As we discussed yesterday, Scott Brown has gone all-in on Roy Blunt’s crazy amendment to let any employer eviscerate any part of your health care coverage because … well, because he feels like it. Oh, to be sure, Brown himself “disagrees” with the “interpretation” that it goes that far, but all you have to do is read the language to see that it does. Brown’s pathetic effort to explain away the amendment’s plain language is pretty funny in this interview with Jim Braude.
Today, lots of commentary is rolling in, and it’s bad. Perhaps the most telling is from Margery Eagan, the Herald columnist who is no wild-eyed lefty, but is rather a middle-of-the-roader who no doubt sometimes votes Republican and sometimes Democratic, and who is also (obviously) female. I also assume, but don’t know for sure, that she’s Catholic. She is, in short, exactly the kind of voter Scott Brown absolutely must have in his corner to win reelection. Here’s her take:
U.S. Sen. Scott Brown has co-sponsored a bill that would allow health plans to deny coverage both for contraception and any service that violates the planners’ beliefs.
It was a huge mistake….
It’s 2012, not 1950, not the Middle Ages. Contraception in 2012 is the routine method prescribed by doctors and used by hundreds of millions to prevent pregnancies or the abortions so many find repugnant. And I thought everybody was onboard with this, except nuts like Rick Santorum and the out-of-touch, elderly and celibate Catholic bishops who call contraception an “intrinsic evil.”
Now Scott Brown, who has so skillfully managed a reasonable and across-the-aisle Senate dance, has sided with nuts and the “intrinsic evil” set.
Surely he’s not sided with Catholic lay people. Many, if not most of them, have ignored the bishops on contraception since 1968, when the church first weighed in against it. Ninety-eight percent of Catholic women have used contraception. Even Sister Carol Keehan, head of of the Catholic Hospital Association, supports President Obama’s Friday compromise (allowing insurance companies, not religious institutions, to pay for contraception)….
No matter how he explains this latest move, underneath it all there’s an unspoken message: There is something morally wrong with a loving husband and wife using contraception to prevent pregnancy.
That’s crazy.
That’s about as strongly-worded a column as I’ve ever seen from Eagan.
The Globe’s Yvonne Abraham is more reliably left-of-center, but her points strike me as awfully hard to argue with.
Blunt has brought us to Crazyland, a place far beyond the issue of contraception, not to mention common sense. What’s mystifying is that Brown has followed him there. During his short career in the Senate, Brown has avoided going out on limbs, refusing to take a position at all on some issues and siding with Democrats on enough of the others to avoid alienating the state’s moderate electorate. That strategy has paid off: In a recent WBUR poll, 48 percent of respondents said Brown has compromised “about the right amount” in Washington. A September poll found that, while voters believed that the GOP as a whole was too conservative, they saw Brown as “about right.”
But Brown is definitely on a high outer branch now. Adding to the peril: He really needs women voters to win this election. In 2010, he beat Martha Coakley by narrowing the gender gap to just three points. Right now, Democrat Elizabeth Warren outpolls him among women, 48 percent to 41 percent, according to the WBUR poll, conducted by the MassINC Polling Group. The Blunt amendment won’t endear him to many of them.
And here’s another review, from Herald commentator and daughter-of-Tim Makena Cahill:
He knows he’s running in MA right? Stupid move for Brown in general, but really stupid considering he needs female vote
Again, this is from someone not generally thought to be a super-lefty. She adds in a subsequent tweet that Brown’s “personality is not going to carry him” this time around.
The only slightly positive commentary I’ve seen comes from David Bernstein at the Phoenix, who thinks that Brown may be playing smart politics with this issue. Here’s his take:
Brown is well familiar with the type of Democratic-identifying crossover voters who he’s needed to win in Massachusetts, for state senate or US Senate. They are, in very large part, white, discontented, blue-collar, Irish-American Catholics.
This move checks off the Catholic box.
Maybe. But Eagan says that Brown “[s]urely [has] not sided with Catholic lay people.” And with all due respect to Bernstein, I put more stock in Eagan’s assessment of how the voters Bernstein is talking about are going to feel about Brown’s move, since Eagan herself is much closer to being one of them than Bernstein is. Furthermore, let’s even assume that Bernstein is right that Brown’s move “checks off the Catholic box” for some conservative male Catholics. It seems almost certain to have unchecked the “female voter” box – and if Brown can’t significantly narrow the gender gap, he can’t win.
Even my conservative Church-regular DAD thinks the Pope is an idiot on contraceptives. I’m not sure how he’d feel about Catholic institutions having to cover birth control, but if you put it to him like “think of how many workers who are non-Catholics or Catholic birth control users you’d be denying access to at, say, the CMC in Manchester, how is that fair?”
I think he’d wind up agreeing with Obama on this one. He *does* have a daughter after all.
Also, getting the white male conservative religious vote? Those are not the voters Brown needs to worry about. They aren’t going to vote for Warren anyway.
Mass for Life has already stated it only endorsed Brown to filibuster HCR and prevent, in their words “the even more radically pro-abortion Coakley” from getting the position. In other words, Brown is also radically pro-abortion in their eyes and his usefulness to that organization has dried up. I also doubt it really has a huge membership or influence across the state where abortion rights have long enjoyed bipartisan support in Massachusetts even with otherwise staunch conservatives like Blute and Torkildsen voting for it in Congress. It is also significant to note that with his opposition to contraception Brown is not only positioning himself to the right of most Catholics, most Republicans, and most independents in Massachusetts but to the right of a majority of voters in Mississippi. The only reason I’d see him supporting this is as a tactical amendment to weaken the mandate, but even then he wouldn’t be so public about it. Unless, as other Crossroads ads he ran show, Brown is really being played by the national Republicans to continue to pound away at their talking points that do not play well here.