of the election.

And until Matt Drudge began covering it like a presidential election a week ago, it might have turned out that way.

Coakley had already won two statewide elections, while her Republican opponent, Scott Brown, had only won elections in his district. She had endorsements from the Kennedy family and the current appointed Democratic senator, Paul Kirk -- as well as endless glowing profiles in The Boston Globe.

And by the way, as of Jan. 1, Brown had spent $642,000 on the race, while Coakley had spent $2 million.

On Jan. 8, just 11 days before the election, The New York Times reported: "A Brown win remains improbable, given that Democrats outnumber Republicans by 3 to 1 in the state and that Ms. Coakley, the state's attorney general, has far more name recognition, money and organizational support."

It was in that article that the Times said a narrow Coakley win would be an augury for the entire Democratic Party. But now she's being hung out to dry so that Democrats don't have to face the possibility that Obama's left-wing policies are to blame.

Alternatively, Democrats are trying to write off Brown's colossal victory as the standard seesawing of public sentiment that hits both Republicans and Democrats from time to time. As MSNBC's Chris Matthews explained, it was just the voters saying "no" generally, but not to anything in particular.

Except when Republicans win political power, they hold onto it long enough to govern. The Democrats keep being smacked down by the voters immediately after being elected and revealing their heinous agenda.

As a result, for the past four decades, American politics has consisted of Republicans controlling Washington for eight to 14 years -- either from the White House or Capitol Hill -- thus allowing Americans to forget what it was they didn't like about Democrats, whom they then carelessly vote back in. The Democrats immediately remind Americans what they didn't like about Democrats, and their power is revoked at the voters' first possible opportunity.

Obama has cut the remembering-what-we-don't-like-about-Democrats stage of this process down from two to four years to about 10 months. Folks, I'm convinced that if we all work really hard, we can get it down to three months.

Four years of Jimmy Carter gave us two titanic Reagan landslides, peace and prosperity for eight blessed years -- and even a third term for his feckless vice president, George H.W. Bush.

Two years of Bill Clinton gave us a historic Republican sweep of Congress, which killed the entire Clinton agenda (with the exception of partial-birth abortion and felony obstruction of justice) -- and also gave us two terms for George W. Bush.

And now, merely one year of Obama and a Democratic Congress has given us the first Republican senator from Massachusetts in 31 years.

In other recent news, last November, New Jersey voters, who haven't voted for a Republican for president since 1988, threw out their incumbent Democratic governor, Jon Corzine. In Virginia, which Obama carried by 6 points a year earlier, a religious-right Republican won the governor's office by 17 points.

Sen. Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, won his last election in 2006 by 28 points -- the largest margin for a Democratic Senate candidate in that state in a quarter-century.

Since voting for the Senate health care bill last Christmas, the once-bulletproof Sen. Nelson not only gets booed out of Omaha pizzerias, but he has also seen his job approval rating fall to 42 percent and his disapproval rating soar to 48 percent. (Meanwhile, the junior senator from Nebraska, Mike Johanns, who voted against the bill, has a job approval rating of 63 percent.)

The Democrats have no natural majority because they have no fundamental principles -- at least none that they are willing to state out loud. They are like a drunken vagrant who emerges from the alley to cause havoc every few years. They are the perpetual toothache of American politics.

To be sure, the fact that 52 percent of Massachusetts voters are racist, sexist tea-baggers -- i.e., voted for a Republican -- means only that the Democrats just went from having the largest congressional majority in a generation to the second largest. But this was "Teddy Kennedy's seat." And it was in Massachusetts.

Now, no Democrat is safe.

But the country just got a lot safer.

COPYRIGHT 2010 ANN COULTER

Why the Great and Growing Backlash?

What Scott Brown’s election portends for the Obama agenda.

By Victor Davis Hanson
http://www.nationalreview.com/
January 20, 2010, 4:00 a.m.

Dream up a gargantuan backlash against Barack Obama’s left-wing gospel, and you still could not invent the notion of a relatively unknown, conservative Scott Brown knocking off an Obama-endorsed, liberal, female attorney in liberal Massachusetts — in a race to fill the seat once held by Ted Kennedy.

