Why does Massachusetts have so many independents?

The New Neo Posted on by

All around the blogosphere I’ve seen variations on the following theme: if Massachusetts is such a deep blue state, why so many independents (close to half of the registered voters) there?

I believe the answer may lie in the rules about voting in the primaries:

In our modified closed primary, Massachusetts has chosen to only allow those who meet the following criteria to vote:

1. You must be registered to vote.
2. You must be enrolled as a Democrat or Republican; OR
3. Are listed as Unenrolled (formerly known as ”˜Independent’)

That’s it. If you meet the above criteria, you are eligible to vote in the primary.

Caveat: If you are registered Republican or Democrat, you MUST vote in your party’s primary ”“ only those listed as ”˜Unenrolled’ can choose either a Democratic or Republican ballot. This is how Massachusetts is still referred to as a ”˜closed’ primary. There is no inter-party voting because only unenrolled voters can choose which ballot they want.

People like to be free to cross party lines to influence the primaries, and only by being “unenrolled” can they do this in Massachusetts. Those many “independents” we’re hearing about—51% of the voters—are actually “unenrolled.”

Reflections on the Brown phenomenon: we the people against hypocrisy

The New Neo Posted on by

The Brown phenomenon continues to surprise.

For example, yesterday I went to Firedoglake, a lberal/lefty blog, and saw a post entitled, “Progressives, please help to defeat Coakley.” Once I recovered from my astonishment, and had finished reading the piece and many of the comments there, I think I understood better what’s going on with this group. They feel betrayed.

They are really really really angry at Obama and the Democrats of the 2008 Congress—every bit as angry as most of the commenters on this blog are. And although the reasons for their anger are almost entirely different, they are not completely different.

These people had believed Obama to be a true “progressive,” and he’s disappointed them. Not only that, but the entire Democratic leadership has angered them by being so tight with lobbyists, Wall Street, pharmacy companies, and other entities the commenters thought the Democrats should be fighting against. They think that if Martha Coakley became a senator she would just become part of the gang they would like to disown. And they believe that, if they help to defeat the Democratic Party as they know it (and have come to hate it), the party is likely to implode. Afterward, a new party will rise from the ashes, purged of double-crossers and run by true progressives.

It’s not a goal I share. But do I agree with their outraged perception of the base hypocrisy of those who are in charge right now. That’s one idea on which left and right can unite.

Read the comments to get a flavor of what I’m talking about. Over and over, there are remarks to the effect that the Democratic Party has abandoned its core values, principles, and constituents, and that it desperately needs to be sent a message. These people feel used, and they were. Many of them had an idealistic belief in what the Party intended to do. They had felt ecstatic just one short year ago, when they were on top of the world. Now they’ve come to earth with a crashing thud, and they don’t like it one little bit.

Something is stirring in the land. A goodly part of the motivation on both sides is outrage at the hypocrisy of our elected officials, and the ignoring of the people’s voice and the people’s wishes. Almost no one, whether on left or right, voted for their candidates in order for them to design a bill as bad as the current health care reform legislation now appears to be. It offends both left and right, while satisfying neither.

Obama, Pelosi, and Reid have managed to profoundly betray the majority of the American people in one short year. It’s quite a feat.

How to defy the aging process

The New Neo Posted on by

How? Be Sophia Loren.

The lady is 75 years old, and she’d be looking good even for fifty. Actually, she’d be looking good even for forty. There’s no super-taut, fake, worked-on look, either.

Here Loren was at last night’s Golden Globe Awards:

sophia.jpg

And here are a whole bunch more images, including closeups of her face. Take special note of her upraised arm; no flabby saggy triceps, even at 75? The mind boggles. Her skin must be made of different stuff than the normal human’s.

Of course, Loren began with a head start. In her youth, she looked like this:

sophiayoung.jpg

And the rest of us didn’t.

[NOTE: Here’s a previous post featuring Loren. And here I take note of the facial resemblance between Sarah Palin and Sophia.]

WaPo writer E.J. Dionne…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is taught a few lessons by his commenters, nearly all of whom have a great deal more sense than he does.

Dionne still thinks it’s all about “the narrative.” His commenters think it’s actually about the poor decisions made by President Obama and this Congress.

Here’s a good one, and quite typical (by “Letscheck,” at 2:11 AM on January 18):

Smoke and mirrors have been blown away. What is going on in Obama World has been apparent to many for years. Every single day, more people wake up to the reality of who Obama is and what he is doing to this country.

Lies piled upon lies just won’t do it any more. No one believes them.

Blaming others night and day won’t cover up the people who are actually responsible for this terrible turn in our country and the fact that it is being driven forward by this Obama Administration and this Congress.

