Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Brown wins! Congratulations to Scott Brown, MA GOP and RMG

By

Really an incredible upset.

I think it’s worth paraphrasing here a comment I read a few days ago on Red Mass Group that went something like: everyone always forgets how proud we Massachusetts Republicans are of our state. We love it! It’s been hard to defend how great Massachusetts is to other Republicans because of how many Democrats this state elects, but we do, have for a long time, and always will.

Massachusetts, after all, comes first in the phrase Massachusetts Republican.

So congratulations to Scott Brown, the MA GOP, and Red Mass Group, which in my opinion galvanized, united and helped organize the movement that accomplished this incredible upset. They have also confirmed the awesome, terrible power of the Hindenberg image, which has been on their website for the past few days and now, of course, remains undefeated. Bruce, of  the late mAssbackwards blog, would no doubt be delighted, if only the well fortified and heavily armed cabin he moved to deep in the New Hampshire woods had electricity.

Pop a beer, flip on your DVD of the 2004 ALCS, and fire away about whatever is on your mind.

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  3. I have no problem letting them savor their victory. Congrats on a very well run campaign.

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    p>We’ll be back in 2012.

  6. Rachel Maddow was just debating with Chris Matthews– he feels it was about policy, and she feels it was about messaging– she said Brown had a clear message (even if it was misleading) and he defined Coakley before she truly defined herself.

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    p>Howard Dean was on with Rachel and he shares my sentiments– the Democrats have compromised too much and moved too far to the center-right, in futile efforts to get some Republican support.  Time to do what Democrats ought to do– let people know where we stand– that it is not the Republicans, but it’s Democrats who support policies that help the middle class.  Time to re-claim the populist message.

    • Time to do what Democrats ought to do– let people know where we stand– that it is not the Republicans, but it’s Democrats who support policies that help the middle class.  Time to re-claim the populist message.

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      p>And then the Democrats need to start supporting those policies, instead of catering to the special interest, corporations, and the wealthy.

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      p>You said it Devorah, thank you!

          • Obama and the Dems have been sellouts to wall street, that’s the biggest issue that sticks in people’s minds. Now they worry that health care will be a sell out to the insurance corporations.

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            p>Can’t imagine why they think that….

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            p>Just remember, I coined “Blue Mass Coup” first.

          • Conventional wisdom these days defines whatever benefits corporations as ‘the center.’ Just look at your favorite corporate media outlet. Anything that might cut into corporate profit is ‘radical’ or ‘extreme.’

            • the “center” has become the new cover for the corporate interests.  We need to change the term.  Our politicians need to move toward serving the people, not corporations.

    • I think that a lot of misinformation increased Brown’s turnout by right-wing types. I got a few emails from friends that were absolutely false — but my friends believed them completely and they voted when they might not normally have done so. Here’s a sample:

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      p>

      One, illegal immigration. I want you to stop coddling illegal immigrants and secure our borders. Close the underground tunnels. Stop the violence and the trafficking in drugs and people. No amnesty, not again. Been there, done that, no resolution. P.S., I’m not a racist. This is not to be confused with legal immigration.

      Two, the STIMULUS bill. I want it repealed and I want no further funding supplied to it. We told you No, but you did it anyway. I want the remaining unfunded 95% repealed. Freeze, repeal.

      Three: Czars. I want the circumvention of our constitutional checks and balances stopped immediately. Fire the czars. No more czars. Government officials answer to the process, not to the president. Stop trampling on our Constitution, and honor it.

      Four, cap and trade. The debate on global warming is not over.. There are many conflicting opinions and it is too soon for this radical legislation. Quit throwing our nation into politically-correct quicksand.

      Five, universal healthcare. I will not be rushed into another expensive decision that will burden me, my children, and grandchildren. Don’t you dare try to pass this in the middle of the night without even reading it. Slow down!  Fix only what is broken — we have the best health care system in the world — and test any new program in one or two states first.