Republican Senator-elect Scott Brown holds up a copy of the Boston Herald announcing his victory as he celebrates with his wife Gail Huff after defeating Democrat Martha Coakley to replace the the late Ted Kennedy at Brown's victory rally in Boston, January 19, 2010.
REUTERS/Brian Snyder

If a liberal senatorial candidate can be defeated in Massachusetts, eleven months after the Obama hope-and-change blitzkrieg, it is hard to believe that any liberal seat is necessarily safe anywhere.

So the real story is not a populist backlash, but a growing populist backlash, whose ultimate nature and magnitude are as yet unknown. What’s going on?

BUYING JOBS?

Voters are sick and tired of a terrible year of big spending and big deficits — especially the sight of Obama and his congressional allies almost daily talking breezily about spending what we do not have.

Voters went for the hope-and-change Obama in part because he promised fiscal sobriety after the Bush $500 billion deficit. Instead, in utterly cynical fashion, Obama trumped that red ink four times over. In the process, he developed a terrible habit of promising favored constituencies a hundred billion here, a hundred billion there as if it were all paper money — rather than real borrowed currency that will have to be confiscated in the future from the beleaguered taxpayer. It only makes it worse than the more the administration borrowed, printed, and spent, the higher unemployment rose and the lower economic activity plummeted.

Most have had enough of pie-in-the-sky talk of massive new health-care entitlements, cap-and-trade taxes and regulation, more stimulus, and more takeovers of private enterprise. The country is broke and the people want to pay off, not incur more, crushing debt. What got us into the mess was too much borrowing, skyrocketing debt, and reckless spending — not too many balanced budgets and too much lean government.

PROPHETS CAN’T MISLEAD?

No politician quite gets a pass for deception and prevarication. Obama in his narcissism thought his sonorous rhetoric made him exempt from a “read my lips” or “I didn’t have sex with that woman” moment. It didn’t.

People heard his serial promises about airing the health-care debate on C-SPAN, his new-transparency/no-lobbyist vows, and his monotonous boasts to close down Guantanamo within a year. All that is now “inoperative.” The problem was not just that Obama made promises that he broke, but that he made them so frequently and so vehemently — and so cavalierly broke them. That brazen campaign deception is problematic for a politician, but proves fatal for a self-appointed messiah.

A CESSATION OF CORRUPTION

We went from a Republican “culture of corruption” to a liberal cesspool of corruption. Sen. Chris Dodd lectures Wall Street while he gets sweetheart loans and vacation-home deals. Few could make up a story that the nation’s top tax lawmaker, House Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel, is a tax dodger, and the nation’s top tax enforcer, Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, is an even more egregious tax dodger. When the Democratic Senate leadership started buying health-care votes at $300 million a clip, our Congress became little more than the praetorian guard, auctioning off its support to any wannabe late Roman emperor. The idea of a muckraking Obama nominating Tom Daschle as his Health Secretary — the liberal populist who skips out of thousands of dollars in taxes on his free corporate limousine service — was the stuff of satire.

BUSH REALLY, REALLY, REALLY DID DO IT

No one likes a serial whiner. It has been a year now — and Obama still blames George W. Bush ad nauseam. He did it in Massachusetts again — and on the eve of the election, no less. Blaming the past for the mistakes of the present gets old quickly. And when one adds in the constant What’s the Matter With Kansas? brand of condescension about naïve yokels not knowing what’s good for them, it gets even worse.

Yet Obama still pontificates that angry deluded voters will “suddenly” come to appreciate how he rammed health care down their otherwise ignorant throats: “The American people will suddenly learn that this bill does things they like and doesn’t do things that people have been trying to say it does. . . . The worst fears will prove groundless. And the American people’s hope for a fair shake from their insurance companies — for quality, affordable health care they need — will finally be realized.”

Good luck with that, O philosopher king!


WALL STREET POPULISTS

Elite liberals are not good class warriors. Factor in multi-millionaire Nancy Pelosi’s government mega-jet or Barack Obama’s various overseas junkets or the big Wall Street money that went into Obama’s near billion-dollar campaign coffers, and it is hard to take seriously Obama’s constant war against “them.” The voters have figured out that their president likes the elite plutocracy and the lower middle classes, but not so much the wannabe rich who aspire to cross his hated $250,000 income threshold — at which point suddenly they become unpatriotic, unwilling to pay their fair shares, and reluctant to spread the wealth around.

It is not particularly smart to constantly demonize the entrepreneurial classes, promise to raise income, payroll, health-care, and inheritance taxes on them, and expand government regulations — and then wonder why they are not creating more jobs.