Attacking business, organizations, people, and news stations to get the focus off of what goes on in Washington is no longer effective. The bag of tricks is out in the open and we don’t like it at all…

Democrats are running from their own party. I suspect most Obama voters are as embarrassed by the result of their vote as I was when I believed Jon Cozine’s lies, and voted for him for NJ Governor. That was over four years ago and I still smart from the revelations of the true Corzine a month into his Governorship.

Corzine was the Obama canary test. He flew so they threw in Obama. Too bad they didn’t pick up on how NJ felt about Cozine after he was voted in. If the Dems had, then they would have foreseen that Obama would end up in the same place.

Government leaders need to be adults.

For all of the blame the childish Dems place on Bush, it would seem that he was the adult and they are the spoiled kids who wanted to take over the house because they thought they knew better.

Give this guy Dionne’s job!

And here’s “radical centrist,” at 2:30 AM on January 18:

Dionne is not just drinking the Kool Aid. He’s passing it out. Keep it up and the Democratic Party will have committed suicide. It will lose 10 more Senate seats in November, not just four or five.

We all know the financial crisis and recession began on Bush’s watch. But we also know that Obama has done next to nothing to stimulate renewed growth and prosperity. We know the “stimulus package” was a Christmas tree of gifts to favored Democratic constituencies and not a carefully targeted jobs-generating program — at a cost of nearly $800 billion. We know that GM bailout was a gift to the UAW and Michigan pols. And we know that more than half of Obama’s time has been consumed by the obsession to pass a monstrosity of a health care bill that will gut Medicare and raise premiums and taxes while handing out more gifts to everyone from Big Pharma to hold-out Senators — at a cost of trillions (and we’re not so stupid as to believe the phony 10-year accounting gimmicks).

So don’t condescend to us out here, Dionne. We’re not punishing Obama for Bush’s sins. We’re punishing him for his phony unkept campaign promises, non-stop bull @#$%& and horrendous health care “reform.”

You’d better “get it” well before next November or there are going to be a lot more “unexpected” losses.

You can feel the heat rising from the computer. These people get it; Dionne does not.

Coakley campaign’s calumny

The New Neo Posted on by

In the heat of a campaign, politicians often shade the truth or at least partially misrepresent their opponents’ positions. But for height, depth, breadth, and pure poisonous brazenness of lie, the Coakley campaign’s latest is hard to equal.

The Washington Post reports on the story:

Republican Scott Brown charged Saturday that a Democratic mailing against his U.S. Senate campaign violates a Massachusetts law prohibiting false statements against a political candidate.

The cover of a four-page mailer sent by the Massachusetts Democratic Party says, “1,736 women were raped in Massachusetts in 2008. Scott Brown wants hospitals to turn them all away.”

Brown is a state senator, and in 2005 he filed an amendment that would have allowed workers at religious hospitals or with firmly held religious beliefs to avoid giving emergency contraception to rape victims. The amendment failed, and Brown voted in favor of a bill allowing the contraception. He also voted to override a veto issued by his fellow Republican, then-Gov. Mitt Romney.

A section of the Massachusetts General Laws prohibits false statements against political candidates that are designed or tend “to aid or to injure or defeat such candidate,” with a penalty of to $1,000 fine and up to six months in prison.

Unfortunately, that sort of sentence is a mere slap on the wrist when the stakes are so high.

So far, Coakley has been mum on the subject of the ad and the suit. What’s more, an earlier advertisement that bore her official stamp of approval made similar false assertions about Brown’s record.

The Democrat Party operatives who sent out these mendacious flyers timed them well: early enough so that the lies could do their dirty work before Tuesday’s election, but not so early that Brown’s camp would have enough time to successfully challenge them before that date.

And in the event of any such challenge, Legal Insurrection blogger and Cornell law professor William A. Jacobson wonders whether, as AG of Massachusetts, Coakley would be responsible under the statute for prosecuting such a case against—her own campaign.

If so, I think she’s fully prepared. After all, the Boston Globe (which couldn’t find room yesterday to talk about the lying anti-Brown rape ad) yesterday quoted Coakley as being ready and eager to fight back against the misrepresentation of a candidate’s record—as long as that candidate is Coakley, that is:

When I am attacked, or my record is attacked, or my record is misrepresented, I’m going to fight back. We are going to make every effort to make sure that people know what the real differences are between me and Scott Brown so they can make a real choice on Jan. 19.

Martha, I think people already know the differences.

Can Kirk vote in the Senate until the Brown/Coakley winner is certified?

The New Neo Posted on by

Fred Barnes attempts to answer the question of what whether it would be legal for Massachusetts Democrats to make good on their pledge to delay Brown’s certification if he wins Tuesday’s Senate race, in order to allow previously-appointed senator Paul Kirk to be the 60th vote for cloture in the health care reform bill fight:

But based on Massachusetts law, Senate precedent, and the U.S. Constitution, Republican attorneys said Kirk will no longer be a senator after election day, period. Brown meets the age, citizenship, and residency requirements in the Constitution to qualify for the Senate. “Qualification” does not require state “certification,” the lawyers said.

