This is kind of nuts (from TPM):
Special elections are notoriously hard to poll because it’s hard to figure out just who is going to show up to vote. (That’s the reference to the ‘screen’ — how the pollster figures out who is a likely voter.) But this is a helluva a spread. Public Policy Polling last night released it’s survey of the special election to fill the seat of Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts. And they have Republican Scott Brown actually one point ahead of Democrat Martha Coakley. That’s essentially a toss up. But still. The thought that the GOP might take Kennedy’s seat — is a huge deal not only in symbolic terms but also in very real practical ones: it might well put an end to Health Care Reform for good.
But here’s the thing, the Boston Globe also has a poll out this morning. And they have Coakley up by 15 points.
So what explains this crazy spread? One thing to note is that the PPP poll is a bit more recent, though seemingly not enough to explain the huge spread. At least not all of it. Another interesting thing about the two polls is that they’re not that far off on Coakley’s number: PPP has her at 47% and the Globe has her at 53%. The difference is in Brown’s number — 48% vs. 36%. As I said, I think the whole story here is that screen the two pollsters are using to see who’s is going to vote.
If Coakley loses, health care reform may be gone.
This scares the living daylights out of me.
Update. This is just weird:
Brown, a guest at a King Philip Regional High School assembly to discuss legislative initiatives, opened by reading obscenity-laced facebook.com Web site comments directed against him for his anti-gay marriage stance and, by association, against his family.
He said some of the written comments attributed to KP students, whom he named aloud at the assembly, were directed at his daughter.
The lawmaker held captive to his outrage many KP students who were innocent of the name-calling and foul language, and did so in a manner unbecoming to his roles as caring parent and respected lawmaker. Who among us would not be prepared to do battle against anyone disparaging and dishonoring our loved ones?
calipygian
What kind of fuckwad curses out schoolchildren?
Oh yeah: IOKIYAR.
SP
But everyone at Kos has been saying we can just kill this and start over with reconciliation!
dr. bloor
I’m hopeful that the stories about this being a close race will help get Dems out on election day, but Coakley really does have to start running like she wants the seat. The campaign’s approach thus far suggests that they expect a coronation rather than an election. That seat might have been Kennedy’s birthright, but it sure ain’t hers.
PanAmerican
…and once upon a time, John Kerry was in trouble against Bill Weld…. heck, weren’t they pointing at Teddy’s soft numbers sometime in the last decade?… so it goes.
CK Dexter Haven
Looks like the sentiment over at GOS is that this is good news for progressives.
cervantes
I’ve lived in Massachusetts for more than 20 years. I’m pretty sure that once voters realize the election is not a mere formality, we’ll get enough turnout to assure a Coakley victory. She does actually have a motivated base who really want to elect the first woman senator from Mass., which also helps.
Herb
“If Coakley loses, health care reform may be gone.”
Huh? Because now HCR proponets will only have a 59 vote majority???
I don’t get this.
jwb
If I’m not mistaken, under the worst case scenario the House could simply pass the Senate bill without changes. By no means ideal, but it would prevent the collapse of HCR.
Face
It doesnt just kill health care. It kills immigration reform, financial reform, etc. You name it, they’ll filibuster it.
Once the Senate gets to 59 Dems/Indys, expect nearly all legislation to grind to a halt.
Quiddity
I read that there wasn’t much spent on advertising by Coakley. Can anyone confirm that?
Ash Can
I understand Coakley has not been running her campaign well, but, not being a Massachusetts-dweller myself, I don’t have any real detailed insight on that. What’s most disturbing, though, is that there are so many people in Massachusetts who could even think about filling Ted Kennedy’s seat with someone who’s mean, petty, and emotionally stunted enough to call an assembly at a high school for the sole purpose of singling out and verbally abusing several students in front of their teachers and peers.
ETA: I see Calipygian had this covered in the first comment. Good. As a parent, I’m very troubled by Scott’s behavior, and believe it can’t be highlighted enough.
Jim
and Ted Kennedy once had a pretty tight race against Mitt Romney, IIRC.
But yesterday I caught two minutes of a rerun of The Young Turks, Cenk Ugyur and his guests were screaming about how “Obama and Rahm” had sold out health care, sold out the unions, were using card check as a sword over the unions’ heads, and of course they’re going to sell out when the time comes, etc., etc. Hence only two minutes. If Coakley did lose, and the Dems lost a progressive seat while Ben Nelson and Mary Landrieu were still in the caucus, the idiots would probably still think the solution was to run a “real progressive” against Pat Leahy or Dick Durbin.
Chad S
I don’t think HCR would be dead, they would have to pay Snowe’s price for a cloture vote or they could just have the House vote on the Senate bill unaltered(and it would go straight to Obama’s desk then).
That said: no way do the dems lose Ted Kennedy’s seat. No way.
calipygian
Another GOP closet case who will a) be caught doinking underaged male pages, b) get busted by the DC police giving a blowjob in the Union Station men’s room, or c) be found dead of autoerotic asphyxiation, wrapped in a wet suit or two with Monstro Jr embeded in his ass?
Its a choose your own adventure!
Brian J
Does anyone really think she’s going to lose? I mean, doesn’t her opponet have much smaller name recognition not to mention not having the benefit of a Democratic machine in the state? Are there really enough Republicans who would turn out in order to flip the seat?
valdivia
I am not worried about this. Maybe I am living in fantasy land but I trust the Globe poll more and think that come election day (19th) the dems will come out and vote for her. I got an email from OFA and will spend some time this week making phone calls with their calling app to make sure people know how important the election is.
Also–based on how the vote went in the primary the numbers really don’t look good for this guy. Plus she just only now got her machinery geared for the general. The Kennedy endorsement only came out on Friday.
dr. bloor
@Ash Can:
I’ve heard a bunch of his radio interviews, debates, etc. on top of the usual press. This guy is a nasty piece of work.
dr. bloor
@Brian J:
Mitt Romney says hi.
