Atomic Nerds

Once upon a time in late 2008, a charismatic and forceful young President carried both himself and his party to overwhelming electoral victory, in what many saw as setting the scene for an unfettered Democratic hand in dramatically remaking the American political landscape, if they could but muster the vision and boldness to execute it. With powerful majorities in the House and Senate. January 2009: Yes We Did!

One year later, the only thing of note the administration has managed to accomplish was the massive TARP bailouts expanding upon the Bush bailouts, which Americans are slowly realizing only stimulated legislative backscratching hands. Cap and Trade has been shelved indefinitely, and the health care bill that was to be the administration’s signature achievement has spiraled into a nightmarish vision of legislative sausage-making, with it becoming ever more apparent that they now want to just pass something, anything, that they can claim as an accomplishment, no matter how vile. Foreign policy has gone largely nowhere, with the Russians, Iranians, Chinese, Israelis, and Olympic Committee being equally uinmpressed and overall disinclined to do anything but what they were going to do anyway. January 2010: What, Exactly, Did We Do?

Somewhere in the middle of all this, Ted Kennedy met his last martini and inconvenienced the Congressional Democrats by dropping dead before the final vote on the health care bill could be had. Before Kennedy arranged to have the rules changed in MA to avoid having a Republican governor be able to pick a successor to a MA seat, and instead arranged for a special election to be held, this would have been meaningless; a sufficiently Ted Kennedyesque replacement would have been slotted in the Kennedy Seat and it would have been business as usual.

It still should have been business as usual. Massachusetts has been a Democratic fiefdom for many decades; every once in awhile the populace gets sufficiently annoyed with the very worst excesses of a single-party state and elects a Republican governor to do some damage control, it’s generally acknowledged that Massachusetts Congressional seats are Democrat seats and that’s the way it is the same way Alaska is snowy. And under that belief, the DNP shrugged and picked a likely enough candidate (due to being a Democrat, having a pulse, and being a DA) and then more or less forgot about the special election, as did the placeholder candidate in question. In order to defeat a Republican candidate, all she had to do was not die or be caught with a dead hooker, after all.

Then a charismatic and forceful guy named Scott Brown with an R tag after his name (the GOP would love to claim credit for him, but they had little enough to do with his success) started conducting his political campaign against Coakley in the same high spirits as Sherman’s campaign against the South. Suddenly polls started showing Scott as having a chance, and then as having a close chance, and Coakley and the Democratic Party collectively lost their shit. Coakley hit Brown hard with a barrage of negative advertising, which mostly backfired, since she took to doing this as silly as declaring Brown an enemy of rape victims.

The harder she tried and the more desperate she smelled, the higher Brown’s polling climbed, and now it’s election night, and Coakley’s so panicked the blame ping pong has already begun even though the polls aren’t closed yet- and so has the accusation of cheating.

Even if Brown DOES manage to lose, the fact that he’s gotten this close to a miracle like taking a Massachusetts Senate seat away from the Dems should be blaring red klaxons that they are in serious political trouble and that they need to make a major shift in how they’re handling governing if they don’t want to suffer a bloodbath in the midterm elections akin to the 1994 Republican takeover. And some of them know that.

Obama, meanwhile, has issued a statement on how he plans to handle it- by doubling down and getting more combative about his approach. This could have the same expiration date as every other Obama statement, but I actually doubt it; never in his political or personal career has he ever actually been thwarted from something he really wanted to do, and I don’t think he intends to start now. If so, all the GOP, as idiotic as they are, will have to do is stand back and let him walk himself into the sawblades- and hope he doesn’t do too much damage to the country on his way through.

Posted current events |