Post-Peak Liberal: What Can Brown Do For (To) You: A Massachusetts Postmortem

Post-Peak Liberal

....... Life on the Downslope

What Can Brown Do For (To) You: A Massachusetts Postmortem

"When there's trouble in Massachusetts, there's trouble everywhere -- and now they know it."

-- Scott Brown (Victory Speech from 1/19/10)

There has been much weeping and gnashing of teeth across the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts this week, as well as a lot of proud conservative swagger. Both are well-earned or well-deserved, depending on your perspective. The amount of national ink spilled over the recent special Senatorial election, in which Republican Scott Brown upset Democratic dauphine Martha Coakley, has also been prodigious. Only hindsight will tell us whether or not this remarkable event was a historic bellweather for epic political change, or simply a one-time confluence of unique factors.

Last time, I outlined what I think will happen in the next couple election cycles: significant gains this fall for the GOP, but probably not majorities; then larger victories in 2012, resulting in Obama's ouster and recovered Republican majorities in both houses of Congress. After that, the "Musical Chair Politics" effect will kick in again, and the sitting party will get their clocks cleaned in 2014 and beyond. As I outlined last time, we're really into a situation where the last thing you want to be as a politician, come election season, is actually in power. It's going to continue to be the advantage of the adversary, as conditions deteriorate in the Long Emergency. SInce both of the main parties are completely owned by corporate interests (no, that's not quite right -- the major parties are actually made up of corporate interests: it's the exact same people), neither of them have any type of true, substantive policy agenda that could turn things around for the country. So I think we'll see a lot of pendulous action in the next few elections, where each side will be content to hone their outsider shtick to perfection, loudly shouting that the other side is messing things up because they're in bed with the "special interests" (just a reminder that a corporation that gives you money is part of the "Business Community," while one that gives cash to your opponent is a "Special Interest"). So the short attention span American public will continue to throw the bums out every couple years, and the other bums will fill the void until it's their turn to get slapped down. Not a pretty picture, and national collapse may preclude this neat unfolding anyway. But you get the idea.

In any case, enough of that. Let's get on to the Brown-Coakley race, and what it means for Massachusetts, America, health care reform --all that stuff. I won't belabor these things for very long, since plenty of other folks have jumped into the fray with their opinions and interpretations. We'll just look at a couple nuggets, and use them to jump off onto tangents and bigger questions, per usual.

THE CANDIDATES

Martha Coakley was not really the most exciting politician to come down the pike, and I don't really know why she was the anointed frontrunner in the first place. But she certainly wasn't horrible. I've seen worse. And she does come across as a fairly competent Attorney General, with a moderately impressive record in standing up to big insurance corporations and corrupt contractors from the Big Dig. The Big Dig angle is fairly significant too, since this bloated behemoth of waste and fraud is really the poster-child for Bay State cronyism. She could and should have made major hay with these portfolio pieces (more below), but evidently didn't. In any case, those people, especially at the national level, who are blaming the candidate for everything are certainly overstating. She wasn't an awesome presence, but in the indigoest of indigo states, she shouldn't need to be.
Similarly, those who are painting Scott Brown as the next Ronald Reagan are a little too close to an open glue tube. This is a good lookin' guy, certainly, with an attractive family and a pleasant overall demeanor (who would have figured that Mitt Romney would only be the second best-looking dude to hold high office in Massachusetts in the past decade?). And he does stay fairly on point, except when he's pimping out his own daughters on national TV. But for God's sake, the guy is one of only five sitting Republican state senators in Massachusetts (out of 40 seats), leaving him with a resume thinner than Bernie Madoff's stack of holiday thank-you cards. But to be fair, Brown's got other non-legislative credentials (National Guard, part of the JAG), and we can't poo-poo those patriotic achievements. But he was running to be one of the most powerful 100 people in the country, and his campaign website (www.brownforussenate.com) is embarrassingly scant in details on policy and credentials. But to be fair, he does drive a truck, I assume to transport voluminous amounts of legislation back and forth from the State House to his modest home each evening. So there's that.