Yes, but we can safely say that Democratic attorneys are most likely saying the opposite. Funny how that works. And the Senate precedents cited in Barnes’s piece—that in previous cases involving back pay for senators, their term was deemed to have begun on the day of election—don’t really address the question of voting rights. For that, we appear to have no precedent at all.

The hypothetical situation is quite different from the recent Franken/Coleman election in Minnesota. That was a very close and contested election. Of course, Brown/Coakley may end up that way, as well, but Massachusetts Democrats are talking about the much more controversial question of delaying Brown’s seating in the event of a victory that is neither contested nor close, merely for the purpose of canceling the will of the people in their own state (and around the nation) and allowing health care reform to pass.

There is no precedent for that in American history, as far as I know, although we see it in various shakier republics and dictatorships.

In the Minnesota case, no one was allowed to vote until the contested election was settled. And Coleman was the previously elected senator from Minnesota. Kirk was only appointed to fill the seat by the governor of Massachusetts, the hated Obama-clone Deval Patrick. This would be a naked usurption of power by the Democrat Party that is transparently obvious.

Would they do it? We may not have a chance to find out; Coakley could win the election, and then the question would be moot. Tellingly, the Massachusetts Democrats are not speaking of delaying her certification, and my guess is that even if she’s only one vote ahead at the end of the day and there are absentee ballots still to be counted, they will be whisking her down to Washington for her swearing-in (although if they somehow decided to let Kirk stay in the Senate a while, the outcome would be the same—a vote for cloture).

But if Brown wins, and even if his lead is large and definitive, we may see a legislative power grab by the Democrats unprecedented in our lifetime, or perhaps in American history (any experts here to offer some parallels?).
.

Looking back at Coakley and Brown: how did they get here?

The New Neo Posted on by

Since most of us weren’t paying a whole lot of attention to the Massachusetts Senate race during the build up to the primary, or in the early days of the post-primary campaign, many people might be wondering how it was that someone as profoundly uncharismatic as Martha Coakley came to be the nominee. Another question is what may have motivated Brown to enter the seemingly quixotic race to win a Senate seat as a Republican from Massachusetts.

So let’s take a little trip back in time.

Looking backwards to the vote on December 9, 2009, (see this), the first thing to notice is that the primaries didn’t get a lot of attention. This is generally true in off-year special elections, and even more true this time, partly because there were no high-profile charismatic entries on the Democratic side (the only side that was thought to matter), and partly because there was virtually no difference among the four Democratic candidates in their positions on issues. In DC, each of them would be almost certain to vote the straight liberal party line. And it was to DC that the winner among them was thought to be inevitably headed.

Even the New York Times characterized the primary race as “notably bereft of drama” and “sleepy.” The turnout was so low that the Worchester Examiner called it “pathetic.” Nobody was excited, and hardly anyone cared except the candidates themselves.

So the voting probably came down to the partly faithful and politically attuned. For Democrats that meant voting for Coakley, the person who’d been the first to declare her intention to seek the seat, who had gotten Bill Clinton’s as well as many union endorsements, and was by far the most well-known statewide. Although Coakley’s resume may seem thin compared to other US Senators—she had spent her career mostly as a DA, ascending to the Massachusetts AG’s office only in 2007, and had no legislative experience whatsoever—it was thickish compared to two of her three other opponents, only one of whom had ever held statewide office (Capuano, a member of the US House).

One of the factors in Coakley’s win may have been that “progressive” Massachusetts had never sent a woman to the Senate, a fact Martha didn’t hesitate to mention in her campaign. The voters may have felt it was time to rectify that omission, since any of these Democrats would be as good as any other in terms of their voting propensities in the Senate, and any one of them was going to easily beat the poor sap the Massachusetts Republican Party had managed to persuade to enter the uneven fray in order to be humiliated.

Although Coakley didn’t win a majority in the four-way primary race, she got 48% of the vote, almost 20 points more than her nearest competitor Capuano. She must have breathed a sigh of relief: next stop, Senate! Her job was to keep a low profile and coast to victory.

As for Brown, he won his race by 89%; his opponent was considered to be only a nominal one. The real question was why did he run in the first place, since everyone agreed his chance of victory was slim to none? This article from last September, when Brown announced his candidacy, indicates that there was a very small pool of candidates to choose from: Massachusetts has only five (count ’em, five) Republicans in its state legislature, and there are no Republicans holding any statewide office. What’s more [emphasis mine]:

Jody Dow, the Republican National Committee chairwoman for Massachusetts, said Brown is a strong candidate whom party leaders have long eyed as a prospect for statewide office.

So someone in the nearly-moribund Massachusetts Republican Party noticed they had something special in Brown. Maybe he was even tapped to run, and he probably thought it might be good publicity and a springboard to later statewide office of some sort.