ELMER GANTRY

Devotees turn on false prophets with a special vengeance. Obama is beginning to grate. His flip-the-switch-on, evangelical cadences at rallies sound more like a Harvard nerd doing blues imitations than Martin Luther King Jr. Purple-state presidents don’t appoint Van Joneses and Anita Dunns, or turn the NEA into a quid pro quo Ministry of Approved Culture. A healer doesn’t start in on the “rich,” “Wall Street,” the “big” oil companies, drug companies, insurance companies, or “fat-cat bankers” — especially when he has done his best to shake them all down for campaign money, hire as many of them as he can in his own administration, and arrange cut-rate loans, insider deals, bailouts, and guarantees for all of them.

Obama’s populism is beginning to sound more like a bought boxer who belatedly has second thoughts about throwing the fight he previously contracted. In short, Obama’s ideological presidency hinged on his post-racial, post-national mesmerizing presence that reassured reluctant Democrats to vote against their local constituencies.

If cap-and-trade or health care reform polled below 50 percent, a worried congressional supporter could always call in Him to charm bolting voters. But now? We have in a blink gone from Obama as the bankable 10 percent edge, to Obama as a non-factor, to Obama as a real liability. In short, why vote for an agenda as unpopular as its albatross author?

LIKED BY ALL, RESPECTED BY NONE

Obama thought the antidote to “smoke ’em out,” “dead or alive,” and “bring ’em on” braggadocio was bowing to the Saudis, promulgating new and undiscovered great moments in Islamic history, and reaching out to Ahmadinejad as he rounded up and beat down reformers in the streets of Tehran.

It’s one thing to accuse Bush of shredding the Constitution, quite another to adopt his anti-terrorism protocols like tribunals, renditions, Predators, intercepts, and wiretaps. Somehow Obama offended his base by such duplicity, and then his opposition by his tokenism of trashing Bush, promising the architect of 9/11 a show trial a few blocks from the former World Trade Center, and using touchy-feely euphemisms to suggest we are not in a war against terrorism emanating from the radical Islamic world.

Ahmadinejad, Assad, Chávez, the Castro Brothers, Putin, and others for the first six months liked us as much as they had little respect for our sycophancy; now they openly show contempt. We accept that obsequiousness cannot earn respect, but it apparently cannot earn affection either.

The best thing that could happen to Barack Obama is more Democratic losses in hodgepodge elections that might yank away our young transfixed Narcissus from his mesmerizing reflecting pool.

Almost immediately after Obama showed his ideological cards last spring, I suggested in the first weeks of his presidency that the bait-and-switch president would soon face a Carter/Clinton moment in which he could either press on with his polarizing ideology, damage his party for a generation, and eventually end up churlish and sneering at the electorate, who did not appreciate his exalted morality and genius — or triangulate and follow the Dick Morris/Bill Clinton model of talking and acting sort of centrist.

Who knows after Obama’s Scott Brown moment? We now may hear once again the old “no more Red State/Blue State” tropes, the stale campaign promises of presidential vetoes, claims of financial sobriety, the return of a “war on terror,” and smaller government

We’re either down to all that — or Obama’s more principled road to perdition.

— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the editor of Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome, and the author of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.

Scott Brown's Road to Victory

By Stephen F. Hayes
The Weekly Standard
http://www.weeklystandard.com/
January 20, 2010 1:15 AM

Massachusetts State Sen. Scott Brown, R-Wrentham, celebrates in Boston, Tuesday, Jan. 19, 2010, with wife Gail, center, and daughter Ayla, right, after winning a special election held to fill the U.S. Senate seat left vacant by the death of Sen. Edward Kennedy. Brown defeated Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, a Democrat, and Joseph L. Kennedy, a Libertarian running as an independent and not related to the late Sen. Kennedy.
(AP Photo/Charles Krupa)


Of all of the memorable moments from the Massachusetts special election, the one that stands out most--and the one with real implications for 2010--did not directly involve either of the two candidates in the race.It came Sunday, during Barack Obama's speech.As anyone who paid even casual attention to the Massachusetts race knows, Scott Brown campaigned across Massachusetts in a 2005 GMC Canyon. The pick-up truck appeared in a TV ad Brown ran shortly after the New Year. "I love this old truck and it's brought me closer to the people of this state," Brown said over footage him shaking hands with voters standing next to his truck.
Obama addressed the spot in his speech. He was cynical. "Forget the ads," he said as the audience sat quietly. "Everybody can run slick ads."