THE CAMPAIGN

It should be fairly clear from my remarks above that I don't think the candidates had too much to do with the ultimate outcome of the race this week. Coakley was blah, but her actual achievements should have far outweighed the thin resume of Mr. Brown -- in normal circumstances. This is Massachusetts, after all, and we're not just liberal-leaning -- we're a fairly brainy bunch, no matter what our political tendencies. There are a lot of independents in the Bay State, just as there are everywhere nowadays. But even if they were pissed at the national picture, independents would not normally choose a nobody over an accomplished statewide office-holder like Coakley. But these were obviously not normal times, as we'll see below.
But the conventional wisdom that has emerged is that Coakley ran a stupendously bad campaign, and that's why Brown won. There is, of course, ample evidence for this. She was slow out of the gate. She didn't do enough banner-buys on heavily trafficked websites. She went on vacation. She came off as elitist with some gaffes about Curt Schilling and the Yankees, and standing in front of Fenway Park in the cold (Jon Stewart even zinged her for that one). So sure, you could write this off to bad campaigning, I guess. But to my mind, if this was really so significant, it would be more of an indictment of voter stupidity and gullibility than it would be of bad campaigning. After all, what so many are clamoring for now is competence in government. Much of the country really has moved beyond the typical campaign gotchas and snark-attacks (albeit, probably and unfortunately only temporarily). I think there's revisionism in this blasting of Coakley's campaign, more smoke than fire.
Brown, for his part, ran a good campaign. But again, the breathless adulation of his electoral brilliance is just more revisionism. He just didn't make any major mistakes, which is fairly easy when you aren't currently associated with the party that is presiding over the implosion of the American Way of Life. Americans have short attention spans, so it's easy to run a conservative boilerplate campaign, spouting the usual pablum about lower taxes and the evils of Big Gub'mint. You have the luxury of knowing that the people will have long forgotten that it was these very policies that exacerbated all of our woes for the last few years (but to be fair, I do not blame Dubya for everything -- regular readers of this blog know that I trace our present state of affairs back a long way, winding through leaders from both left and right).
One interesting note is that Coakley's ideal campaign would have been very tricky to pull off. She could have run as an outsider Democrat. She could have said that she was not going to just be a rubber stamp for Obama's agenda, but would instead stand against the fat cat corporations who are looting America. She could have highlighted her history of fighting big business corruption, and vowed to take that battle to her led-astray colleagues in the Senate. Of course, this would all have been tongue-in-cheek, with a knowing nod to Harry Reid and Obama on the side. But even though it would have been substantially dishonest, it likely would have defused Brown's outsider shtick and delivered a solid Coakley victory. The hard part would have been the primary, where she could not have gone too far in bashing the present Democratic powers without falling victim to her significant challengers. It's worth remembering that Coakley really blew her financial wad in the primary, and had meager resources with which to start the race against Brown. It would have been extremely difficult to run as an uber-Dem to win the primary, and then transform into an outsider for the general. But it would have worked, in my opinion.

THE STATE

This level really deserves more attention than it's getting from the mainstream media. I guess it really can't be otherwise. I mean, how many people in Osh Kosh really care about what some nimrod in Peabody says about the wicked hack douchebags in the State House? But this really was a significant part of the electoral puzzle. If you look at the town-by-town map, you can see the Coakley supporters clustered in cities and the typical liberal enclaves of the Berkshires and the end of Cape Cod. Most of the towns (and thus the state) were for Brown. Non-Bostonians in Massachusetts are sick of what they see as rampant one-party arrogance and corruption. Our last couple House Speakers are under indictment. There was the 16-year epic debacle of the Big Dig, the largest highway and graft project in US history, so far over-budget that it will not be paid off until 2038. There's the saga of the Bulger brothers and their intimate enmeshment with law enforcement, state government, and brutal street crime. On and on.
Massachusetts, in essence, is almost too blue. Now, I don't mean that people are too liberal. I like "liberals," in the older sense of the word: generous, giving, broadminded, unafraid of change. What I mean is that there is no systemic outlet for non-liberal views. The Democrats have had such a stranglehold on state politics for so long that massive reservoirs of resentment have built up. Monopolies are not good, in politics or business. One-party rule has resulted in too much corruption, nepotism, cronyism, insiderism -- the works. Disgruntled conservatives and independents dine on the endless streams of ressentiment porn served up by the Boston Herald and Fox 25 (the local Boston Fox affiliate). "How did this city worker get a $300 thousand a year job, and then only show up for work three days out of every month? Find out, as we confront this hack SOB in his driveway at 6AM! Next, on FOX."
You get the idea. I think the people of Massachusetts were sending a message, to be sure. But as much as it was a message to the national Democrats, it was equally a shot across the bow of state Dems, including Governor Deval Patrick. The state has become a kind of symbol for the corruption of one-party rule, in need of dressing down.

THE NATION

Finally, we get to the national scene, and I'll spend less time here, partly because there is a lot of quality stuff out there already, better than I can give. But also, I won't dwell here because I'm not totally freaked-out and panicked about the whole thing. Yah, Massachusetts elected a Republican Senator. Get over it. The world will go on. The time to panic is not now -- it was two years ago, five years ago, ten years ago. In reality, we should have been in slow-motion panic (wait, is that possible?) since the dire warnings of Dwight Eisenhower about the military-industrial complex in 1961, or the "Malaise Speech" of Jimmy Carter in 1979. In general, we have to pull ourselves away from this up-and-down obsession with the electoral horserace, where we are alternately panicked or oblivious, depending on whether it's the right time of year.
Sure, Scott Brown's victory can be seen as the proverbial shot across the bow of the national Democratic Party and the President. But remember, Brown is only in for two years, and he will likely face a much stronger challenger next time around. And in the meantime, hello -- the Dems still have a substantial majority in both houses of Congress. The idea that 41 Republican Senators spell a death-knell for all-things liberal and good is preposterous, and shows just how pussy-ish the Dems have become.
And then, let's remember the whole Musical Chair Politics metaphor. For the next few cycles, whoever happens to hold power when the electoral music stops is going to get pounded. Why? Because the long-term macrotrends that are unraveling our national economy and civilization are not going to be altered by another stimulus package, or a sweeping round of tax cuts, or by health care reform, or by the heroics of a John Galt entrepreneurial class. The Long Emergency is going to continue its glacial creep downwards, and our two plutocratic national parties are going to get scraped along and ground to dust in its inevitable march. We should be adjusting to these these macro-trends and creating the new social forms necessary to survive in a much different world, not worrying about the ascent of a hunky, truck-driving Senator.

Oh, and by the way, don't be surprised when Scott Brown and Sarah Palin begin their high-cheekboned rise to center-stage in 2011. They really would make the perfect GOP ticket for a country that prefers image over substance, and sound-bite over discourse. It might be good to have such a comely pair at the helm as we continue our national dissolve.