But by far the most interesting part of the article about Brown’s candidacy announcement back in September of 2009 was that Brown seemed to take his own campaign very seriously from the start, plotting out the precise course the would put him in the spot he’s in now, and even using some of the same lines. Perhaps you’ll recognize a few of them here [emphasis mine]:

“I have always thought that being in government service is a privilege, not a right. This Senate seat doesn’t belong to any one person or political party. It belongs to you, the people, and the people deserve a US senator who will always put your interests first…I believe that it is the private sector—small businesses and entrepreneurs—that will get our economy moving again. Government can and will help, but it also needs to know when to step out of the way”…

He pledged he would run a “clean and mean” campaign and promised he would not be beholden to special interests. “My opponents are already pandering to special interests. That’s not the way I operate,” he said.

Well, Brown’s campaign has been clean—although not all that mean—and he’s continued to deliver the same message, one that was carefully chosen back in September to resonate with the feelings of the electorate. Smart man, with good instincts.

After Brown won the primary, local journalist and blogger Jules Crittenden was understandably pessimistic about his chances. But although Crittenden thought a Coakley win was almost inevitable, he also believed there was a tiny chance of a Brown victory if the following unlikely circumstances were to happen to come together: “remarkable gaffes by Coakley, an extraordinary and deft effort by Brown, and probably external events such as a Democratic health-care debacle.”

Crittenden may have scored the trifecta, because all three seem to have occurred in short order in the month since he wrote the post. Blogger Sissy Willis also saw some possibilities, because she titled her immediate post-primary post “Think Scott Brown can’t win? Here’s why he can.”

Brown certainly hasn’t won yet; I’m not counting those chickens. But he’s put the fear into the entire Democratic Party, is leading in many polls right now, and has made himself a national and inspirational figure for Republicans and Independents around the nation.

Not bad for a month’s work.

[ADDENDUM: Jules Crittenden, a witty man, clears up the record some more. And praises yours truly into the bargain.]

Haiti: amidst the horror, a few good stories

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s only about one small child who was saved, to be sure. But whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.

I have highlighted this story not only because of the heartwarming fact that the four-year old child trapped for three days alone in the rubble of a building was saved after hope might have been abandoned, but because amidst all the stories of shootings and lootings it shows ordinary people getting together to do a great and noble thing:

People in the street ran to get a glimpse of Paul Derlice [the boy] as he was carried down a huge pile of rubble by the heroic Haitian men who slaved for hours in the blazing sun to free him.

Strangers formed a large circle around the small boy and jostled each other out of the way to get a closer look, reaching their hands into the sky and exclaiming: “God lives!”

The rescue effort had begun after a voice was heard in the wreckage. In the absence of help from authorities or official rescue workers, the neighbors took matters into their own hands:

A group of neighbors – swelling in size to as many as 10 men – began digging for Paul using whatever primitive resources they had on hand.

In the terrible chaos and suffering following the earthquake, some people are taking advantage of the situation in order to do bad things. But others—and far more of them, I’d wager—are rising to the occasion to do good.

Brown is sweeping the country

The New Neo Posted on by

If you study blogosphere and newspaper comments boards, it’s hard to escape the impression that an extraordinary number of people around the country seem to have heard of the Massachusetts special election because—unlike many such votes—this one feels like it matters to us all.

People are cheering Brown on in a populist, grassroots, “take back our country from the dread ultra-liberals who have hijacked it” way, and they’re putting their money where their mouths are. Over and over, I read the equivalent of: “Do it for [fill in state’s name]!” “Wish we had someone like him here in [fill in the state’s name]!” and “Can we clone this guy?”

You couldn’t write this script if you tried (or maybe you could, come to think of it). It would be deemed too unrealistic, too unlikely, and too pat, especially the Massachusetts angle.

The ironies and resonances abound. There’s the fact that this is only happening because of longtime liberal leader Ted Kennedy’s death, and that the health reform bill that could be jettisoned as a result was meant to be a monument to his life’s work. Another is that Brown wouldn’t even have had the chance to run if the Democrats of Massachusetts hadn’t tried to finesse things by changing the law time and again; otherwise Democrat Governor Deval Patrick could have appointed a senator to fill out Kennedy’s entire term and it would have been ho-hum news.

There’s also the little detail that Brown is one of the most personable and telegenic candidates ever, who seems to convey exactly the right tone and a good sense of what the country is looking to hear right now. As if that weren’t enough, the American Revolution (and the original Tea Party) began in Massachusetts, even though that long and proud tradition has been ground into the dirt by many decades of liberal hegemony.

The sense of unity among Brown supporters—of “we’re all in this together”—is both profound and encouraging. So maybe Obama (with a big assist from the Pelosi-Reid Congress) has kept his campaign promise and united America, after all.