Obama paused briefly before offering the punchline. "Forget the truck," he said derisively, as if sharing an inside joke. The audience roared with laughter. "Everybody can buy a truck."

It was a revealing moment. Everybody can buy a truck. Obama seemed to assume that Brown had purchased his pickup truck for the purpose of using it in a political ad, as if that were the only reason that someone might own a pick-up truck--as a prop. In his world, everything is political and everything is about appearances. Beer summit anyone?

The rest of the world doesn't think that way. Scott Brown's truck is five years old. And when polls closed yesterday, it had 201,178 miles on it--most of them miles that Scott Brown had put on it himself. Brown and his advisers used the truck because they believed that it told voters something about the candidate, not because they wanted to fool voters or make Brown something he was not. The truck ad worked because it was as real as it was corny.

Obama's joke--one of several scornful references to the truck--reflected not just his detachment but his arrogance. Obama not only misunderstood the political dynamics of Brown's truck, he assumed that everyone else would see it the same way he did.

So what does all of this mean? Barack Obama is going to have a difficult 2010.He was set to "pivot"--in the overused word of the year--to an agenda that was to have focused on jobs and the economy. White House advisers planned to kick off that effort in the State of the Union--an address that would be given after health care reform could be counted as an accomplishment. It was to have been a big speech by a president who specializes in big speeches and it was to have started Obama's transition from visionary leader to born-again populist.That'll be a tough sell. A real populist would be far more likely to drive a pick-up truck than make fun of one.

Copyright 2010 Weekly Standard LLC.

Blessing in disguise

THE PEOPLE’S SEAT - JEFF JACOBY

By Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe Columnist January 20, 2010
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/

IT REALLY is the people’s seat, and yesterday the people took it back.

But in electing Scott Brown instead of Martha Coakley to replace the late Ted Kennedy in the US Senate, Massachusetts voters did more than hand the GOP its most improbable and thrilling come-from-behind victory in a generation. They did more than embrace a charismatic, upbeat Republican and reject a dour, gaffe-prone Democrat. And they did more than prove that no political party has a permanent lock on any state’s electoral loyalties.

They also gave President Obama and the Democratic left a blessing in disguise - if only they are wise enough to recognize it.

Brown ran explicitly against Obama’s domestic agenda, above all the radical healthcare overhaul that the president has made his priority. Not long ago, such a strategy would have been dismissed as suicidal. But the harder the administration and congressional Democrats have pushed their health legislation, the more unpopular it, and they, have grown. In Boston on Sunday, it spoke volumes that Obama made not a single direct reference to the healthcare bill he champions - and that Brown promises to oppose.

Politically, ObamaCare has backfired. Much of the goodwill with which the president entered the White House has been squandered, and any effort to try to force a health bill through Congress now will drive what’s left of that goodwill over a cliff.

But Brown and the voters of Massachusetts have killed ObamaCare. In so doing they have provided the president a priceless second chance to adjust his political course, move toward the center, and deliver at least some of the bipartisan cooperation that was at the heart of his once-enormous appeal. If Obama seizes the opportunity that Massachusetts and its senator-elect have given him, the brightest days of his presidency may be still to come.

Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com.

Democrats and Double Standards

If Martha Coakley were a Republican, she would have been Quayled.

By Mona Charen
http://www.nationalreview.com/
January 19, 2010 12:00 AM

Oh, how different the world would look if Martha Coakley were a Republican! As it is, she gets the sort of gentle rebukes the press reserves for Democrats. Her campaign was too “lackadaisical,” we are told. She was “overconfident,” and too “buttoned down.”


Candidates for Massachusetts US Senate seat: Scott Brown, Martha Coakley and Joseph L. Kennedy

Reading and watching the MSM, you wouldn’t know that Coakley is a walking minefield. There is now, and there has always been, a completely different set of rules for Republicans.

If a Republican candidate in such a high-profile contest put out campaign literature that misspelled the name of her state, it would be worth, let’s see, mentions on every Sunday gabfest and two, maybe three, jokes on the late-night shows. Dan Quayle’s misspelling is the stuff of legend. Coakley’s? Not so much.

