Progressives in Massachusetts have a choice over the next week: we can gossip and guess about polls, wondering which pollster will be right, which will be wrong; or we can devote ourselves to the most consequential federal election in this state in nearly two decades.
There’s really no use in disputing that Scott Brown has developed a potential path to victory. The likelihood that he’ll be able to make his way down that path, well, it’s substantial enough to demand our attention. I’ve been phonebanking for the past ten days, and I can tell you that a non-trivial percentage of folks with Ds after their names are not solidly in Martha Coakley’s corner.
Barack Obama is the most progressive president in a generation. His domestic agenda would be derailed if Brown were to win. His signature bill—health care reform—would be nearly dead in its tracks. A Brown victory would be the first step towards an even more toxic version of the Clinton/Gingrich showdown that marked the mid-90s. If you’re a progressive, and you know there’s a chance of that happening, you have to take action! Phone bank: http://www.marthacoakley.com/e… Donate: https://coakley.zissousecure.c… Put up a sign; a bumper sticker; work your tail off for Martha Coakley.
The choice is a stark one, make it known.
Does Mass. support policies that stimulate the economy and promote green jobs? Or does it support global warming denialism?
Does Mass. support federal aid to states to keep teachers, policemen, and firemen on the payroll? Or should we leave the states, our children, and our safety behind, sacrficed at the altar of tax cuts for the wealthy?
Does Mass. support brining health insurance to 40 million uninsured? Or shall we just kick the can down the road another fifteen years—the uninsured be damned?
Does Mass. believe that the policies of George W. Bush’s Republican party caused this economic mess that we’re diligently trying to work our way out of? Or can we simply shrug off those policies because, hey, Scott Brown drives a truck?
Does Mass. believe that we shouldn’t cave to terrorists by shuddering our courts and scrambling to set up military tribunals—only to see them, $200 million later, be overruled by the Supreme Court? Or should we engage in empty sloganeering about being “lawyered up” and pretend that militarry tribunal defendants are denied counsel?
Does Mass. understand that our structural budget deficits are due, in substantial part, to health care spending and that any hope of fixing them starts there? Or do we embrace Scott Brown’s empty nonsense that he’ll somehow cut taxes, increase defense spending, and protect social security and Medicare all at once?
Does Mass. believe, for one second, that if a female candidate posed nude, she would ever contend for public office? Can we similarly dismiss the male model? Or should we be comforted that Scott Brown is better known for his current suit choice—that of empty?
Does Mass. support reforming the financial sector, so that it cannot overleverage itself and once again bring our economy to its knees? Or should we elect an individual who, along with the rest of his party, will stonewall any type of meaningful reform?
Does Mass. support a dedicated public servant who has spent two decades working on its behalf? Or a state senator without a single legislative success?
Will we honor Ted Kennedy’s legacy by finaly passing a bill on his single issue? Or will we elect someone who voted for nearly the same bill in Mass. but has turned on it out of political expediency?
Do we know that pro-freedom means pro-individual rights, including procreative choice and equality for all? Or do we embrace the Orwellian logic that we must torture to be free?
One candidate ran on her resume. The other candidate, who has no resume, ran a campaign. Luckily Martha has begun to campaign in earnest. She needs our support. Even a 5% chance of a loss is far too great.
We normally look at battleground states from afar. Now we’re smack in the middle of the battle ground. IT’S WELL PAST TIME TO ACT LIKE IT.
It’s true that in simply considering Coakley vs. Brown without a larger context, Brown loses by a mile. However, there is a broader context here.
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p>Most “Democrats” are the same these days – as soon as they’re elected they moon us and scream “who the $%&@ else ‘ya gonna vote for, chump!”, while furiously tossing our tax dollars with both hands to bankers and other denizens of the predator class.
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p>I have no reason to believe that Coakley is cut from different cloth – should I?
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p>If she loses, OTOH, it might send a message to the folks we’ve elected as Democrats: to behave like Democrats and stop the economic sodomization of the working class. 60 votes in the Senate has gotten us little or less, a two-by-four to the head might be more important than that extra vote.
Earlier today, I wrote the following at Universal Hub and it applies here as well:
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p>In no universe will electing a Republican from Massachusetts of all places encourage national Democrats to move left. The only message will be that if a liberal (and face it, Coakley is the most liberal candidate we’ll have on the ballot next week) can’t win in Massachusetts, then they won’t win anywhere, so move right. This is what happened after 1994 and again in 2002 — the Dems all got spooked and moved even further right. The media message will be that the GOP is resurgent and the conventional wisdom that this is a ‘center right’ nation will be reaffirmed. The Overton Window moves right and it becomes more impossible to get progressive legislation passed.