GregB
This fucking monster Liz Cheney makes me sick to my stomach.
I don’t know what is worse…Liz’s vulgar beliefs laid out from her own mouth….or Donna Brazile’s fumbling and moronic half efforts at slapping down Liz or John King sitting on the sidelines literally smirking as Cheney talked over Brazile’s every effort to respond.
-G
Brian J
Yes, but isn’t that more the exception than the rule, especially because it was for the governorship and not the Senate seat?
GregB
Can anyone find out what Brown actually said to the students at the assembly?
-G
Max
@GregB: I had to turn her off. She’s on The Week too.
I really loathe that woman and would rather watch Joel Osteen on Sunday mornings than listen to her bullshit.
Gene
Losing healthcare reform as it’s now constituted can only help the Democrats. It avoids the giant sh*tstorm that will come with the mandate. I mean giant.
Jim
@Max:
The emergence of Dick Jr as a pundit has to go in the Top Five of media outrages of the last thirty years. And who launched her career? Fred “Useful Idiot” Hiatt.
calipygian
@GregB: Brown’s daughter was an American Idol contestant and as such attracted the usual adolescent pettiness and immaturity on her Facebook page.
Brown read some of those comments out loud, while confronting the high school sophomores who wrote them. Some of those comments had the “f” word in them.
Yes – a State Senator got into a pissing match with HS Sophomores.
Classy.
xian
Any worry about Joe “no relation” Kennedy acting as a spoiler?
KCinDC
Clearly this is all part of Obama’s plan. See, the White House actually prefers the Senate bill, so if Brown wins then there’s no choice but to pass it unaltered. RAAAHHMM!! has actually sabotaged Coakley behind the scenes to ensure the House can’t move the bill left.
Actually there seem to be some lefties out there who believe this one.
Skepticat
@Brian J: That’s the kind of complacency that loses elections. Mr. Brown really has been very visible and vocal with a strong ad campaign, while Ms. Coakley has had too low a profile. I’d like to see her fire up.
KCinDC
And then aside from those thinking Obama is plotting to have Brown win, there are “progressives” following Gene‘s logic and rooting for a Brown win themselves, since we obviously can only get good legislation after Obama’s political capital is destroyed and Republicans are more empowered.
Jim
I could name names, or rather, name nyms, without looking, at a couple of comment threads I used to read.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Brown likes to get nekkid because he can’t take the heat.
@calipygian: Thanks. Really. A mouthful of hot tea does wonders for my keyboard.
Brian J
@Skepticat:
Okay, fair enough. I wasn’t saying that nothing that should be done, only that some perspective is necessary.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
has a Hamster named Jane stuffed up his ass.
Citizen_X
He throws a public fit because some teenagers wrote nasty things in Facebook? What is he, the Sarah Fucking Palin of the east?
David
“[T]he Republican candidate vying for Ted Kennedy’s U.S. Senate seat posed nude for the centerfold of Cosmo. Scott Brown won our “America’s Sexiest Man” contest and appeared in the June 1982 issue.”
http://www.cosmopolitan.com/celebrity/news/scott-brown-nude-in-cosmo
calipygian
In other news, Doughy Pant Load is sad because people think Republicans are racist.
Seventy year old Harry Reid may have chosen his words poorly, but if Republicans want to shake the racist label, they have to stop doing racist shit.
angler
If Coakley loses Jane Hamsher and Kos have a lot to answer for.
KCinDC
@calipygian, I actually don’t find that Goldberg post that bad (especially in comparison to many other things he’s said), except that he should recognize that the “double standard” has to do with giving people the benefit of the doubt if their history shows that they’ve supported racial equality — something that’s not true of people like Trent Lott and George Allen.
aimai
I don’t want to go OT on our hideous Senatorial candidate but that Sun-whatever editorial is so badly written that it just makes me weep:
“held captive to his outrage?”
And can you really “pepper” an audience with “regurgitation?”
Don’t get me started on the incorrect paragraph breaks, the bizarre interjections, and the utterly absurd conclusions like
aimai
sloan
There’s word that even if Brown wins he wouldn’t be seated until after HCR passes.
And who the hell goes to a high school and calls out a bunch of teenagers by name while running for Senator? WTF? Arguing with kids about what they wrote on Facebook? That’s a straight up Sarah Palin move right there.
KCinDC
@angler, I don’t think they have that much influence (and Kos hasn’t been doing the full Hamsher anyway). If Coakley loses, it’ll be the same sort of thing that was happening in Virginia all last year, first with disappointing special election results and then in November. Wingnuts are energized by their Obama hatred and Democrats don’t have Obama on the ticket to get them excited. It’s hard to get people enthusiastic for low-turnout elections, and having anger (even if it’s completely illogical) as a motivator helps a lot. I’m not sure how to get Democrats angry about the possibility of a Republican comeback, since too many seem to have sunk back into not paying much attention to politics.
aimai
Oh, on the subject of the polling for this race–I got called up by a pollster last night. They pre qualified my answers to the Coakley poll by asking me if I was affiliated with a political party (that is, worked for one) or ever wrote any blog posts about politics. As soon as I said I did, actually, blog about politics they hung up on me without asking me who I’m voting for. Here in MA if they are trying to poll people who are registered to vote but never work for, or express an opinion about politics, they are going to be polling the elderly, the incompetent shut ins, and independent republicans who don’t yet blog and mostly spend their time bitching privately.
aimai
Nethead Jay
So Scott Brown doesn’t like being cursed out for his views. Not too surprising, one thing I’ve observed about right-wingers is that many of them like to dish it out, but get all outraged when it’s turned back on them.
Newsflash for you, asshole, better be prepared for some uncivility when you hold bigoted views that are harmful to people. As far as I’m concerned, hateful views like yours should be protested as strongly as possible whenever they rear their ugly head.
