January 20, 2010 · 5:28 am
Four Quick Thoughts on Massachusetts
- Candidates matter, even in polarized states. If Barrack Obama is the poster child for the advantages of the primary system, Martha Coakley embodies its defects. No smoke-filled room of cigar-chomping party bosses would have ever given her the nomination. I am in all sincerity surprised that she managed to walk the streets of Boston in broad daylight after her Curt Schilling comment. Add to that her supreme arrogance — it just came out that her campaign never conducted a single tracking poll until January — and her general awkwardness on the stump, and you’ve got a perfect storm for political disaster.
- The political timer has gone off on health care reform. It is curious (read: pretty unsound) to interpret the will of an electorate that already has health care reform (and loves it so much that among its proponents is… Scott Brown) as a judgement on the merits of the federal counterpart. I honestly do not think this is about policy. But the Democrats do have a political problem with timing: voters perceive, not without some merit, that health care reform has completely consumed Congress since last year. With the benefits still undersold to the voters, and with unemployment in a holding pattern at 10 percent, time has just about run out. The best option is for Pelosi to convince the House to pass the Senate bill, deal with the remaining funding issues in reconciliation, take the win and then move on.
- Other than health care, this doesn’t change the legislative dynamics significantly. The Democrats had 60 votes before yesterday, and we all saw what a breeze legislating was back then, right?
- Deficit reduction is now harder, not easier. Scott Brown is on the record believing that we can cut our deficits by slashing taxes. His voters, in a Rasmussen focus group, talked mostly about the economy as their motivation, and little about the deficit specifically. Meanwhile, centrist Democrats are panicking that their caucus has paid insufficient attention to unemployment. Everyone’s going to want a huge “jobs” bill, but no one’s going to have the stomach to make deep cuts in programs or raise taxes later on this year. Not that this is such an extraordinary dynamic for Congress, but I think before Scott Brown’s election, the obsession of the centrists was the deficit. Now, it’s unemployment. Looks our debt conversation will have to wait another year.
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Are you using "polarized" in the sense of "all at one pole"? It seems that MA doesn't fit the standard definition of polarized, since registered Republicans are about 12-18 percent and "unenrolled" outnumber Dems. MA is one of the *least* polarized. Perhaps you mean the election itself was polarizing?"Barak" has one r.Do you think supreme arrogance from Dems in MA is unusual? 10 of 10 reps are Dems (no republicans this millenium) and no GOP senator since the 1970s. All six exec positions are Dems. Dems are 90% of the state Senate and state House. They figure that they own the place and had pretty good evidence to back it up. The absence of competition results in Coakleys (and Boxers).Focus groups said that it is about health care. Outside money says that it was about health care. The symbolism of the 41st vote against health-care is unavoidable. 88% of Brown voters say that it is better to do nothing than pass this health care. So, yeah, it was about policy.So, you are saying it won't change the agenda in the senate because they won't do anything anyway and you can't do less than nothing? It will change the dynamic in 3 ways: 1. the marginal voter has been moved one to the right, which is what matters. The key is always to identify the median senator for any given piece of legislation Now that median has shifted. 2. Every senator is the 41st senator to vote against cloture. 100 Ben Nelsons to bribe. Even Reid can't do that. 3. It sends a signal that there is no safe seat and that Obama's coattails are short. If a Dem can't win in MA?… then Reid might lose, and Dodd and Specter and who knows? All conventional wisdom is thrown out the window when a State Attorney General with a 30 point lead and the endorsement of unions and Kennedys loses to a state senator in a state that voted for Obama by 26 points.
- The Democratic machine controls politics in MA, so in that sense it's polarized. I actually think that Coakley's association with this old guard machine explains a great deal of why she lost.- My spelling sucks.- Brown didn't run a single ad against health care. He said he supported the Massachusetts system. Most of his voters support the Massachusetts system. The Massachusetts system is similar to the Senate bill that passed last month, only the Senate bill has better cost controls. So while I'm sure outside Republicans want to make it about health care, it's not about the merits of the policy. It's about the fact that Congress is letting it consume all its time when it ought to be moving on to other economic issues.- The marginal voter has now moved to… Olympia Snowe, whom the Democrats have had to court anyway on some votes because of Joe Lieberman and other conservative Democrats. Had Snowe's vote been on the line last month, I think she would have been persuaded to support health care with minimal changes from what we got anyway. – I'm sure some Democrats will freak out. On the other hand, Coakley was pretty much the opposite of a political heavyweight. Brown better establish himself quickly; otherwise, it'll be a potential Dem pickup in a couple years.- The flip side of course is that this general anti-incumbent sentiment can hurt the GOP just as badly, especially since their angry base is more organized and will probably soon have a political outlet in the Tea Party with some heavy political weight behind it. And the GOP won't have a Democratic super-majority to blame any more for inaction.