      Six, growing government control. I want states rights and sovereignty fully restored. I want less government in my life, not more. More is not better! Shrink it down. Mind your own business.  You have enough to take care of with your real [Constitutional] obligations. Why don’t you start there.

      Seven, ACORN. I do not want ACORN and its affiliates in charge of our 2010 census. I want them investigated. I also do not want mandatory escrow fees contributed to them every time on every real estate deal that closes — how did they pull that one off?  Stop the funding to ACORN and its affiliates pending impartial audits and investigations. I do not trust them with taking the census with our taxpayer money. I don’t trust them with any of our taxpayer money. Face up to the allegations against them and get it resolved before taxpayers get any more involved with them. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, hello. Stop protecting your political buddies. You work for us, the people. Investigate.

      Eight, redistribution of wealth. No, no, no. I work for my money. It is mine. I have always worked for people with more money than I have because they gave me jobs — and that is the only redistribution of wealth that I will support. I never got a job from a poor person! Why do you want me to hate my employers? And what do you have against shareholders making a profit?

      Nine, charitable contributions. Although I never got a job from a poor person, I have helped many in need. Charity belongs in our local communities, where we know our needs best and can use our local talent and our local resources. Butt out, please. We want to do it ourselves.

      Ten, corporate bailouts. Knock it off. Every company must sink or swim like the rest of us. If there are hard times ahead, we’ll be better off just getting into it and letting the strong survive. Quick and painful. (Have you ever ripped off a Band-Aid?) We will pull together. Great things happen in America under great hardship. Give us the chance to innovate. We cannot disappoint you more than you have disappointed us.

      Eleven, transparency and accountability. How about it? No, really, how about it? Let’s have it. Let’s say we give the buzzwords a rest and have some straight honest talk. Please stop trying to manipulate and appease me with clever wording. I am not the idiot you obviously take me for. Stop sneaking around and meeting in back rooms making deals with your friends. It will only be a prelude to your criminal investigation. Stop hiding things from me.

      Twelve, unprecedented quick spending. Stop it now.
      Take a breath. Listen to the people. Slow down and get some input from nonpoliticians and experts on the subject. Stop making everything an emergency. Stop speed-reading our bills into law. I am not an activist. I am not a community organizer. Nor am I a terrorist, a militant or a violent person. I am a parent and a grandparent. I work. I’m busy.  I am busy, and I am tired. I thought we elected competent people to take care of the business of government so that we could work, raise our families, pay our bills, have a little recreation, complain about taxes, endure our hardships, pursue our personal goals, cut our lawn, wash our cars on the weekends and be responsible contributing members of society and teach our children to be the same all while living in the home of the free and land of the brave.

      <

      p>The discourse on the national level, from ACORN to death panels, took its toll on a lot of voters.

      <

      p>I also think that a very simple anti-tax message brought independents into the fold. Remember, this state talked about raising every tax in the book before settling on the sales tax, and property tax bills just came out too. People are hurting, and they are angry when their taxes go up when their income does not. They’d be angry with services being cut too. It’s not a good recipe for the party in power.

      • These talking points were not invented by the Brown campaign. They were carefully crafted over the years to play on people’s fears and frustrations, for use in campaigns all over the country.

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        p>The points appear simple on the surface but they strike me as very sophisticated. It isn’t easy to get people to feel threatened, especially by a policy or group that might actually help them.

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        p>I think you’re right about the anti-tax message. The “beauty” of that message is that it can be used in good times or bad. The Bush administration got away with proposing tax cuts as the policy to use in just about any economic climate.

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        p>The conservative noise machine has been shouting about tax cuts for more than two decades. If they are as good as advertised, why aren’t we in better economic shape? Why were we in better shape during the Clinton years when taxes were higher? It is an ingenious media strategy that manages to keep these questions under wraps.