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p>Punishing Martha Coakley for the truculence of Blue Dog Democrats is nonsensical and counterproductive unless your aim is to further water down or completely derail the progressive agenda.
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p>I get that you’re frustrated with the pace and content of reform. We all just got a very drawn-out lesson in how the sausage gets made and it ain’t pretty. I know that liberals, myself included, feel like Lucy keeps pulling the football away. But the solution is not to dig ourselves in an even deeper hole. Even if Coakley is not the candidate of your liberal fantasies, she is at very least an ally to progressives. She will not be actively working against our interests in every case, unlike her opponent.
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p>That’s your larger context. You don’t make Democrats act like Democrats by letting Republicans win. That just makes them act MORE like Republicans.
A significant percentage of progressives ran and won as opposed to those candidates chosen by Rahm Emanuel….. the same guy who convinced pols( John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, to name a few) to vote for the Iraq War
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p>How many times do they need to relearn the lesson?
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p>Our Democratic elected officials and Party poo-bahs have reflexivley gone back into their comfort zone of spouting Republican lite legislation and have failed to recognize that the electorate has moved beyond this point.
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p>It is a grind and a slog and one feels like a teacher who has a class and has to go over material that should have been learned last year.
I think .08 has it. There are so many chatterrheads telling the Democrats that “progressives are far-left” and that they should pander to the so-called “center” that Coakley’s defeat would almost certainly trigger another rush to the right. The timid wing of the party did not learn the lesson of the ’90s and early ’00s – that being imitation Republicans is a sure path to losing. They would take that path again; look at the healthcare bill.
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p>I’m not Coakley’s biggest booster, but a Brown win would be unmitigated bad news. Fortunately, in two years we get another chance to elect a forceful Progressive Senator. Maybe Coakley will surprise me and be that Senator. I’d like that.
health care reform bill ‘doesn’t go far enough’ to cover Americans, to contain costs, to regulate health insurance WINS over goes too far
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p>http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2…
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p>The ‘center’ is way left from where DC thinks it is.
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p>And on Tuesday we’ll see if a significant number of Democrats are willing to give into the impulse to use the 2×4…….anecdotal evidence in my corner of the world suggests it has crossed many minds.
I’m sure that if Martha Coakley had her way, Health Care Reform WOULD go farther than the current Senate bill.
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p>But guess what? Scott Brown wants the Health Care Reform stopped completely.
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p>How is supporting someone who’s explicit aim is to stop the process over someone who wants more but is willing to take a small step in the right direction going to send a message that we need STRONGER reform and not WEAKER??
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p>This does not make any sense!!
sees it as a giveaway to insurance companies.
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p>It may be that a significant number are contemplating sending a message.
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p>We’ve seen that before.
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p>I firmly believe that the NAFTA vote is what kept Democrats home more than the Clinton health care initiative failure.
A majority of our nation does not want the Obama version of health care. That makes tremendous sense to me.
as well as ending the anti trust exemption
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p>Oh and the Dorgan amendmnet would have pleased the electorate as well
If exactly what you propose were on the table, who do you think would be more likely to vote for it? Scott Brown or Martha Coakley?
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p>Take as long as you need.
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p>Now, given that what you suggest is not on the table, under which scenario do you think those things would be more likely to be put on the table? One where Massachusetts was represented by two Senators who generally approved of such things or one where Massachusetts was represented by one who approved and one who opposed those things?
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p>One more: Under which scenario do you think it’s more likely to get the reforms you’re interested in? One where we have a starting point for reform that needs to be changed to work better or one where we’re starting again from scratch with even FEWER people who want the things you want in the Senate?
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p>Electing Scott Brown to the Senate does not give us a better chance of making the current bill better nor does it give us a better chance of more and better reforms in the future.
to suggest what is behind the Brown quasi support.
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p>He’s got a lock on Republicans
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p>She does not have a lock on Democrats according to the author of the diary
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p>Unenrolleds – MC has her work cut out for her here as well.
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p>I am not suggesting she won’t win.
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p>She can pull this off.
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p>I am suggesting that the disillusionment over the health care bill, the compromising away of key components, the lack of real fight for what amounts to real reform or even the willingness to use reconciliation to achieve real reform has been noticed by the informed electorate which will vote in this special election.