Cat Lady
Scott Brown’s nickname at the State House is Senator Nitwit. I know this on authority. He’s a himbo, and he’s lazy and preening. That said, Coakley needs to make her case this week. This shouldn’t even be this close.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
OT, and I don’t point to videos very often, but this is really a must see and understand. Moyers, Corn and Drum on the problem of Wall Street.
Watch, as they say, the whole thing.
Pasquinade
@Citizen_X and sloan, speaking of Palin….
Palin 6 weeks before election: Saddam Hussein Attacked US on 9/11
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/09/2008-campaign-all-over-again-in-new-book/
Church Lady
Irrespective of his political beliefs, he was really hot as a young man. And he has aged really, really well.
Tom Hilton
And how much more heartbreaking would it be to have it killed by Teddy Kennedy’s replacement?
KCinDC
@Pasquinade, also, too, the “Can I call you Joe?” line was because she couldn’t remember Biden’s last name properly.
BR
What I’d like to see a member of the media do for once is to show some true gender fairness, and consider how this would have been treated had Coakley had done a similar shoot. Honestly, I can’t imagine it being written up with any angle other than “will this kill her campaign?” Except this time it wasn’t a woman who did the photospread – it was a man. There should be no difference.
I want to see the media not give a male Republican a pass it would never give a female Democrat.
How would it go? The RW blogs would be making all sorts of sexist jokes, then Fox would pick it up making snide comments about it, and then the MSM would be asking whether the Coakley campaign was over. Let’s see them do it with Brown.
NobodySpecial
There’s an idiot on one of my other boards already claiming that they’re going to do some hijinks with the certification to aid Coakley if the race is close or Brown’s winning. That’s got to be a record for claiming vote fraud, doesn’t it, that early before votes are even cast?
SiubhanDuinne
@Cat Lady:
*he’s a himbo*
Heh.
KCinDC
OT, but when I saw Avatar yesterday, I discovered why Chris Matthews is afraid of kung fu terrorists on airplanes: He must’ve seen Tom Cruise in the trailer for Knight & Day.
sloan
@aimai: I wonder if they they would have screened you out of their poll if you listened to or expressed an opinion on right-wing talk shows. Or if they would have even asked. Funny that they asked about blogs.
@NobodySpecial: I’m surprised we haven’t heard John Fund whining about ACORN VOTER FRAUD yet. It’s only a matter of time.
SiubhanDuinne
@(
*Let’s see them do it with Brown.*
No. Let’s see them *not* do it with women.
BR
@SiubhanDuinne:
Well I can’t see that happening anytime soon, so at least we should hope to avoid another round of IOKIYAR.
GregB
Wingnuts throughout America have ceased forwarding e-mails depicting President Obama as an African witch-doctor and a shoeshine boy shining Sarah Palin’s shoes to denounce Harry Reid as a racist for his recent comments.
-G
Desert Rat
@calipygian:
Maybe not this time. A lot of these kids parents (and a lot of people who read about it), just got an association of a candidate cursing out schoolchildren.
That’ll sting, in the long run.
Davis X. Machina
Every True Progressives wants Brown to win.
No Coakley, no sixtieth Senate vote for cloture.
No cloture, the Worstest Bill Ever is stopped.
No Worstest Bill Ever, the Democrats aren’t slaughtered in the mid-terms.
Coakley wins, cloture passes, Senate bill is enacted.*
Riots in the streets over mandates
Dems lose both Houses in ’10, and the White House in ’12
So to preserve the Democratic majority in the House and Senate, you have to vote against a Democratic Senate candidate.
And no, I’m not making this up. I took this argument out for a spin in an ostensibly Democratic venue, and it has plenty of supporters.
We’re doomed.
The health care bill is going to do to the Democratic party what the repeal of the Corn Laws did to the Tories in Victorian England. The only question is who plays the Sir Robert Peel role and takes the rebels out of the party.
• I’m taking Pelosi, Raúl Grijalva and Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) at their word, that the Senate bill unaltered is unacceptable.
KCinDC
@BR, I think in this case it’s a case of IOKIYARM: a Democratic man or a woman of either party would be trashed in the media for a nude photo spread, but Brown gets a boost instead because of his “sexiness”.
Desert Rat
@SP:
But everyone at
KosFiredoglake has been saying we can just kill this and start over with reconciliation!There’s actually been debate at the Great Orange Satan, so I don’t think it’s fair to label it that way. Jane Hamsher, on the other hand, and the drones at FDL, have been off the grid for a while on this one.
The folks at FDL also believe that if one concentrates hard enough, you can shit rainbows that smell of rose petals.
kay
Using a legislative forum at a high school to “call out” individuals really bothers me.
Were their parents notified that Mr. Brown intended to pick their nasty comments out of thousands of posts of Facebook idiocy and make a national example of them, in the service of his political campaign, going around their parents without an opportunity for them to respond?
Since when it his job to punish these kids? In what capacity is he acting? Is every parent at that school given a forum to go after their children’s Facebook “enemies”, and deliver a lecture and mete out punishment, in the form of public shaming?
The way adults handle this is to contact the parents of the children concerned, or handle it through the school, who bring in the parents. They don’t assume the authority to punish other people’s children based on their status as a Senate candidate.
Hob
@aimai: Or just people who lie to pollsters in order to get to answer the rest of the poll.
Cat Lady
@Cat Lady:
Full disclosure – I’m in Brown’s district, and Barney Frank is my Rep. Yeah, there’s a little red heart of affluent Republican voters in the middle of a very blue congressional district. And, don’t underestimate Brown’s daughter’s American Idol “fame” – he uses her like a shield in his ads. His wife is a long time well known reporter on the most popular local news show in Boston, so he’s got the whole TVgenic package. Very Palinesque. Coakley shouldn’t just assume. You know what they say about assume.
Davis X. Machina
The fever at Kos is now only endemic, not pandemic, but it’s still widespread. There was a front-page diary last night in the old vein with a thousand comments.