When Coakley was challenged in an October debate about her lack of foreign-policy credentials, she parried: “I have a sister who lives overseas, and she’s been in England and now lives in the Middle East.” Hmm. Just a few months ago, Sarah Palin said something similar, and the smart set has not yet finished laughing. Palin didn’t say, “I can see Russia from my house!” But the Tina Fey parody has replaced the less amusing truth. Saturday Night Live can be brilliant. But if Palin’s comment was worthy of such mockery, wasn’t Coakley’s equally so? Just asking.

The woman who would like to sit in the U.S. Senate announced last week that there are no longer any terrorists in Afghanistan. Not since Joe Biden boasted (during the VP debate) that he had chased Hezbollah from Lebanon have we heard such a loony claim. Where are the titters?

The Democrats style themselves the party of the little guy. They’re for the people rather than the “special interests.” Just ask them. Yet Martha Coakley sneered at the idea of shaking voters’ hands “in the cold,” and chose to spend a critical night just seven days before the election in Washington, D.C., at a high-roller fundraiser sponsored by drug and insurance companies. The host committee included Pfizer, Merck, Amgen, Sanofi-Aventis, Eli Lilly, Novartis, AstraZeneca, and others. Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Cigna, Humana, HealthSouth, and United Health were all sipping white wine with Coakley.

When the president stumped for Coakley in Massachusetts on Sunday, he praised her humble ambitions: “She became a lawyer not to cash in but to give working people a fair shake. She became a lawyer to fight for working families like the one she grew up in.” Oh yes, and “she went after big insurance companies that misled people.”

Members of the Fourth Estate always claim that hypocrisy is what they cannot stand. They are, they say, utterly nonpartisan scourges of that least forgivable political sin. Accordingly, they explain, if a Republican “family values” candidate is caught in a sexual indiscretion, he’s fair game (even if he never mentioned family values). But when Obama broke his solemn promise to abide by campaign-finance limits, and Coakley passed the hat for insurance-company cash, well, how about those Yankees?

Speaking of sports teams, Coakley is fortunate to be a Democrat, and therefore ipso facto a woman of the people, because she’s a little rusty on her Massachusetts sports knowledge. Asked on a radio program about Curt Schilling’s support for her opponent, Coakley said, “And another Yankee fan!” The incredulous interviewer could only stammer, “Curt Schilling? The Red Sox great pitcher of the bloody sock?” Now it was Coakley’s turn to stammer, “Oh, am I wrong about that?”

She won’t get hammered for it. She’s a Democrat.

But in the final hours of the campaign, Coakley is an increasingly desperate Democrat who has stooped to slander. A lurid flier aimed at women voters claims that “1,736 women were raped in Massachusetts in 2008. Scott Brown wants hospitals to turn them all away.” Brown is, as it happens, pro-choice (though in favor of more abortion restrictions than Ms. Coakley). This vile lie was based on Brown’s support for a conscience exemption (which was also supported by Ted Kennedy) for emergency-room personnel who do not wish to prescribe the abortifacient “morning after” pill. That’s a world away from closing hospital doors on rape victims.

Coakley will get a pass on all this from the press. It’s good to be a Democrat. Except, perhaps, on Wednesday morning.

— Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Blame Obama

By Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe Columnist
http://www.boston.com/
January 17, 2010

Edward M. Kennedy has been gone less than five months, but in political terms he is already ancient history. For 47 years he represented Massachusetts in the US Senate; in his home state, no one wielded greater influence or cast a longer shadow. As recently as a few weeks ago, it was taken for granted that the race for the seat he occupied for so long would be shaped unmistakably by his legacy.

But that’s not at all the way this campaign has worked out. As Tuesday’s special election approaches, Massachusetts voters are not being driven by their esteem for Kennedy’s memory or by affection for his family. Indeed, far from advancing what Kennedy called the cause of his life - universal health care - hundreds of thousands of Bay State voters are fired up in supporting a candidate who promises to derail it.

For the first time in two generations, the outcome of a US Senate campaign in Massachusetts is not a foregone conclusion. Whatever happens on Tuesday, this much is clear: Democrat Martha Coakley will not win in a cakewalk, and Republican Scott Brown will not be a sacrificial lamb.
Heading into the final weekend, two of the country’s most respected political handicappers - Stu Rothenberg and Charlie Cook - pronounced the Bay State Senate contest a “toss-up.’’ A new Suffolk University poll showed Brown surging into the lead, with 50 percent of likely voters supporting him vs. 46 percent for Coakley.

