A RED Letter Day

(Ted Kennedy must be suffering the pains of hell. I'm not judging how he conducted his life. His sins are his, and my sins are mine. No, I'm thinking it must be hell for him to look back at the situation he so recently left and see that there was no lasting foundation to all that he had built with forty years of labor, that his entire legacy is a sandcastle with the tide coming in. Hell itself is built upon regret.)

The people of Massachusetts did something astonishing last week. They elected Scott Brown, a conservative Republican, to the United States Senate. This is the first time in nearly four decades a Republican has won election in the bluest of New England's solid block of blue states. The result, as you have no doubt heard, is that the 60 vote super-majority the Democrats have enjoyed in the Senate for the past year is broken, and they can no longer simply present a bill, close the debate and bring it to a vote. They still have the votes to pass whatever they want, but they can't make people shut up and vote without talking the issues through. It's going to be tougher for them now.

The Democrat spin on Brown's election has been, predictably, that this was a local race against a weak Democrat candidate and has no bearing whatever on national issues. Hooey.

Spin (see Propaganda Techniques) is more than mere fallacy. It is an attempt to distract the listener from the truth by consciously applying any number of fallacious arguments or explanations. The difference is that a fallacious argument may be presented in ignorance, but the the spinner knows he's spinning and chooses to deceive.The Massachusetts Senatorial election was undoubtedly a referendum on the Obama administration and the Democrat agenda, and both sides clearly demonstrated that they knew it was throughout this special election campaign.

Brown's choice of issues left little doubt what he was thinking. Clearly he was running a national campaign. In spite of the fact that Massachusetts already has state-run health care, his stump speeches hammered the national health care bill where his vote will now be the spoiler. He addressed the American economy, American unemployment, American everything, and the Massachusetts voters ate it up. The candidate did interviews with the national media and courted campaign contributors and grassroots political bloggers from across the country, and he didn't hesitate a moment to welcome the support of the big conservative guns who came to the state to campaign for him. The politics of getting elected are always local, certainly, but Scott Brown and his constituents know that the issues in this case are the concern of the entire country.

Martha Coakley and her staff also knew that the issues, and more importantly the stakes, were national. She too campaigned on health care which, in Massachusetts, would have been preaching to the converted had she not been looking toward the national plan being hustled through the Senate. She also addressed the national economy and national unemployment. More tellingly, she welcomed the campaign visits of national Democrat Party leaders, right up to the President, all of whom stressed the important role Martha (or sometimes "Marcia") Coakley would play in promoting the Democrats' national agenda. To pretend that her defeat was not a rejection of that agenda, and the leaders who support it, is just not credible.

And now that I've written this, I find I could have been more succinct by quoting a woman who donated to Brown's campaign on the internet. She said, "I can't vote in Massachusetts, but the people of Massachusetts voted for me."

PS