Wednesday, and the election results haven't changed. The Republican still out-hustled and out-worked the Democrat in MA, capitalizing on bailout angst. More analysis of that and related news:
NY Times conventional wisdom: Democratic Defeat Imperils Health Care Overhaul. So does ignoring the Democratic base. Who is going to fight for you, Rahm?
NY Times: Forget the spin doctors, and listen to the people:
"I’m hoping that it gives a message to the country," said Marlene Connolly, 73, of North Andover, a lifelong Democrat who said she cast her first vote for a Republican on Tuesday. "I think if Massachusetts puts Brown in, it’s a message of ‘that’s enough.’ Let’s stop the giveaways and let’s get jobs going."
Dan Balz:
President Obama and the Democrats rode a wave of anger aimed at the presidency of George W. Bush to victories in 2006 and 2008. Now, a year to the day after Obama was sworn into office, in a dramatic reversal of fortunes, populist anger has turned sharply against the president and his party.
Hello, Congress? The message isn't do less, it's do more.
Steven Pearlstein:
The Democratic candidate promised she'd vote for the health bill, which the Republican vowed to vote against.
The Republican won after surging the final weeks of the campaign.
Ergo, health-care reform is dead.
This is the kind of facile conclusion and faulty logic that, unfortunately, drives too much of the political narrative, just as it did after gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey. So let's break it down into its component parts and see where it goes astray.
Jacob S. Hacker and Daniel Hopkins:
Forget the question of whether a Republican Senate victory in Massachusetts spells the end of health reform. It doesn't -- unless Democrats let it. The Senate has already passed a bill that is far from perfect but far better than nothing. If Democrats lose a Senate seat, the House should simply enact it in return for strong commitments from President Obama and Democratic leaders that they will fight to improve the bill in the future, including through the filibuster-proof budget process.
David Stockman:
While supply-side catechism insists that lower taxes are a growth tonic, the theory also argues that if you want less of something, tax it more. The economy desperately needs less of our bloated, unproductive and increasingly parasitic banking system. In this respect, the White House appears to have gone over to the supply side with its proposed tax on big banks, as it scores populist points against the banksters, too.
Not surprisingly, the bankers are already whining, even though the tax would amount to a financial pinprick — a levy of only 0.15 percent on the debts (other than deposits) of the big financial conglomerates. Their objections are evidence that the administration is on the right track.
Et tu, David? If even you see it...
Mark Blumenthal on new "do your own poll" ventures:
What's troubling is less the technical capacity of these ventures than the potential consequences of their success. Over the last 10 years, we have seen the proliferation of automated polling reshape the way we follow and cover political campaigns. A decade ago, automated polls were a curiosity dismissed by journalists and political professionals. In 2008, 37 percent of the polls we logged on the presidential race at Pollster.com were conducted using an automated telephone methodology, though virtually all of those were done by just three firms: Rasmussen, SurveyUSA and relative newcomer Public Policy Polling.
What will happen if we start to see a flood of polls from the kinds of Web sites that sponsored the two wildly divergent polls in Massachusetts last week? What will happen if hundreds of local political organizations and PACs choose to conduct and release their own robo-polls?
Good thing, or bad thing, it's coming...
Charles Franklin:
Memo to Dems: Ignore public opinion at your peril. Note to Reps: This applies to you too.
Drew Westen:
So in that sense, the story of health insurance played right into the story that lies behind the looming tsunami that swept away Ted Kennedy's Senate seat and will sweep away so many more Democratic seats if the Democrats draw the wrong conclusions from this election. The White House just couldn't seem to "get" that the American people could see that they were constantly coming down on the side of the same bankers who were foreclosing people's homes and shutting off the credit to small business owners, when they should have been helping the people whose homes were being foreclosed and the small businesses that were trying to stay afloat because of the recklessness of banks that were now starving them.