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p>They do not like the Senate version of the bill and the poll I cited supports that claim:it doesn’t go far enough.
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p>As well as this bit of info from PPP:
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p>I can find no other reason for the movement to Brown because his record doesn’t reflect what people voted for just over a year ago.
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p>It’s gut check time for Democrats and left leaning unenrolleds
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p>As for your point that it is a ‘starting point’ and further reform will come – with the announcements that Dorgan isn’t running for re-election and the current state of races coming….I don’t think ‘reform’ of the reform was ever seriously on the table.
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We’ve reformed every reform we’ve ever reformed. No program that lasts any length of time after being enacted stays exactly the same. If we pass the bill and it needs fixing, we can more easily fix it with Martha Coakley than with Scott Brown. It may not be a touchdown, but a first down at least keeps your team on the field for another four tries. Better that than turning the ball over.
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p>And frankly, I don’t think it matters whether you actually believe that electing Scott Brown is better for a progressive version of health care reform or whether you’re just describing people who do. I’m making a case that to do so is counterproductive.
That’s true, but electing Scott Brown would do nothing to correct DC’s erroneous thinking; it would reinforce it.
And things have simply gotten far, far worse.
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p>Don’t you think it’s time for plan B? Why would continuing the same actions result in a different outcome?
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p>If I had any feeling whatsoever that elected “Democrats” had good intentions and were doing the best they could with a bad situation, I might concur with you. But all indications are that they have (on whole) zero interest in stopping the evisceration of the working class – rather, they accelerate it.
Rahm Emanuel is involved in pushing policy( NAFTA Iraq War resolution and now the Senate version of the health care bill) and selecting what tyle of candidates to run from certain districts.
.sco’s point is that electing a regressive Republican is not a constructive response and the only real alternatives at the moment are Coakley versus Brown.
Putting more Republicans in charge? Talk about the same actions but expecting different results!!!
If voting for Democrats won’t get them to go to the left, and voting for Republicans won’t get them to go to the left, what course of action remains? Abandoning the party altogether and starting over?
The primary election was our big chance to make a shift. We failed to capitalize on it, and now we can only either minimize or maximize the damage. After that, we have another opportunity in 2012.
You of all people know that voting alone is not the only action one can take in a Representative Democracy. Moving the Democratic Party to the left is a long-term project that certainly can’t be accomplished by voting against Democrats. It means making sure incumbents are not insulated from primary challenges. It means making sure there is a progressive infrastructure that progressive candidates can take advantage of. It means getting involved with the system to try to change it for the better.
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p>By the time the general election comes, it’s too late for “making a statement”. You have a choice and in this election it’s pretty clear — a paint-by-numbers Bush/Cheney style Conservative or a plain vanilla center-left Liberal. If you want the Senate to be more Conservative, vote Brown, if you want it to be at least no worse than it is now, vote Coakley.
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p>Anyway, it’s not about moving the Democratic Party to the left. It’s about moving the country to the left. Scott Brown in the Senate moves the country Right — far to the right considering his symbolic value to the GOP. Martha Coakley at the very least keeps us where we are.
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p>And by the way, there was a time when you could move the country to the left by voting for a Republican. This is not one of those times.
Poll after poll shows where the American people stand on issues ~ left of where DC says it is~ and the unresponsiveness to that marker is astonishing.
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p>What is also astonishing is that the relentless drumbeat from corporate media endlessly pitching the rightward angle and STILL the polls reflect a left of center stance on issues.
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p>Just waiting for a politician to step up and acknowledge this and fight for these positions on an executive level: – 2009 – seems like such a wasted year now that it is over
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p>I’m trying to understand, but I just don’t get this. Why would you suppose that a Coakley loss should send a call for Democrats to behave as such? On the contrary, I think that it would send the message that even Massachusetts is reeling rightward and that therefore everyone might as well just give up on reforming health care and Wall Street and on advancing many of the issues that progressives care about. It would be a most energizing message to the Republican base across the country — not at all a call to action for Democrats.
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p>On a purely personal level, if Brown wins, it will significantly damage my pride in my adopted state of Massachusetts. In my own head I will probably just give up on healthcare and try not to think about it too much for awhile. Should I suppose that the message to politicians would be of a completely different nature?
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p>However, you’re obviously not alone in this stance that seems so peculiar to me. Today Nate Silver points out some of the apparent polling contradictions and offers some advice to Coakley.
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…is not “sending a message.” It’s cutting off your nose to spite your face.