How can this be happening? This is the bluest state of them all - a state without a single Republican in Congress or in statewide office, a state Barack Obama won in a landslide. How can the Senate race be too close to call?

Part of the answer, of course, is that Brown has proved an engaging and indefatigable candidate, while Coakley’s campaign has been plagued with gaffes and missteps. Her claim in last week’s televised debate that the terrorists in Afghanistan are “not there anymore’’ suggested a dangerous naiveté on national security, while her huffy response when asked why she has been such a passive campaigner - “As opposed to standing outside Fenway Park? In the cold? Shaking hands?’’ - came across as sneering and elitist.

But ultimately the Massachusetts Senate campaign is not about Brown’s personal appeal or Coakley’s shortcomings on the stump. It is about something bigger. This race is a referendum on Barack Obama and the Democratic ascendancy in Washington.

When Obama was inaugurated a year ago this week, he was hailed by his supporters as a political messiah who would transform American politics, ushering in a new era of hope and goodwill. Never had a new administration been greeted with such rapturous enthusiasm. “Obama’s standing above the country, above the world,’’ Newsweek editor Evan Thomas exulted. “He’s sort of God.’’

What Obama and his party delivered, however, was not uplifting and transparent bipartisanship.

It was trillion-dollar increases in government spending. It was party-line votes on 2,000-page bills. It was “cash-for-cloture’’ backroom deals. It was tone-deaf boasts about millions of jobs “created or saved,’’ even as unemployment soared into double digits and millions of American jobs disappeared.

Above all, it was the attempt to force through a radical health-care overhaul that would drive up the cost of medical insurance, slash Medicare by half a trillion dollars, and subject one-seventh of the US economy to government micromanagement.

The more insistently Democrats in Washington have pushed ObamaCare, the more unpopular it has become - and the more the president’s approval ratings have sunk. In a CNN poll released last week, 48 percent of respondents say Obama’s presidency has so far been a failure, while just 47 percent call it a success. The latest CBS News survey measures only 46 percent approval for Obama - his lowest rating to date and a drop of 22 points since April. On his signature issue - health care - Obama has the support of only 36 percent of the public. Massachusetts residents are no exception: According to the new Suffolk poll, they oppose the health-care legislation by a ratio of 51 to 36.

A year ago, Americans were enchanted with their new president. Today they are suffering from severe buyer’s remorse. Massachusetts may be the bluest state, but voters here are fed up too.

Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com.

Can Obama hold Teddy's seat?

By MARK STEYN
The Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/sections/opinion/
2010-01-15 10:49:17

I've been out of the country for a couple of days, so let me see if I've got this right:

America's preparing to celebrate the first anniversary of Good King Barack the Hopeychanger's reign by electing a Republican?

In Massachusetts?

In what the tin-eared plonkers of the Democrat machine still insist on calling "Ted Kennedy's seat"?

Remember the good old days when the glossy magazine covers competed for the most worshipful image of the new global colossus? If you were at the Hopeychange inaugural ball on Jan. 20, 2009, when Barney Frank dived into the mosh pit, and you chanced to be underneath when he landed, and you've spent the past year in a coma, until suddenly coming to in time for the poll showing some unexotically monikered nobody called Scott Brown, whose only glossy magazine appearance was a Cosmopolitan pictorial 30 years ago (true), four points ahead in Kennedy country, you must surely wonder if you've woken up in an alternative universe. The last thing you remember before Barney came flying down is Harry Reid waltzing you round the floor while murmuring sweet nothings about America being ready for a light-skinned brown man with no trace of a Negro dialect. And now you're in some dystopian nightmare where Massachusetts is ready for a nude-skinned Brown man with no trace of a Kennedy dialect.

How can this be happening?

You don't need to have been in an actual coma. Subscribing to The Boston Globe, the unreadable and increasingly unread Massachusetts snooze-sheet, has much the same effect. As the house organ of a decrepit one-party state, the Globe endorsed Martha Coakley with nary a thought using its Sober Thoughtful Massachusetts Election Editorial template ("[INSERT NAME OF CAREERIST HACK HERE] For Governor/Senator/Mayor/Whatever") and dutifully obscured what happened when one of the candidate's minders shoved to the sidewalk a reporter who had the lese majeste to ask an unhelpful question. If you're one of the dwindling band of Bay Staters who rely on the Globe for your news, you would never have known that a Massachusetts pseudo-"election" had bizarrely morphed into a real one – you know, with two candidates, just like they have in Bulgaria and places. On Friday, the paper finally acknowledged that something goofy was happening: As the revealing headline put it, "Race Is In A Spinout." As in "spinning out of control"? You mean, out of the control of the party and its dopey media cheerleaders? What they really mean is that the Democrats' coronation procession is in a spinout.