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        p>One aspect to the talking points is the assumption that the public has a short memory and little appetite for details. The talking points you list above contain elements of truth that lend credibility to the misinformation.

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        p>Now I want to read the book “What’s the Matter with Kansas” to see if it can shed light on what is happening here.

    • Howard Dean was on with Rachel and he shares my sentiments– the Democrats have compromised too much and moved too far to the center-right, in futile efforts to get some Republican support.  Time to do what Democrats ought to do– let people know where we stand– that it is not the Republicans, but it’s Democrats who support policies that help the middle class.  Time to re-claim the populist message.

      <

      p>believe in the “validity” of this statement.  Do you all actually want to be put the Democratic party on the status of the Greens?

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      p>My own two cents on why this race fell apart (of course inviting a plethora of bad comments):

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      p>1)  Flight 253:  I don’t care about your attitude on the Patriot Act or water boarding, it brought sharp focus back that there are some folks out there who really, really don’t like us.  I remember back to ’79-’80 with Jimmy Carter (a nice guy, but probably one of our worst presidents ever) being burned in effigy in the streets of Tehran.  That snapped regular voters’ back that to the fact that we are at war regardless of the political makeup of the White House and Congress.

      <

      p>2)  The Health Plan:  do we need Health Care Reform?  Heck ya, we need health care reform.  But we need something that actually will work, instead of this Rube Goldberg scheme thrown up against the wall.  The Dem plan has hidden tremendous costs to ordinary working people in this bill (time to start focusing on the financing parts of both the House and Senate legislation folks – if this thing goes through, regardless of your party affiliation, you’re going to be screaming come 2011).  A tremendous job of obfuscation so far, but even Beth Healy at the Globe has started to figure out the consequences.  The large crowd may not be too smart (although as a fellow NESCAC grad, a brilliant strategy on this board’s part to portray Brown as a Tufts and BC Law alum as a moron ticked me off) but they can sense when too much stuff is being pushed without reasoning.

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      p>We do indeed need Health Care Reform. But let’s look back in history to Social Security bipartisan reform in ’83 with Reagan and Tip O’Neill.  Will be the death blow to the Democratic party if you try and play games over the next few days before Brown is seated.  If this happened in MA where Obama won by 27% a little over a year ago, can you possibly imagine what the rest of the country is thinking now?

      • Brown, as a reliable Republican, will not contribute any more to a constructive solution than the rest of his party has.

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        p>The Rube Goldberg of health reform may be the best that is possible for now. Of course the plan stinks compared with what it should be. But how can government break the stranglehold of big insurance and pharma? These organizations do not play nice or fair. It’s very hard to get elected without their money, and you can’t govern once you’re tainted with it.

        <

        p>That said, I’m appalled at how easily Obama caved to these interests. What happened to the bully pulpit? Can’t say the corporate media is helping here either.

    • What are our elected Democrats thinking?

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      p>Two quotes come to mind:

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      p>“Given the choice between a Republican and someone who acts like a Republican, people will vote for the real Republican all the time”
      – Harry Truman

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      p>“The Definition of insanity is repeating the same behavior and expecting a different outcome”
      – Anonymous

      <

      p>As soon as Clinton hit the White House, the Democrats turned into Republicans and went on to lose elections in droves.

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      p>Obama moves into the White House and pulls the same stunt, with many of the same perpetrators, and gets the same results – the Republicans just gained a Mass Senate seat, unthinkable!

      <

      p>Triangulation/CryptoRepublicanism/DLCism just doesn’t work. I have no idea why otherwise-smart people can’t recognize this.

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      p>Time for the leader of our party to replace Rahm, Larry, and Timmy, roll up his sleeves, and get to work doing what he promised.

      <

      p>Or all is lost.

      <

      p>Let this be a wake up 2×4 to the head.

  10. Howard and Rachel get it, it wasn’t the campaign or the candidate; there’s a groundswell of discontent with the lack of Democratic message, principles, and more importantly, results. We better change gears pretty quick.