You need to rephrase your statement. Try pro-death, baby killing. Having a baby or not is up to the manufacturers involved, no one else. It is time to have your 6% brethren step aside and let majority rule.
How tuned out can you be?
I’m particularly interested in knowing what his ten-plus years in the lege have amounted to. I really did read everything on his website to try to find out. No help there.
to political scientists and bloggers 😉 to just figure out what motivated the Independents/Unenrolleds and no doubt some Democrats to vote for Brown on Tuesday, because his record is an anathema to what people voted for just over a year ago.
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p>I’m putting my trust in the CBS News poll which basically criticizes the health care bill from the left i.e not going far enough.
And for the life of me, google offers nothing beyond the campaign fluff.
Nor does his campaign site.
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p>JoeTS, care to provide some examples of why you’re voting for him? Besides how good he looks in a uniform, I mean. 😉
Martha Coakley’s resume. Specifics please, not generalities. Cases, money, that she has won for the Commonwealth. Sincerely asking.
You can have whatever opinion you want about Coakley, but you sure can’t make the case that she hasn’t gotten a lot of good stuff done in her career.
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p>Here’s a little info on the bad guys she’s put away.
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p>And as for money brought back to the state, geez, Bill, in addition to the $60 million she got out of Goldman Sachs, you can just run down the list of press releases from the AG’s office for the smaller stuff that doesn’t make big headlines. Here are a couple, just from the last couple of months:
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p>Jan 11: “Today, Attorney General Martha Coakley’s Office entered into an agreement with grocery store chain Shaws Supermarket, Inc., after an investigation unveiled the company was overcharging public entities for various prescription drugs under the workers compensation insurance system. Under the terms of the Assurance of Discontinuance, filed today in Suffolk Superior Court, Shaws will make a payment to the Commonwealth and to certain cities and towns in Massachusetts totaling $103,000.”
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p>Jan 7: “Today, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley’s Office, along with 22 states and the District of Columbia, reached an agreement with Abbott Laboratories, Fournier Industrie et Sante and Laboratories Fournier, S.A., resolving antitrust and deceptive trade practices claims involving the drug TriCor. The claims were raised in a suit filed by the Commonwealth and other states against Abbott and Fournier in a federal district court in Delaware. Under the settlement, states will be reimbursed for overcharges paid for TriCor. The Commonwealth will receive $750,000 under the settlement. “
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p>Dec 23: “Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley’s Office, the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs (EEA), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (MassDEP), the US Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS) and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced today they have reached a settlement with 49 parties to clean up the Sutton Brook Disposal Area Superfund Site in Tewksbury, which has been listed on the EPA’s National Priorities List since 2001…. The remedy, expected to cost approximately $29.98 million, includes excavation and consolidation of contaminated soil and sediment, installation of a cap at two landfills and a vertical barrier for groundwater diversion, a combination of natural attenuation and active treatment of contaminated groundwater, institutional controls and monitoring.
The remaining 29 responsible parties will make cash payments toward the cost of financing the remedy and for other purposes. In addition to performance of the cleanup remedy, this settlement includes $512,000 to reimburse MassDEP’s past response costs and an obligation to pay for MassDEP’s and EPA’s future oversight costs. The parties will also pay $1,650,000 in Natural Resource Damages (NRD) to state and federal Trustees to restore injured resources to their baseline condition, compensate for the interim loss of resources, and reimburse the cost of conducting the damage assessments. “
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p>Nov 23: “Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley’s Office has reached an agreement with Aventis, an international drug company and wholly-owned subsidiary of sanofi-aventis U.S., LLC., resolving allegations that between 1995 and 2000, Aventis and its corporate predecessors knowingly misreported best prices for the steroid-based anti-inflammatory nasal sprays Azmacort, Nasacort and Nasacort AQ. Under the terms of the settlement agreement, Aventis has paid $4.25 million to the Massachusetts Medicaid Program, which provides funds for health care products and services to eligible low-income individuals, including people with disabilities, children and elder citizens.”
Woodward case: she lost it. Then went on television whining about the unfair judge.
John Geoghan(?): went free to rape more children, I blame the Cardinal more though.
McDermott: Even she couldn’t blow that one.
Will pay: No settlement yet, case still open. Not a win.
She’s put hundreds of bad people behind bars; most of them don’t make headlines. She’s recovered millions and millions of dollars for MA; most of that doesn’t make headlines either. Doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened.
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p>Like I said, you can dislike her all you want. But there is nothing you can do to change her record. And her record is pretty damn good.