Now this is Massachusetts, so the Dems may yet regain control of the spinout and get back on track for victory. If not, they've already taken the precaution of tossing Martha Coakley under the bus the way her minder sent that guy to the sidewalk. Martha? Oh, hopeless candidate.

Terrible campaign. Difficult climate. Yes, but this is Massachusetts.

Tone-deaf candidates running on nothing but a sense of their own entitlement are all but compulsory: This is a land where John Kerry demonstrates the common touch by windsurfing off Nantucket in buttock-hugging yellow Spandex.

As for the "climate," that gets closer to the truth, but, as my colleague Jonah Goldberg pointed out, in this case the Democrats created the climate. If Scott Brown gives Martha Coakley a run for her money on Election Day, Jan. 19, 2010, will be a direct consequence of Jan. 20, 2009. Once upon a time, Barack Obama, in the words of Newsweek editor Evan Thomas, was "standing above the country, above the world, he's sort of God." Seeking to explain why the God of Hope had fallen farther faster than any modern president, David Brooks of the New York Times argued that the tea-party movement had declared war on "the educated class." He seemed to think this was some sort of inverted snobbery: If "the educated class" is for it – "health" "care" "reform," cap-and-trade, Miranda rights for terrorists – Joe Six-Pack and his fellow knuckledragging morons are reflexively opposed to it.

This almost exactly inverts what really happened over this past year.

"The educated class" turned out to be not that educated – if, by "educated," you mean knowing stuff. They were dazzled by Obama: My former National Review colleague Christopher Buckley wrote cooing paeans to his “first-class intellect” and “temperament.” I used to joke that “temperament” was for the Obammysoxers of “the educated class” what hair was to Tiger Beat reporters. But you don't really need analogies. As David Brooks noted after his first meeting with Obama, "I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant, and I'm thinking, a) he's going to be president and b) he'll be a very good president." And once you raised your eyes above pant level it only got better: "Our national oratorical superhero," gushed New York magazine, "a honey-tongued Frankenfusion of Lincoln, Gandhi, Cicero, Jesus, and all our most cherished national acronyms (MLK, JFK, RFK, FDR)."

Where'd that guy go? "People once thought Obama could sound eloquent reading the phone book," wrote Michael Gerson in The Washington Post last week. "Now, whatever the topic, it often sounds as though he is."

If the educated class's pant legs weren't as perfectly creased as Obama's, that's because they were soaking wet. While the smart set were demonstrating all the sober forensic analysis of a Jonas Brothers audience, the naysayers were looking at the actual policies: What is this going to cost me? And my children? And the country? A week before the presidential election, I wrote in this space:

"Settled democratic societies rarely vote to 'go left.' Yet oddly enough that's where they've all gone. In its assumptions about the size of the state and the role of government, almost every advanced nation is more left than it was, and getting lefter."

For the most part, that's just the ratchet effect of Big Government, growing, expanding, remorselessly, under cover of darkness. What happened this past year is that Obama and the Democratic Congress made it explicit, and did it in daylight. And, while Barack may be cool and stellar if you're as gullible as "the educated class," Nancy Pelosi and Ben Nelson most certainly aren't: There's no klieg light of celebrity to dazzle you from the very obvious reality that they're spending your money way faster than you can afford and with no inclination to stop.

"The educated class" is apparently too educated to grasp this insufficiently nuanced point.

It's not just the money. The notion that the IRS should be able to seize your assets if you don't arrange your health care to the approval of the federal government represents the de facto nationalization of your body, which is about as primal an assault on individual liberty as one could devise.

As Michael Barone observed, "the educated class" was dazzled by style, the knuckledragging morons are talking about substance. They grasp that another year of 2,000-page, trillion-dollar government-growing bills offers America only the certainty of decline. Just before the Senate's health care vote, Obama, the silver-tongued orator, declared that we were "on the precipice" of historic reform. Indeed. On Tuesday, we'll find out whether even Massachusetts is willing to follow him off the cliff.

