The collateral damage to the Democratic Party by the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts goes far beyond the Obama Healthcare Bill.
A lot of elected and unelected Democrats have now had their reputations severely damaged without the benefits for which they prostituted themselves – in particular Senators Landrieu and Ben Nelson, but to a lesser degree Democrats in Florida, Massachusetts and even Vermont.
The President’s offer to SEIU, to exclude them from taxation of Cadillac Plans, means that the President himself suffered a blow to his reputation on two fronts – one that he singled out a supporting union for an unearned benefit, and additionally that he did so behind closed doors in violation of his own pledge of transparency. The President probably can’t measure the impact against his continually lowering poll numbers anyway, but more-local politicians suffer more quickly and publically.
It is easy to see the visceral reaction that Senator Nelson suffered in being booed out of a restaurant in his home state of Nebraska, and even the “break in” of Senator Landrieu’s office. The “journalists” claim that they were in her office to get a video reaction of the staff to claims that the staff was so annoyed by constituents’ complaints of the Senator’s political prostitution that the staff had sent the complaining calls to dead-end phones.
Whether that staff claim was true or not, and actually whether the ‘break in” claim by the ‘journalists” is true or not, the very claim means that the cover story was believed to have sufficient legs to act as justification.
To say that the election of a single new Senator in Massachusetts was a game changer is an understatement. The ability of Speaker Pelosi to hold her votes from swing districts was simply destroyed. A Mississippi Congresswoman told the Speaker in a private Democrat meeting that after telling so many of her Katrina constituents that they had lost their house, it was now necessary to tell Madam Speaker that she had lost HER House!
After the political earthquake in Massachusetts, my wife called our ultra-liberal sister-in-law, a member of a long-time Massachusetts Democrat family – only to find that she had voted for Brown! She said that after so many decades of one-party rule in that state, the Democrats had become too corrupt even for her!
Everyone has their own spin on how, and why, Brown won – and all of those issues probably played a role. Liberals even continue to claim that Brown won because the Healthcare bill did not go sufficiently far – and I am reasonably certain they really believe it.
But whatever the reasons, the collateral damage is real. Additionally, there is the independents flight from the Democrats radical movement to the left. General Motors is still Government Motors, Chrysler, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG and a lot of other entities are still government owned or government controlled, but the attack has been blunted.
That is a lot of seismic activity for a single Senatorial election of an unknown in Massachusetts.
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