KCinDC
@Desert Rat, it’s not quite to the level of Daily Kos, but FDL has become a big enough empire that I don’t think everyone in it can be lumped in with Hamsher. I imagine some of the people hitched to her now are somewhat less thrilled than they were at the start.
WereBear
@BR: Hear hear! What blatantly sexist bullshit.
aimai
Hob, yeah, I thought about lying but I was curious to know what would happen if I answered yes. Silly me!
On the subject of the actual “legislative issues” that Brown was to discuss at the Highschool–he was in fact there to discuss his stated position on equal marriage in MA, a fairly hot topic that the students seem to have supported and that he opposed. I think this is even worse than it seems because it sounds like instead of debating the students on the merits of their position and his he chose to open up the meeting by attacking the students who were present with reference to something other students had done online.
And, of course, in the context of MA’s actual situation vis a vis gay marriage a strongly anti gay marriage position is a far far worse attack on the actual “loved ones” of those students than almost anything that could have been said on facebook. In otherwords, Brown’s own position was at that point a kind of attack, or hate speech, against the gay parents and gay students at the school. After all, he’s calling for people to be forcibly considered “divorced” and their families dissolved. That’s what the anti gay marriage stance amounts to in MA. Its not some hypothetical or distant “legislative issue.” Its real people’s lives.
aimai
Tom Hilton
@Davis X. Machina: they’re making a lot of noise, but I think one gets an exaggerated view of their numbers from inside the blogospheric bubble. Really, there aren’t that many of them.
Of course, they’re doing their level best to dampen enthusiasm among less hysterical progressives. If there’s one thing I hate more than Republican ratfuckers, it’s people who let themselves be used by Republicans as ratfuckers.
Davis X. Machina
@Tom Hilton:
So one hopes. And there are grounds for hope.
But it’s not universal
Jim
@Davis X. Machina:
That’s an interesting take from Stark. It’s the people who don’t think that Obama is the secret Karl Rove Manchurian candidate who are responsible for negative perceptions of Democrats.
Jim
@Tom Hilton:
If I correctly recall a study from about two months ago, blog readers make up about 10% of self-ID’d Dems, and about 5% of those are PUMAs and Naderites et cetera flinging purity and poutrage at everyone else.
asiangrrlMN
@SiubhanDuinne: Agreed. I don’t think this asshat is cute at all, and he definitely needs to be taken down for his stupidity.
@calipygian: I hate you for linking to Goldberg, but, as usual, I hate myself even more for clicking on the link. Now, I must poke out both my eyes with a rusty pitchfork.
Ben
Yeah, I’m not buying it. Democrats like to panic every once in a while but this is not only the only poll to show Brown ahead, it’s the only poll to show less than a 9-point edge for Coakley. Coakley’s not going to lose.
The Grand Panjandrum
So, as noted above, any woman with this sort of Cosmo pictorial in their past would be toast. Of course, John Edwards was harangued for the video of him fussing with the do before he went on air. ANYONE who goes into a high school and goes off on individual students (calling them out by name) and regurgitating the profanity from those comments isn’t fit to be a public official at any level. Period.
If Harry Reid is called to account for his dumbass “light-skinned” and “negro dialect” comments in a private setting, then should not Brown step aside for the good of the children? Clearly, he is temperamentally unsuited for public life.
Davis X. Machina
For which the Republicans — who I am sure are secretly pissed he didn’t use the n-word, because that’s what they would have done. — are raking him over the coals as racially insensitive.
We’ve gone through the looking glass so many times this last decade that we should have a transponder on the windshield so we don’t have to stop and pay the tolls, and get the commuter discount.
And that ‘thump’ going through wasn’t a speed bump — it was the corpse of irony….
Hob
@asiangrrlMN: Ew– I hope you washed it first! Or are they all single-use?
Chad N Freude
@kay: Well, it seems that this sort of thing is perfectly acceptable as long as it is not the President of the United States admonishing children to be good students and work hard. Perhaps if Obama had singled out a few students by name and excoriated them for something it would have been OK.
calipygian
@Davis X. Machina: Even worse, Republics are treating Harry Reid’s inartfully worded sociological analysis as analogous with Trent Lott’s call for a President Thurmond which would have solved that pesky “civil rights” issue.
Chad N Freude
@Davis X. Machina: Dude, you win the Nobel Prize for Metaphors.
Ash Can
@Church Lady: But that’s just it. It’s not even his politics that I (for one) am objecting to. I’m objecting to him being, on a very basic level, a reprehensible person.
A container can be pretty as all get-out, be gilded and encrusted with jewels, etc. It doesn’t matter. If it holds nothing but cockroaches and anthrax, I ain’t going near it.
I hate to think of that shitheel winning any votes on the basis of his looks alone.
mogden
Don’t get too excited. There is no way the Massachusetts electorate is smart enough to elect this guy.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
Why? Nobody thought the Dems were going to get 60 in the Senate back in ’08, all the informed guesses were in the 57-58 range. And at the same time Obama was promising a much more progressive health care reform than the pussified one we ended up getting with 60. So if Obama thought he could get health care with 58 then he surely we can get it with 59, right?
kay
@aimai:
I think it’s completely out of line. The general social contract rules (and the actual legal structure) starts with the idea that parents have huge responsibility for their kids. With that comes a commensurate right, though. They are brought in before any random adult metes out justice.
A school staff member can do this sort of thing (although they wouldn’t, not without clearing it first with parents) , because the parents agree to cede authority to the school when the kid enrolls.
Conservatives are the most vigilant on this very point, actually. Here, this would be a huge issue. Conservative parents here would be up in arms if any random person inserted himself between children and their parents as an authority figure, without their consent. The rationale would be he’s denigrating their authority by acting as a parent, without their consent.
matoko_chan
PPP also predicted a ginormous victory by Hoffman over Owens in NY-23.
not quite.
pablo
I think Brown has changed his philosophy, and is reaching out to the gay community!
kay
@Chad N Freude:
It’s actually not acceptable, and if I were a parent I would object, strongly. I didn’t consent to Mr. Brown punishing my children when I enrolled them in school, and that’s what he did. This isn’t the way we do this, and there’s a lot of good reasons for that.