    • Sure, this wouldn’t have happened a year ago. And sure, Coakley’s not much of a candidate. But it’s not that Coakley ran a poor campaign. She just ran no campaign until it got close. It was like a heavily favored football team taking a knee on the first play of the game. Honestly, I’ve never seen anything like it. And to think that they’ve already started trying to blame the national party. Good luck with that one, folks.

  11. Scott Brown just became a national hero for 40+% of the nation – he’s gonna singlehandedly stop healthcare reform and cap-n-trade discussion.

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    p>Cue discussion of President Brown in 3…2…1…

    • he won’t stop health care.  Most likely, the House will simply agree with the Senate bill, which means it’s passed and goes to the President.  Done.

      <

      p>Now, cap ‘n’ trade, that’s another story.

      • The Senate bill is much weaker than the House bill, and has all sorts of giveaways to Nebraska, Louisiana, Arkansas…  The House bill barely passed; you think they will approve the Senate bill? Maybe – something is better than nothing, but I won’t believe it until I see it.

  13. Brown ran a good campaign, Coakley did not. Listening to her speech tonight I heard a very decent person and someone I actually like. But then there was the cringe moment. And not the first of the campaign (but thankfully the last)

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    p>Near the end of her speech she said (and has now e-blasted the same message):

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    p>

    To quote our beloved Senator Ted Kennedy, “The work begins anew; the hope rises again, and the dream lives on.”

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    p>Something didn’t sound right so I looked up Kennedy’s 1980 convention speech. Here’s what he said:

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    p>

    For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.

    <

    p>If you’re going to quote the man whose seat you just lost, at least get the friggin’ quote right.  

    • as spoken by Coakley had been presented by someone else (don’t know who) in one of the many tributes to late Senator at the time of his death. I liked the quote when I heard it last fall and wrote it down at the time. It matches Coakley’s words exactly.

  14. This is what I said in an email to a concerned liberal out-of-state friend last night:

    I didn’t want to say this publicly but Martha Coakley is lackluster personally. She’s smart and good on issues but rather mousy; she fades into the background even at her own events. She has too small a persona for this. I voted for Congressman Mike Capuano in the primary. He’s an unabashed liberal with a sharp tongue (good!). She, by contrast, is a very careful lawyer and boring. People are tending to frame Scott Brown’s surprising success as the electorate being fed up with Obama and the Establishment but in a strongly Dem state, in an election to succeed the liberal legend Ted Kennedy, I’ve got to lay the major blame at Martha’s personal door. Oh, and by the way, she was not an eager campaigner either. Peter Principle at work here: she should have stayed an Attorney General. But, in their wisdom, my fellow Dems in Mass. chose her in the primary, I guess because Capuano was well-known around his Boston-area district but not far beyond it. That’s my take on this.

    Can someone please remind me, why exactly did Coakley beat Capuano easily? Was it the statewide visibility she had? Stronger labor support and, if so,why? Other reasons? He was always more of a “proven fighting liberal.” Wasn’t that what was called for?

      • He has voted against the majority – e.g. Iraq authorization in 2002 – which I valued. The media simply ate Howard Dean after his scream, which was much ado about nothing.

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        p>I like temper. Truman had it. Reagan had it. LBJ too. In a world of control and conformity, I like to see my pols flash anger at appropriate times.

        <

        p>Only saw Obama do it once: after the multi-agency screw-ups on the attempted flight terror attack. Never saw him lose his composure on health care reform. Saw him do faux-anger on banker/investor bonuses. Obama makes nice too much. Conciliation is great, to a certain point. Then ya gotta turn up the heat. I could not visualize Martha in the well of the Senate, exhorting or berating colleagues but I could see Mike doing it.

          • Coakley largely got a free pass in the primary — from the press, from many activists, from a lot of electeds.  The three other primary candidates didn’t attack her, maybe because of the threat that they would be called sexist by Senate President Murray (who couldn’t even deliver her hometown for Coakley).    
             

