In electing Scott Brown to what the elites believed was Ted Kennedy’s U.S. Senate seat one day shy of the anniversary of Barack Obama’s inauguration, Massachusetts voters have delivered an irrefutable repudiation of the president, his agenda, and the people in Congress who support him.
Make no mistake. All the attempted post-election distancing in the world won’t change the fact that this election was all about Dear Leader, who has seemingly done everything he can to earn the “punk” moniker I applied to him on Election Day in 2008, and a Congress that has rubber-stamped his wishes, often without even reading the bills his acolytes have prepared. Fox’s Charles Krauthammer noted that the Brown campaign succeeded in making the election “a referendum on the Obama agenda and also on single-party rule in Washington.” Obama’s last-minute decision to appear in Massachusetts on Sunday in an attempt to stop the bleeding merely confirmed that obvious fact.
Only fourteen months after his Bay State defeat of John McCain by 26%, Washington’s favored U.S. Senate candidate failed by a greater margin than Walter Mondale lost to Ronald Reagan in 1984. That year, Reagan carried Massachusetts by 2.8% on the way to his 49-state reelection landslide.
The more-than-30-point swing from November 2008 and the comparison to Reagan’s win are both important metrics. They demonstrate just how resounding the following rejection notices sent to Barack Obama and Congress, by voters in what is still virtually the most reliably liberal state in the union, really are:
- Rejected — Predatory, life-threatening designs on the nation’s health care system.
- Rejected — Micromanagement of virtually every aspect of our daily lives and drastic reductions in living standards, all in the name of environmental purity, championed by pseudo-scientists who are in reality proven scam artists.
- Rejected — Out-of-control, crony-favoring spending that has “stimulated” nothing but the growth of crowds at the unemployment office.
- Rejected — Government-sponsored bailouts, takeovers, and looting of private businesses, through the bankruptcy courts, the tax system, or the exercise of clearly condoned mob action.
- Rejected — The condescending elitism that ridicules plumbers and people who drive trucks while all too often funneling their tax money to the undeserving.
Voters in the often wayward Cradle of Liberty looked danger in the eye, stood up, and said, “Enough.” Tuesday’s takeaway is this: if Obama & Co. can’t sell their agenda there, it’s an epic fail everywhere.
So now what?
On Monday, I wrote that a Brown victory “may prevent” the forward march of what that now-famous “Massachusetts Miracle” video calls a “tyrannical government.” The operative word is “may,” because there are valid concerns about Scott Brown, one of his major backers, and his party that cannot and should not be ignored.
While he’ll never pass the Emily’s List litmus test, any experienced pro-lifer can tell from the relevant language on his issues page that Brown is not a movement supporter. Additionally, as a legislator he voted for the creation of state-run Commonwealth Care. Besides imposing a dreadfully costly, punitive, and potentially care-rationing health care regime on its citizens, Commonwealth Care formally legalized government-subsidized abortions in Massachusetts for the first time.
On marriage, Brown’s issues page says that states should “make their own laws in this area, so long as they reflect the people’s will as expressed through them directly, or as expressed through their elected representatives.” If he really believes this, he was remarkably silent during the mid-2000s when his own party’s governor unilaterally imposed same-sex marriage on his state without the benefit of either the popular vote or the legislative statute the 2003 Goodridge ruling itself said was required. To this day, same-sex marriage in Massachusetts has not been legalized as its Constitution mandates.
The governor who did this, and who thereby made himself objectively unfit to hold future public office, was Mitt Romney. Romney also championed the aforementioned Commonwealth Care, a.k.a. “RomneyCare.” Brown continues to defend RomneyCare, even though it has often and in my opinion fairly been described as the model for ObamaCare, which Brown claims to oppose. As the possibility of statist nationwide health care looms, Brown’s stance raises legitimate concerns about his reliability at ObamaCare crunch time.
The worries about Brown’s vulnerability to selling out only grow when one learns, as Politico reported on Monday, that Brown’s campaign was “filled with staffers who once worked” for Romney. Expect Romney, who I believe is the only potential GOP presidential candidate guaranteed to lose in 2012 if nominated, to take major credit within party circles for Brown’s win in an attempt to revive his flagging viability and to quietly attempt to minimize the importance of tea partiers and others on the ground and throughout the country who did the dirty work. Sadly, top-echelon Republican leaders are still enamored of Romney based on his money and supposed charm. They don’t call it the Stupid Party without reason.
But for all his potential faults, the fact remains that Scott Brown and his campaign made a game-saving tackle on fourth and one at the goal line on Tuesday, turning the tide against our punk president at a crucial time.
Forget about savoring the win. In true punk fashion, Barack Obama and his apparatchiks appear poised to double down on the very things voters in Massachusetts and elsewhere in this great nation have now proven they so bitterly oppose. To truly appreciate what he’s up against, Scott Brown would be well advised to devour the content of and adopt the principles contained in Mark Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny on his way to Washington.
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