In a historic upset, Brown defeats Coakley to fill the late Kennedy’s seat
With 52 percent of the vote, tonight former Republican State Senator Scott Brown upset Democratic Attorney General Martha Coakley to fill the Senate seat of the late Edward Kennedy. Despite the President’s efforts on Sunday to urge voters to support Coakley under the premise that Democrats risked losing their 60-vote filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, Brown won by a decisive margin in the heavily Democratic state of Massachusetts.
The election of Brown is a reproach of the President’s agenda. Although Virginia and New Jersey voted for Obama in 2008, in 2009 both states voted for Republican governors. Tonight they have lost a seat that was considered as inevitable for the Democratic attorney general. Now Democrats stand to lose more seats in the midterm elections later this year.
In the aftermath of Brown’s election Democrats will be hard-pressed to pass health care legislation, the keynote of Obama’s first-term agenda. Unless the House Democrats outright accept the Senate version of the health care bill, an extremely unlikely prospect, the White House will now begin to push for at least one Republican Senator’s vote, when they were previously content with garnering only the support of their party.
With poll numbers favoring Brown prior to his election, the New York Times reported today that the White House continued their efforts to coax Olympia Snowe, the moderate Republican Senator of Maine. On Friday Obama and Snowe participated in a long telephone conversation and the President’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, conceded that the White House had not been able to fully convince Americans that the health care bill was a step in the right direction.
After Brown’s victory, Democratic Senator Jim Webb released a statement, which read:
“In many ways the campaign in Massachusetts became a referendum not only on health care reform but also on the openness and integrity of our government process. It is vital that we restore the respect of the American people in our system of government and in our leaders. To that end, I believe it would only be fair and prudent that we suspend further votes on health care legislation until Senator-elect Brown is seated.”
Without any Republican support for health care or the “bailouts,” for months poll numbers showed that independents grew increasingly discontent with the President’s efforts. Health care town halls were marked by angry protests, and grassroots movements like the Tea Party Movement gained notoriety. Pundits will compare 2010 to 1994, the year when Democrats lost control of Congress. Although hindsight is twenty-twenty, the President would have been better served if he had won Republican support despite pleas from his party to push through major legislation without a single vote from the other side.
Hurray! The American people are speaking clearly: No health reform, no bailouts, and transparency.
What a great victory! Should be the end of the current healthcare plan and Democrats feeling that they can ramrod through any new, radical policies they want.
The big challenge ahead for Republicans: How does the party find a cause to rally behind? The current set of Republican victories seem to be more a backlash to the extremism of the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress, not a rallying around the GOP. The wave that swept the current Democratic leadership into power was similar; moderate indepent backlash to policies of the Bush administration, not an embrace of their extremist ideologies that are now being rejected.
As a country we seem to be caught in a bad cycle of popular opininion against whoever is in power. Bottom line is that the country and the world face a lot of complex, difficult, serious challenges that have no simple, satisfying answers. The GOP needs a policy that is serious about addressing some of these key issues, while being honest with the American people that there are no easy or popular answers to everything, and that a lot of issues involve individual responsibility and fortitude, not solely a government reliance to fix things. Getting this message across strongly and clearly is the only way to keep the pendulum going in the right direction and prevent it from swinging back again.
I’m relieved Brown won, on the other hand, I’m worried. Has the Republican party really changed? Are they just going to repeat the mistakes from 2000-2008? Is the GOP going to think this is a green light to get elected, only to get lazy once they are in office?
Republicans should NOT rest on their laurels and decide that they have a mandate now. They do not have a mandate to own government. As Scott Brown reminded the Democratic machine in Mass.: Government is OF the people, FOR the people and BY the people shall not perish from the earth. Republicans better remember that or I see a third party in the future.
Brown’s television appearances projected an intellect and wisdom superior to that projected by Coakley, suggesting votes were cast for the individual rather than for a particular party. In regard to national aspects, I’ve said for a long time that Obama is markedly inept. He gives the appearance of being led by those far more radical in perspective than he. His true leanings are often camoulflaged with rhetoric. Republicans would be well advised to approach future elections with pragmatic presentations the populace can appreciate and endorse. Highlighting outlandish approaches of radical Democrats may help, but in the end voters will prefer to vote FOR positive positions, rather than just against opponent positions. I look for candidates to project a healthy measure of common sense pragmatism in upcoming elections. Voters need to perceive the world as it is, not as some extremists wish it were.
Being a liberal-conservative I am not happy about this but I do want to congratulate the Republicans on their victory. Im confident that Mr Brown will do a good job for the party.
Great News!
We certainly need healthcare reform (HCR), and hopefully now the Democrats will be forced to discuss the Republican plans put forth over the last few months. The answer is not to kill HCR but to improve upon it with Republican ideas. We had eight years to improve healthcare during the Bush years, we did not. If we don’t learn to constructively affect change, we will deserve the ‘party of no’ label.
Brown’s win is both encouraging and inspirational to grassroot efforts such as this website and conservative candidates who may have shied away from running for office in the next 9 months. But Lyn is right, this is just the beginning, much work must be done to win back Congress and the White House.
Republicans will not win future races if they promote the status quo, business as usual, and run the same type of candidates. The GOP is fueled by anger, it needs to be fueled by hope in principled candidates. We lack a conservative candidate around whom we can rally because we are fragmented by selfish ideologies.
Lets enjoy this victory in the heart of the liberal Blue East Coast and congratulate ourselves on fighting through the Obama facade and the media bias. It was an important battle but the war ahead is long and challenging.
It’s a sad day for hope. Republican politicians (and idiot left wingers like Howard Dean I might add) care about power not people. They know that empty rhetoric, fear, and smear politics wins elections & not good policy. Sadly voters are too easily manipulated and uniformed for facts to get in the way, and fools like my brother cheer for the defeat of a bill that could help provide a better standard of living and opportunity for his disadvantaged children.
Conservative Democrats had been calling the shots before now and they had done a very respectable job of overcoming the do nothing Republicans and the far left liberals to produce a sensible, good bill that would have saved and improved lives of hard working lower and middle class Americans who are increasingly getting left behind in the sink or swim private market the Republicans pray to.
Careful what you wish for, the Republicans will now be fully accountable for their complain and attack politics that put winning elections ahead of serving the people. As Mitch McConnell himself has openly acknowledged, the Republican healthcare plans would not help most uninsured Americans, and in doing so they would continue to burden insured Americans with the hundreds of millions of dollars in hidden costs the uninsured impose on the insured every year. McConnell & the Republicans claim we can’t afford to improve the health of Americans, but they still manage to bring home hundreds of millions of dollars of earmarks and pork to their districts every year and pay for new wars (the costs of which far exceed the costs of healthcare reform) each and every time a Republican is elected president.
But hey, it’s about winning at all costs. So cheer on, while the lives of hard working Americas “we can’t afford to help” sink into hopelessness. After all the more Americans suffer the more votes the Republicans will get in November, and that’s what’s really important.
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