Can I do this? Can I book a forum at the high school and call your kid out by name, in a sort of shaming ceremony? Of course not, no matter what my ostensible “bigger lesson” happens to be. Ain’t no way in hell that anyone at that school would allow me to do that.
He doesn’t have any more authority than any other parent, in terms of other people’s children. Um, NONE.
Ash Can
@mogden: Go on. Explain to us all why it would be a good idea to put someone who did what he did at King Philip Regional H.S. into the US Senate. I dare you.
Go on. Convince us all. Since you’re so much smarter than us it should be a cinch for you to make us see the light. Go for it.
Davis X. Machina
How about: Extremism in the defense of heterosexuality is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of teh ghey is no virtue.
Nah.. I got nothin’
KCinDC
@Bruce (formerly Steve S.), back then apparently Obama and a lot of other people were under the delusion that Republicans weren’t going to remain united against the president who had just been soundly elected by the American people and filibuster absolutely everything.
So far I haven’t seen a realistic plan for how the Dems are going to deal with the filibuster, so I despair that we have only a few more months to get anything at all passed before we hit the election, at least a few Senate pickups for the GOP, and then at least two years of nothing while Republicans keep screaming “No!” and people blame Democrats.
licensed to kill time
@Davis X. Machina:
I hereby nominate this for Comment of the Year competition.
Ash Can
@Davis X. Machina:
That’s OK, neither does mogden.
burnspbesq
@Davis X. Machina:
And the people who believe this are, unfortunately, capable of reproduction, so their kind of stoopid won’t be removed from the gene pool anytime soon.
CalD
I will promise to be duly thunderstruck and soil myself appropriately if a Republican wins Ted Kennedy’s old seat on one condition: If Coakley ends up winning by a respectable margin instead, we have to give the “Democrats on the Ropes” thing a rest for at least six months and Democrats have to refrain from shitting themselves every time some pollster says boo!
(Full disclosure: I’d be surprised if the call has not already gone out for Michael Whouley to drop whatever he’s doing and do whatever it is he does in these cases. And PPP has yet to really dazzle me with the exceptional prescience of their work anyway. I guess there’s always a first time, but…)
Hiram Taine
@KCinDC:
What’s that line about history and those who fail to to learn the lessons?
Were these people
on another planetin an alternate universe all through the 90’s?KCinDC
Republicans are really blowing the expectations game here. As of last week, if Brown lost by only 5 points, that would be a propaganda victory for Republicans, far closer than anyone could have hoped. Now if that happens it’s a failure, and if (as is more likely) Coakley clobbers him, then it’s a disaster rather than the perfectly normal result for Massachusetts.
So I absolutely encourage talk of a close race to motivate Democrats and make sure we win big.
Hiram Taine
@kay:
Fixeteth.
Chad N Freude
@kay: Was my sarcasm not obvious? Unsarcastic: This sort of thing is never OK. A president urging children to be good citizens (in a national address, no less) is always OK.
KCinDC
@Hiram Taine, during the ’90s there wasn’t this level of unity among Republicans, nor this level of filbusters, which is unprecedented. And the media certainly wasn’t saying it takes 60 votes to pass legislation in the Senate.
Hiram Taine
@KCinDC:
It doesn’t, for Republicans..
And ISTR something about an impeachment of a sitting president for private consensual adult behavior. (yes, I know that wasn’t the ostensible reason, but it really was the actual one)
Texas Dem
I think it’s called “heightening the contradictions,” a term that basically involves pushing a foul, wretched, corrupt system towards collapse, rather than doing anything that might save it. Perhaps the only way we’ll get REAL change is to put GOPers back in power at every level of government, and then sit back and await the inevitable disasters. And this time don’t bail them out: Let the GOP wallow in the aftermath for a few years, as in the 1930s. Then sweep them out. By that point, folks Texas and other bright red places will a hell of lot more willing to listen to reason.
kay
@Chad N Freude:
No, it was obvious. I’m a little het up about this, because it flies in the face of the whole “usurping parental authority” meme conservatives are always nattering on about.
Just a little consistency, that’s all I ask from them.
If Coakley had gone in and “called out” individuals, doing an end run around their parents, who wrote nasty things in opposition to gay marriage would conservatives cheer? Fuck no. They’d be filing lawsuits.
Is there tape of this event, and have the kid’s name’s been published? This is a Palinesque abuse of authority, and it’s worse, because Johnson is 1. an adult, and 2. an extended member of Palin’s family.
henqiguai
I am a professional pessimist. I’m also a firm believer in the absolute stupidity of the American public. Therefore, I say in all honesty that I am not sanguine about Coakley’s candidacy. Not only does she seem to be assuming a coronation, but there’s a Kennedy on the ballot. Ignore the fact that the Joe Kennedy on the ballot has nothing to do with The Kennedys, but he’s a Libertarian running on some obscure state party ticket. And a significant number of people in Massachusetts will autonomically pull the lever for “Kennedy”.
asiangrrlMN
@Hob: Of course I washed it first. How do you think it got so rusty in the first place?
mcc
@Texas Dem: This is an argument I’ve seen made explicitly with the health care bill. In that case some people are openly arguing that the health care reform will at least prolong the current system, whereas doing nothing will cause things to get exponentially worse until there is some sort of complete apocalyptic crash in the medical system in the next 10 years at which point America will suddenly embrace socialized medicine or some other proposal the left likes. The fact that things have been pretty bad for the last 10-20 years at least and rather than anything collapsing they’re just gradually getting more and more miserable with most of the pain falling on the lower and middle classes doesn’t seem to register. Also not seeming to register: This was basically the strategy the Republicans followed for a long time. They called it “starving the beast”, they through a combination of sabotage and neglect attempted to get a hated system of governmental spending to collapse so they could destroy and reform it. It didn’t work: people just sort of muddled through as things got more miserable, the system survived, all the entitlement spending survived, and conservatism was widely discredited as an ideology because its followers failed to follow through on acting on their own principles when given the opportunity.
mcc
Ugh. It seems like if you’re a candidate for Senate, trying to debate high school students at all is a no-win situation. Surely there’s some way to just sort of express your disagreeing viewpoint making it feel like a debate? Cuz if you do that it seems like you’re doomed to either (1) win, in which case you look tiny because all the world sees you doing is beating up on a bunch of high school students or (2) lose, in which case you just lost to a bunch of high school students.