      • Your reasoning makes sense, PP, yet the outcome, IMO, was that the strongest of the four Democratic candidates did not win the nomination. Kinda strange how “ready-to-go statewide infrastructure” trumped “best candidate qua candidate.”

        • …but I am going to say this.

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          p>You created the need for an election over an appointment, to save ‘President’ Kerry’s seat.  You created the need for, and timing of, a special election after Kennedy died.  You made it impossible for ‘best candidates’ to run effectively.

          <

          p>Not known by BMG – Scott Brown was NOT an obscure senator among Republicans and conservatives.  He had made a strong pitch to be Kerry Healey’s LG candidate (another reason I think the ‘picking’ thing is dead) and campaigned statewide.  In my neck of the woods, the Chair of the Lower Cape Republican Council worked hard for Scott because of his many apparances at Council breakfasts and support for the group over the years.  Multiply that example over and over.

          • Is really good at retail politics and his positions hit a cord with the voters. The free medicare(for Nebraska) and exempting unions and public sector workers from the taxes in the health care bill is over the top. Also Coakley’s husband retired in his 50’s, that  just reminded everyone in the private sector of the pension problems in the state. People do realize you cannot retire in your 50’s from the private sector (the IRS won’t even allow it).

            <

            p>On the retail politics side, just talked to a friend of my from his state district – Brown  stopped by (NOT IN AN ELECTION year ) to say hello and see if he could be of any help.

    • Can someone please remind me, why exactly did Coakley beat Capuano easily?

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      p>I think a couple of reasons.

      <

      p>First, Coakley came out for the seat first. How many weeks passed before Capuano threw his hat in the ring? Those weeks allowed people to settle on her simply as a default. That was my reaction, until I started doing more homework and settled on Capuano about 2 weeks before the primary.

      <

      p>Second, Coakley had state-wide recognition among primary voters. Capuano did not.

      <

      p>Third, I think that many Democratic women voted for Coakley based on her gender. I know of women who weren’t that into the race who said that they were voting for Coakley.

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      p>Fourth, the candidates were virtually indistinguishable from each other in positions. That allowed the first 3 points to reign.

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      p>I’m in the western part of the state, so maybe my perspective is different because we didn’t get much attention out here.  

  15. Her email also included this line:

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    p>

    For all of you who poured your hearts and souls into our campaign, thank you for everything.

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    p>It’s a sad commentary, but the very first thing that popped into my mind was, “does that include you, Martha?”

    <

    p>I have no personal animosity against her (other than my current anger at her for blowing this), but the more I hear about how her campaign got stuck on the launch pad after the primary, the more upset I become. She deserved to lose, but the country did not deserve to suffer the consequences of that loss.

    <

    p>I only hope the Dems remaining in congress can take a lesson from how the Repubs acted after Obama won. Everything seemed to be going wrong for the GOP, but they didn’t back down from their principles one bit, and didn’t concede that the election was a repudiation. The kept pressing on with their agenda (misguided and dangerous as it is), and now 15 months later they’re celebrating.

    <

    p>If the Dems can learn that lesson, they’ll put this behind them quickly. If not, it’s going to be a quick slide to minority status and a long time out of power.

  16. Brown ran a relatively clean campaign. Something I would like to do in my own business. Both candidates had classy closing statements.

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    p>BTW – if I was a member of the Massachusetts Democratic party I would NOT run Coakley in a tight race.

    <

    p>

  17. Ted Kennedy’s seat going to a amatuer like Scott Brown? I think this may be the end of the party as we know it in Mass?? Analyze the message, check in with the consultants, maybe focus on college campuses to GOTV

  18. So, Martha Coakley walks into a bar.  She goes over to the bartender and she orders a beer.  And the bartender says, “No, you’d probably f*ck that up too!”

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