- #51
Gokul43201
Staff Emeritus
Science Advisor
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Do you really believe that a GOPer winning the MA Senate seat held by Ted Kennedy is a historical milestone greater in significance than a black person being elected President? After slavery, decades of living with a sub-human (three-fifths) status, a civil war, lynchings, segregation, Jim Crow, a civil rights movement that captured the world's attention, and more recently, issues of racial profiling, racial economic disparity, and on the flip side, the debate behind Affirmative Action, one might expect that a black person being elected President is indeed the more historically profound of the the two events. And that's not even comparing the relative significance and power of the two positions involved: POTUS vs. Senator in a minority party (albeit, in this case, a filibuster de-proofing senator).russ_watters said:
On the other hand, Brown has been a MA congressman for 12 years now, having run and won a number of successful campaigns, while Coakley has only been the MA AG for the last 3 years, and as is obvious from her senate "campaign", seems to not know the first thing about running one. And another important stat missing there: 4 of the last 5 MA governors were Republicans. So, the state does not, in general, have an aversion to picking Republicans over Dems.
While the election may have been perceived as a referendum on Obama, Scott Brown most definitely did not run it that way. Brown did his best to campaign as NOT a GOP candidate, calling himself "independent" in many of his campaign ads and pitches. He even went so far (to the left) as to liken himself to JFK in one of them and was insistent on publicly distancing himself from the idea that the election was a referendum of Obama. He even says explicitly in his final pitch on election day that http://www.thebostonchannel.com/video/22267317/index.html "
This one second-order data point tells you that? Clearly? So the result of the election doesn't say much about the actual candidates themselves, then? Or their ability to run a senate campaign? And the outcome would have been essentially the same, no matter who the candidates were, and irrespective of whether or not they had bothered to campaign?
And what does, "flatly rejected" mean? That a little under http://www.pollster.com/polls/us/jobapproval-obama.php ?
Easy to say in retrospect, but I don't recall any of the McCain supporters on this forum making this easy call back then. Naturally, I will take that back if you can link some posts to the contrary.
Let's also recall that Bush was nearly at the same point in just about 9 months following his election, when he got a nearly 40% boost in approval because of a terrorist attack. And it only took him a little over a year to squander away that nearly 90% approval rating...makes Obama's 15% drop in approval look like someone hopping out of bed with a parachute strapped on.
This is exactly right, and in my opinion, is a much bigger contribution to the election results than any specific policy choices of specific parties. The group in power during any extended recession, is expected to suffer a "kick the bums out" tendency, and that was likely a significant contributor to this particular result (just as it was in the last one).
I don't believe any of the major news networks conducted exit polls.
Do people really see Obama being more left wing than they thought he was, or is this just one of those kinds of things that is said so often without careful retrospection? This was the person that was repeatedly referred to as communist and socialist. The same person who repeatedly, and to the extreme dismay of a significant chunk of the Dem party and its supporters, asserted way back in the Spring, that Universal healthcare should come off the table, and that it would be dangerous to cause a large disruption in the way that healthcare is provided. The same person that has threatened to veto any healthcare bill that isn't pronounced deficit neutral by the CBO. The same person who refused to nationalize the big investment banks, as many in the left would have liked, or even claw back at the bank bonuses, which would have been a bare minimum requirement for any self-respecting socialist. The same person that has not dangerously evacuated troops out of Iraq (as every other Right Wing commentator was predicting in 2008) or Afghanistan (and has, in fact, done the opposite), has continued drone attacks into Pakistan, has stated that he would prefer a legislative process to deal with issues like DOMA rather than using Executive fiat, has argued against swinging towards protectionist trade policies, has done nothing to push for the abolition of the secret ballot/card check for unions (another of those things that was predicted to happen once he was in power). Yet so many of the people that were predicting a dive into communism under Obama seem to find him more left wing than they were expecting - odd.
It's pretty plain to see that the US leans to the right. Did you really need such an oblique connection as this to feel confident about that? And as a single data point it hardly carries the statistical weight to draw conclusions about long-term/large-scale behaviors.
This is also trivially true, at least in comparison to most of the rest of the world. But also, in this particular instance, it wants a Senator that actually gets out on the streets and shows a direct interest in the welfare of the people.
I wouldn't use the same words, but I too am happy that one party no longer has a filibuster proof majority. That feeling, however, is rooted in the belief (now fading) that there are at least a handful of relatively independent, non-sheep members in both parties.
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Massachusetts already has universal health care and Brown supports it.