Nick
@Texas Dem:
We’ve already done this about 45 times and it still hasn’t worked. If the economy teetering on the edge of complete collapse couldn’t get more than 53% of the country to vote Democratic, what the hell do you think will?
Ash Can
@Hiram Taine: No, the actual reason Clinton was impeached was because he was a Democratic president, and a successful one at that. The Republicans worked tirelessly from Inauguration Day onward to nail Clinton on something, and finally managed it with the Lewinsky mess.
Comrade Darkness
Somewhat OT, but does Michael Steele really want Reid to step down as leader? Isn’t Reid the best thing the republicans have going at the mo? Seems a short term strategy to capture a news cycle at the expense of larger advantage.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
First delusional, then powerless? Somebody remind me why we should root for Dems to win elections.
mcc
Re: Previous comment, wait, I just realized the Brown/Facebook event in question occurred in 2007. Doesn’t seem to make Brown’s actions any wiser though :/
licensed to kill time
This Brown guy seems like he just got pissed that he got dissed so he slapped down some kids in a hissy pissed fit.
Smooth move, Ex-Lax.
(What? I’m engaging on his level!)
eemom
@Comrade Darkness:
maybe, but Steele isn’t exactly the sharpest tack on the board when it comes to clever republican strategerizing. Wonder how much longer he’s gonna last.
Texas Dem
Perhaps if the GOP had been kept in office for a few years after the collapse, and then taken the blame for a collapsed economy, 20 percent unemployment, etc., things might have been different. But that approach is somewhat like burning down your house to kill the termites in your basement. And it doesn’t even consider the enormous human suffering involved. Plus, there’s no guarantee the county won’t move even further right and embrace a fascist solution to our problems.
Nick
@Texas Dem:
I’m actually willing to bet based on people I talk to often, this is EXACTLY what will happen.
Davis X. Machina
Nach Palin, uns!
Party like it’s 1932.
Hiram Taine
@Ash Can:
Thank you for reinforcing my original point that a lot of Democrats, including Obama, seem to have been inhabiting a (not particularly) parallel universe all through the nineties. Any Democratic politician who didn’t see the Republican obstructionism coming is not fit to hold office, I’m anything but a politician and the current contretemps is utterly unsurprising to me.
ds
That’s almost certainly what would happen. The absolute failure of Republican governance didn’t chasten conservatives at all. It just made them angrier and more extreme.
If we had a massive economic collapse, people aren’t going to say “Gee, I guess the liberals were right. Let’s vote in Dennis Kucinich.”
Conservatives would just move farther to the right, start attacking both parties, and pinning the blame for our economic problems on Jews, gays, blacks, and immigrants.
CalD
@Bruce (formerly Steve S.):
I honestly don’t believe that Barack Obama ever bought into the hype about himself, for all that he does seem happy enough to let other people believe what they want about him when it serves his purposes. It’s very common for capable men to overestimate their own capabilities to some extent (I say “men” because capable women don’t seem as quite susceptible to this for some reason) and it would probably be impossible for even the most level-headed person to be surrounded by as much sheer hubris as he was without getting even a little bit on them. But I followed his campaign pretty closely and I can think of very few occasions where I heard Mr. Obama actually make any promises that I knew damned well he couldn’t keep when he made them, and fewer still where I wasn’t pretty sure he knew it too.
Now there were plenty of cases where I heard him say one thing and lots of other people seemed think they heard something else. And I’ll certainly give you that plenty of other people believed some pretty damned silly things about the man (and were willing to defend those beliefs quite nastily to anyone who questioned them). But there’s always a certain amount of magical thinking in play in a presidential election season. This one was remarkable in terms of degree, but really not a new thing otherwise.
Hiram Taine
@Nick:
You and me both, brother, you and me both.
My union-member (and knows he has it made) son in law is really a pretty smart and decent guy and a good father but he told me not all that long ago how he voted for “anyone with an “R” by his name”..
Exercising superhuman restraint I only grunted, there simply is no way to explain to him what I know, he watches football and “Deadliest Catch” or something similar and has not the slightest interest in politics. Any attempt to explain reality is met with a glazed-eye, slack-jawed look. In fact the only person IRL I can talk politics with is my brother and he’s about 70% of the way toward being a Paultard.
CalD
@KCinDC:
Good point. In that light I guess I could take a break from being annoyed by all the hand-wringing.
SiubhanDuinne
It seems from most of the comments here that Brown’s contretemps with the h/s students took place duribng the current Senate campaign, but I swear one of the linked articles indicated it was in 2007 (I’m not willing to go back and look; once was enough TUVM). Not that that makes it any better, of course. Worse in a way, because it suggests that he’s gone 3 years without being called out on it in any significant way.
MikeJ
@SiubhanDuinne: Yeah, it was in 2007. I like this quote: “And now I find out I’m being portrayed as a vile-speaking hate-monger. It’s pretty saddening. I feel very badly that I’m being victimized here.”
http://wonkette.com/237494/mass-state-senator-unleashes-devastating-im-rubber-youre-glue-defense
Martin
This is why Obama wanted this thing done now. They’ve got 9 days to get it signed, or else it could be a lost cause.
The GOP knows how tight the timeline here is, and guys like Baucus dragged it out too long, and people like Hamsher are doing their level best to make sure HCR never gets passed, though she doesn’t seem to realize it.
ds
All I can say is: Dude!! Did you start paying attention to politics at some point in late 2008? Democrats campaign on health care reform in every. single. election. Every single one. Obama was not the first. And yet after all these decades, it still hasn’t happened.
It dies every time, because even when Democrats are in power, interest group pressure and party infighting dooms the effort from the get-go.
Today’s Republicans will never come on board, because they’re conservative and don’t want to spend any money, and more importantly, they don’t want to give a Democratic president a huge policy victory.
At the time of the 2008 campaign, most informed observers of politics were convinced that Obama was talking out of his ass about health care. Either he would pass a watered down package that looks nothing like his campaign pledge, or he would get nothing at all. That’s Washington. That’s how it happens every single time.
I thought he was talking out of his ass. But then somehow or another Dems got 60 votes and a comprehensive reform package stopped looking like a pipe dream and more like a reasonably realistic possibility.
59 votes is not going to magically pass a reform bill. Obama can’t hope his way into getting a bill on his desk. If the Massachusetts Dem machine fails catastrophically and Coakley loses, there will be two possibilities.
1) The House passes the Senate bill completely unaltered
2) Nothing passes at all
Davis X. Machina
I admire your willingness to be charitable…
Darryl
It’s not going to take that to happen. Congress is refusing to fix the financial system, because they’re owned by the banking industry. Without rules against excessive leverage and opaque derivatives, we’re going to experience an even bigger economic meltdown in the next 10-15 years. Add in growing income inequality, stagnant wages, the looming public pension crisis, California, the debt, excessive military spending, and at some point in the next few decades there’s going to be a calamity which seriously reshapes America. I mean dictator/socialism/ civil war level reshaping.
john b
PPP polls were incredibly badly done during the presidential campaign. nothing to see here.
calipygian
Uh…
Interesting. Scroll down a bit and on the left side of the page, you can find a version of that famous pic of noted racist/dickhead Dale Robertson with the offensive message completely photoshopped out with a new message inserted.
ds
Any health care system attempting to be universal has to have some sort of mandate. Otherwise people will game the system by only paying in when they have expensive health costs, and the system will just collapse.
Either mandate people to pay taxes to fund a national health care program, or mandate people to buy subsidized private insurance.
The latter mandate isn’t going to be popular. But because 85% of people already have insurance and won’t be affected at all, any backlash will be limited. Especially because many of the uninsured have preexisting conditions and desperately want insurance but can’t get it, and for others, the subsidies will be sufficient to make insurance affordable.
Over 95% of voters already have insurance, so any political backlash against the mandate will be marginal.
A tax on the other hand, would spark a massive backlash. It would apply to 100% of the public, and 75% of the public is already happy with their existing coverage and won’t take kindly to a huge new tax worth thousands of dollars a year to fund a new program that they didn’t need.
ds
I’m not saying it isn’t happening now.
But if Republicans had held power and the economy collapsed, the result would be a lot worse.
Yes, the Republicans would be swept out of power in the next election, but then we’d be facing a situation similar to what we have now, but worse. You’d have tea partiers contesting elections and winning.
The net political result would not be good for liberalism. Liberalism thrives when people feel secure and prosperous, like America in the 60s. Right-wing fascism thrives when people are angry and looking for someone to blame.
Tom Hilton
@Martin:
As I said upthread: if there’s one thing I hate more than Republican ratfuckers, it’s people who let themselves be used by Republicans as ratfuckers.
mcc
@ds: Fiftieth time I’ve made this post, but I still can’t get past this: Where were the people claiming there would be a huge voter backlash against the mandate back in July? Nobody in the left blogosphere cared about the mandate– actually, most of the left blogosphere was actively fighting for it– back when there was still a public option as part of the expected bill. There are various reasons one might flip-flop like this. But if the problem with the mandate is it causes a voter backlash, then it would cause the same voter backlash with or without a public option. 2-3% of the public buying from a publicly-owned insurance company might satisfy ideological objections by bloggers, but it couldn’t make a difference to the public in general in a way that moves elections. Either way you’re being forced to give someone your money regardless of how you feel about the service being received in return, and if we’re talking in electoral terms then you’re not going to brush away the consequences of that with “yes, but you have the choice of being forced to give your money to the government!“
henqiguai
@mcc (@133):
An yet few people ever seem to want to point out that all of us are giving up over $1,000.00/year, at least, in additional health care costs and insurance premiums, to actually pay for others health care. Somebody (all of us) has to pay for the uninsured/underinsured at the emergency rooms.
Hiram Taine
@ds:
“Affordable” insurance is going to have high deductibles and high copays, there are already plenty of people out there with insurance who can’t afford to use that insurance thanks to that. This bill will put practically everyone who gets subsidies into that category, if you need the subsidy to pay the premium then there’s a very good chance you’re going to be buying a cheap policy which is almost certain to have a high deductible and a high copay.
At that point the person with the subsidized insurance will neither be able to use their insurance or pay for medical treatment out of pocket since all their disposable income will have gone to pay the premiums.
Universal insurance by no means is a guarantee of universal health care.
Oh.. And it looks like Senator Ensign’s amendment is going to make it much more expensive to get insurance if you have a preexisting condition.
Johnny Pez
I like to think this is all part of a cunning plan by the Dems. If the GOP actually thinks they have a shot at taking the seat, they’ll pour a bunch of money into the race. Then the Dems crank up their GOTV machine, Coakley wins, and the GOP has to start selling off their wetsuits and dildos to pay the rent.
kay
@Martin:
It’s not just that. It’s this: there is something called ” the health care reform bill” that exists. It’s a mixed bag, but there’s a lot of progressive pieces, and a lot of progressive Senators have signed onto it. I don’t understand why they’ve chosen a blunt instrument to attack it, because the progressive parts are not going to be perceived differently than the more conservative aspects. If the thing goes down in public perception, it takes the liberal aspects with it.
We already know how this plays from stimulus. IMO, Krugman and Reich learned from that experience. They want to sell the broader idea of trickle-up stimulus. There’s no upside to trashing the existing programs known as “the stimulus”, and they dropped that tactic, once the thing existed. At some point, you have to drop the club and pick up a scalpel, or you’re only discrediting your own larger idea.
ds
For young, healthy people, health insurance is inherently a raw deal. Your medical expenses are just too low. This bill doesn’t change that.
For people who develop cancer or some other catastrophic illness, or even worse have a persistent chronic condition, the 15% of income out of pocket cap (premiums + copays and other expenses) is going to be an absolute godsend.
Right now, out of pocket costs aren’t capped by the government at all, and insurance companies impose yearly and lifetime limits that are devastating for people who have major health costs.
People are already facing outrageous out of pocket expenses. For the first time there will be some legal limit on them.
If you want to compare this bill to some hypothetical health care system that we can never get Congress to agree to, I agree that this bill sucks. It’s way too stingy, and doesn’t go nearly far enough. But in comparison to the health care system we have, it’s a major improvement.
You really think a Republican poison pill amendment is really going to get 60 votes to pass? No fucking way.
This bill isn’t even going to Conference Committee because of the Republicans’ obstructionism. All the amendments are being negotiated between the offices of Reid and Pelosi.
Any Republican amendments are going to be tabled. Period. Don’t worry about it.
Hiram Taine
@ds: It’s a matter of expectations, so much hype has surrounded health care reform that people are going to be expecting something a lot better than what they’re getting, it was pointed out up above that this has been on the agenda for at least a couple of decades now and even Nixon had a universal health care bill.
As you say, this bill sucks, people will see that fairly quickly and who will their ire be directed toward?
There is an immense amount of ill will for the insurance companies out there in the general public, practically everyone knows someone who has been shafted if they haven’t had the treatment themselves. I strongly suspect the insurance companies are even more hated than the government. Whether this bill is seen as a net positive or a net negative by the general population remains an open question and only time will really tell.
I guess we shall see, eh?
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
Dude!! These are rhetorical questions!! To gauge people’s expectations of what was/is possible or reasonable to expect from politicians. I realize that it’s unreasonable to expect honesty from our politicians, and that Barack Obama couldn’t be expected to run on this: “I want to be your President, and I want to fix health care, but please be advised that unless Al Franken wins that recount, and Arlen Specter switches parties, and Ben Nelson responds favorably to a massive political bribe, then you won’t be getting ANY reform, much less watered-down reform. EVER.” In that context, consider that Doug says it’s completely doomed if this one race doesn’t go the right way.
So again, what were reasonable expectations a year and a half ago, and what will they be if Coakley loses?
General Winfield Stuck
@Bruce (formerly Steve S.):
One thing is, if Coakley were to lose, or when dems certainly lose a few seats in Nov., it will take away the talking point political mirage that dems have a filibuster proof majority in the Senate. They don’t, they have 58 dems and two indies that caucus with them. This is rather huge, because neither Lieberman nor Sanders have connections to the DNC in any meaningful way. So party pressure on them is pretty much non-existent. Especially with Lieberman with his DNC axes to grind.
It will, or should, to a greater degree put some onus back on wingnuts and make them more vulnerable to charges of obstruction when they filibuster everything dems propose. It is politics and fear of perception that motivates CC’rs as much as anything. Though in this day and age, old rules may not apply.
That’s why it is impossible to say “what If” dems had only won 56, or 57 seats last election. Repubs, or a few of them, would possibly be more amenable with cooperating on some form of reform, just would be different/ Though a PO would never have flown, short of reconciliation.
ds
The smart bet was that the Democrats would pass some sort of health care bill through the budget reconciliation process that would boost Medicaid and SCHIP.
Harry Truman campaigned on single payer. Carter campaigned on national health insurance. Clinton campaigned on some sort of mandate/regulate model. They never had the votes, even though all three had Democratic Congresses at some point in their term.
This year the Dems stumbled into 60 votes. That made a package similar to what Obama campaigned on politically possible. If they go down to 59 votes, it’s the bill the Senate already passed, or nothing. There aren’t any liberal Republicans anymore, like John Chafee, Lowell Weicker, etc. who might cross over to support progressive legislation. Snowe isn’t going to sacrifice herself to the teabaggers.
I wish our political system wasn’t so shitty and conservative. It is though. If it were really so easy to pass health care reform we wouldn’t be the only industrialized country without a universal system.
ds
I don’t think the expectations are high at all. A lot of the “hype” over the bill has been bullshit like death panels, government takeover, rationing. Stuff that is never going to materialize.
The truth is that 80% of people aren’t going to be affected by the bill one way or another, because they don’t have high health costs and they have good insurance.
For the remaining 20%, the overwhelming majority will benefit from it, even though it’s far from perfect.
Jon H
@Chad S: “That said: no way do the dems lose Ted Kennedy’s seat. No way.”
There’s an unrelated guy named Kennedy running for the seat in a third party.
I betcha idiots vote for him, thinking he’s family, and thus Brown wins.
bjacques
That Kennedy guy could be stalking horse, though he might score some Libertarian votes from Republican voters as well.
Some years ago, there was a popular Democratic Congressman named Jack Brooks (RIP) who’d held the 9th District (includes Beaumont) for 42 years before being defeated in the 1994 GOP sweep by Steve Stockman. In 1996, the state was redistricted (Tom DeLay had a hand in this) and Nick Lampson emerged to challenge Stockman. The GOP found some guy named George Brooks to run as a Democrat–since the redistricting was a mess, the judge allowed more than one candidate in a party–and he appeared on the ballot as G. “Jack” Brooks. This could have split the Democratic vote, coincidentally when Stockman was having trouble after the GOP shutdown of the government.
The race went into a runoff, but “Jack” Brooks dropped out and Lampson won the runoff. In 2006 he took Tom DeLay’s former seat for one term. That’s not irony; that’s a whole laundry.