©MARK STEYN

Dems Feeling Heat Over Kennedy Seat

The Democrats’ “bad climate” is a direct result of how they’ve governed.

By Jonah Goldberg
http://www.nationalreview.com/
January 15, 2010, 0:00 a.m.

In August, Ted Kennedy, the Lion of the Senate, the last son of Camelot, the soul of the Democratic party, friend of the people and scourge of robber barons, fat cats, and special interests, departed this mortal coil.

Now, that’s not really my opinion of the man. But if you were inclined to imbue Tom Brokaw with pontifical authority or view the world through the prism of the New York Times, or its Mini-Me the Boston Globe, that’s how you’d see Teddy.

So it should be of more than passing interest that “Ted Kennedy’s seat” in the Senate may go to Republican Scott Brown next week. And not just any Republican, but an actual conservative, as opposed to some me-too Republican who promises to drive in the same direction as liberals.

Not long ago, Brown was down 30 points to Massachusetts attorney general Martha Coakley. Now it’s neck and neck, according to many polls. Brown is still the underdog, but the fact that it is even close is in itself hugely significant. It’s a bit like Tibet holding its own against China in a land war, or Abe Vigoda giving Tiger Woods a run for his money at Augusta (or, for that matter, at a Vegas nightclub).

Even more astounding, Brown is running directly against what everyone agrees was Ted Kennedy’s signature issue and legacy: health-care reform. Massachusetts is the most famously Democratic state in the union. Barack Obama’s presidency and the Democratic congressional majority are invested in health-care reform like a Bernie Madoff victim, and Brown is surging by running as the monkey wrench for the whole thing.

This is like a Democrat successfully running in Texas on tax hikes, gay marriage, and funding the Pentagon solely through bake sales.

The Democratic party is panicking like brothel patrons with the cops at the door. They’re dropping shock troops of muckety-mucks, hacks, spinners, and door-knockers into Boston like Rangers into Normandy.

Meanwhile, the liberal press establishment is in near-total denial. Yes, the race is getting a lot of attention, but Coakley’s problems are being chalked up to the fact that she is a bad campaigner and this is a bad “climate” for the Democrats.

They use “climate” to suggest that things are bad for Democrats for reasons beyond their control (ironically, they don’t talk about the climate that way when it comes to global warming). Orange growers in Florida can’t be blamed for a bad crop if the climate won’t cooperate, and Democrats can’t be held accountable for their crop failure now. It’s the economy! It’s the obstructionism of the Republicans and that satanic whatchamacallit, the filibuster. Jupiter is aligned with Mars, NutraSweet has poisoned the water supply, Lost has been on hiatus too long, Mongo likes candy: It’s the climate, you see, the horrible, horrible climate! Democrats didn’t do anything wrong!

Except they did.

The Democrats’ “bad climate” is a direct result of how they’ve governed. The populist backlash is fueled by a sense that Democrats are acting on their preferred agenda and by their own rules. From the shenanigans of the people who write our tax code and collect our taxes to special deals and secret arrangements for big businesses and legislators who play ball, the Democrats have abandoned transparency in favor of transparent arrogance.

Coakley is a creature of this climate. She hasn’t been running for “Ted Kennedy’s seat,” she’s been strolling to it like someone who knows it’s been reserved for her and all she needs to do is swing by the will-call window to pick it up.

“The people of Massachusetts” are an abstraction whose assigned role is to ratify her entitlement to that seat. As for the actual citizens of the state her campaign can’t be bothered to spell correctly in campaign ads? By all means, keep them at a safe distance.

When asked if her campaign style is too aloof, she snapped back: “As opposed to standing outside Fenway Park [the way Scott Brown does]? In the cold? Shaking hands?”

Heaven forfend the royal heir apparent descend from her carriage and actually touch the proles.

Brown has raised vast sums through the sorts of small donations that allegedly made Obama a man of the people. But Coakley attacks his fundraising as the tainted lucre of right-wing ogres lurking under America’s bridges (bridges no doubt paid for with stimulus dollars), while she shakes down health-care lobbyists eager to cash in on the “reform” she will ratify.

Coakley may still win. But Democrats should be on notice: The fault for her sad performance lies not in the climate, but in themselves.


— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. © 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc.