Senator Brown’s Daughters: Want One?

Re the blog entry today: sigh

Hear hear! What an odd man . . .

Hey suomy. . . Say all that you want. Here are the facts. Obamacare is dead. Cap and trade is dead. Dreams of a progressive workers paradise are dead. You can rant like the moron Olbermann all you want and it won’t change reality. The reason that Brown won. . .uh. . .the reasons. . . I mean. . .Wait a second. Okay. You and your liberal friends are right. I take everything back. Here’s the truth. 1. Brown won because the Democrats didn’t get health care passed. Please encourage your elected Dem rep or Senator to redouble his or her efforts to bring about total government health care.2. Brown won, not because Liberal/Dem policies are unpopular, rather, 52% of MassachusettEs voters are racists angry that we have a Black president. Please encourage your reps to speak out daily against racist white males.3. Brown won because Democrats didn’t pass Cap and Tax. Please speak out about global warming and how important it is to sacrifice our prosperity and pay even higher prices for energy.4. Brown won because Obama and the Dems didn’t spend enough money on stimulus. Please encourage your liberal/dem rep to sponsor legislation for another 3 or 4 trillion in bail outs.So. . . there you go. You guys are right. All you have to do is follow my advice and Dems will be all set for the November elections!

I agree with the core of Livefree…’s contention that the original postress missed the joke and looks down her nose at pickup trucks, I am actually curious about something. Votes for the Democrat candidate declined from the 2008 election over most of the Commonwealth. But a map in todays NYT [which I read to know what the ememy is up to and to keep my disgust fresh] that showed that the areas which Coakley carried, often by substantial margins, were Central Boston area (probably the Academic cluster), the two big islands, the tip area of Cape Cod around Provincetown, AND the West. I was surprised — I expected the rural and small town West to have gone for Brown. I would be glad if someone who actually knows more about Massachusetts than I do — and you wouldn’t have to know a lot to know more than I do about it — could write in and give us an analytic, non ideological, non rhetorical, account of this.

The Democrats/liberals lost an important election, and we’ll just have to absorb the blow, figure out what we did wrong (no, no, stinkcat and livefreeor2, not absolutely everything from the New Deal to now), revise our expectations and agenda (a little), and listen to the catcalls. What we shouldn’t do is what Prof. Barreca has just done: find something Palinesque that the winner said off the cuff, scream about it, and, as they say, “demonize” the guy before he’s made a peep on the Senate floor.Conservatives will spin this election as an undebatable sign that America has already come to its senses about the 2008 election and has made the first move to come crawling back to the only people who can save them from their mistake, conservative Republicans. Liberals will microanalyze the results and spin them toward the election being an anomaly–bad campaign, underestimating the opponent, infusion of money, unfair ads and (the most baroque) that Democrats voted for Brown because they were pissed off at Obama and supporters for not being leftist enough. (My own inexpert opinion is that the result had considerable to do with one party having held the seat for 30 years and it being–good reason, bad reason, or no particular reason–”time for a change.”)This is not only a country whose electorate is neither liberal nor conservative, but a country rather acrimoniously split (witness liverfreeordie2′s remark on another thread that “ALL liberals lie”). Elections in the near future are, I think, going to swing back and forth, with, on balance, the Republicans gaining a few seats and governorships, net, as opposition parties tend to in off-year elections. My own possibly wishful thinking (I did say “possible”) is that this smacking down of the Democrats prior to the November elections might be a good thing: it’ll let off some steam from embittered conservatives, it’ll wake up the Democrats to the fact that honeymoon, such as it was, is over, and that, possibly, Mr. Brown and the Republicans will do enough stuff repugnant to moderate voters, e.g., filibuster a healthcare reform bill that’s been so arduously arrived at, and that is, in sum, about what the country wants at the moment, to give Americans second thoughts about Massachusetts’s second thought.In the meantime, liberals would be well-advised not to do what Prof. Barreca has done in this post, and conservatives would be well-advised not to indulge in sports-blogs-type gloating about one game won when there are others still to play.

“the last time a liberal was in office the government ran a surplus and saw federal spending decrease.”Selective memory–ah, the bastion of partisanship! The balanced budget that led to a surplus was passed by a Republican-controlled Congress. Split government is the key there. In recent decades, government spending increases dramatically when one party–either party–controls both chambers of Congress and the presidency. It increases at much smaller rates under split governments. The lesson I take from this is one of extreme caution when thinking any single political party can be trusted to govern by itself.That said, I think the original post is missing a sense of family humor.

_perplexed_Was that a joke?

“Selective memory–ah, the bastion of partisanship! The balanced budget that led to a surplus was passed by a Republican-controlled Congress.”jclay is a better person for integrating some nuance into my argument. Until then I was trading an eye for an eye: we all know that factors outside of ‘presidential will’ contribute to presidential legacies, but we also know that the man (unfortunately I can’t be gender-neutral here) who presides is the one who takes the credit and the blame. This is to say that while livefree gets himself worked up over ‘Barry,’ attributing all current political problems to the president, it’s my prerogative to apply the same narrow scope to presidents past: Clinton presided over a surplus, Bush turned a surplus into a deficit (not to mention the vast abuses of personal liberty, privacy, and Constitutional rights, which had nothing to do with the budget). My memory isn’t so selective, my accusations less so.

I did not know that people who spend all of their time blogging on this site also monitor what happens on sprots blogs!!!If the topic of this post is all that the author noticed about what happened last night, then as I often used to say to my students when I was teaching high school, “you have problems beyond which I can help.”"Most U.S. Americans can’t find it on a map because, and so, and such as, we need to help the Africa and the Iraq…such as” never mind!!Blackhawks in 2010!!Good night now!!

Livefreeordie2 (for short, should I call you “Live” or “die”?):What on earth do you disagree with? That liberals shouldn’t write irrelevant japes at Mr. Brown? Or that conservatives shouldn’t gloat? Can’t imagine it’s the former, so it must be that conservatives SHOULD gloat. Lordy.Re #18:I don’t spend all of my time blogging (actually, I’m just a commenter) on this site, just the fitful moments while I’m waiting for the coffee to drip. And, less frequently, the same on the sports blogs. Would be a real Murrikin if I didn’t, would I?

Excuse my mistype – I wish there were an “edit” function on here – that should be CoaklEy.

Thank you Louisie, Another question. Shay’s Rebellion as I understand it was a populist movement prompted by differential taxation, particularly onerous on those for whom transportation of corn and rye in liquid form was much more feasible than in dry form. Similar circumstances a decade later prompted the Whiskey Rebellion, and in my view the country in some respects has been going downhill ever since the both of em were suppressed. So is Western Massachusetts politics something of an alliance, or maybe perceived confergent interests, between a rock (or in the Pioneer Valley, grass) roots populism and a literary-collegiate elite? And which of the two, Brown or Coakley, was the more populistish, or were they both in different ways?

The simplest answer to the question “Why did Martha Coakley do relatively well in western Massachusetts” is that she was born and raisd in western Massachusetts.

I thought it was a creepy thing to do. People are shallow no matter what state they live in.

If this election is read as a rejection of the Obama health care reform, how does one explain the fact that Massachusetts already has a health-care policy in place that is very similar and was put in place by a Republican governor, Mitt Romney? Are the voters of this state just saying to the rest of the country that they don’t want everyone else to have what they already do?

Get a life. Wake up to the serious message sent by the voters of MA and stop spinning onto anything else you can create to critize. The voters told you what they think. You are being told to be real, to deal with issues that are important to your fellow citizens. Get busy.

Come on – give Scott a break! He was riding an unbelievable high, after doing what nobody thought he could do a month ago, and he says something less well thought out than he should have. We’ve seen it with actors/actresses winning the Oscar and sports teams after a big win. His faux pas is certainly more innocent than President Obama speaking off the cuff at a press conference and saying the Cambridge police acted ‘stupidly’ for their handling of the Gates arrest.

I guess I can forgive the faux auctioning-off of his daughters. It was crude and somewhat disturbing, but we have freedom of speech here, right? Can’t forgive his support of waterboarding, though. I don’t care what kind of truck he has.

Just an aside. Have you ever noticed that when some men are very angry with women, they start to call them “mam” or “sweety” or “lady” as in “Let me tell you something, lady” in livefreeordie’s post.Whenever someone says one of these words to me,such as “mam” I know something bad is coming…

Gender. I don’t believe that Martha Coakley lost only because of gender, but I think that’s a factor. Imagine if she had been named “Sexiest Woman of the Year” and posed nude in a men’s magazine–the equivalent of Scot Brown’s being named “Sexiest Man” and posting nude in Cosmopolitan. . . . Imagine if she held up her campaign director’s hand and offered him to the “highest bidder,” as Brown did his daughters’. Imagine if she proposed giving women the right to invoke a “conscience clause” and deny legal medication–like Viagra–to men, as Brown did to men to refuse to provide emergency contraception to women who had been raped. Imagine if America, and Massachusetts, weren’t afraid to elect an intelligent, cool-headed, lawyer who happens to female? Time to start studying the “Hillary Syndrome”? Martha seems to have fallen victim to it.

[Whenever someone says one of these words to me,such as "mam" I know something bad is coming...]Where I’m from (NC), “ma’am” is being polite, “lady,” not so much, and “sweetie” had better be your wife, your daughter or your (substantially younger) niece.

The “facts” on what motivated a majority of MA voters to choose Scott Brown aren’t in, and to attribute a monolithic, single- mindedness to that vote is naive and self-serving SPIN. As a MA resident, I can confirm that there were some very ugly overtones to this race – people driving by Coakley sign holders in my community hurling insults and threats, behavior meant to intimidat;, Coakley signs stolen, and web-based rants that suggested Brown should rape Coakly and withhold emergency contraception, or that as a “baby-killer” she should be killed.I myself had a male of indeterminate age in a pick-up truck drive by my home when I was out shoveling snow and launch a littany of insults at me because of the Coakley sign in my yard. This behavior ignorant and cowardly at best, dangerous at worst. As one who has served in local town government, I have been subject to violent threats if I voted a certain way. Dare I say I’m female? The anonymous caller a good number of years ago that called me and several of my fellow female town meeting members threatened us with harm in the coarsest of terms if we voted a certain way in regard to a town project. When you start getting phone calls threatening to rip your c**t out, something’s gone terribly wrong with our system. Very sad.

And Prof. Barreca, this whole post is hard to take seriously at all. Are you really sad and stunned because the guy said something awkward (ok, very awkward) in a live appearance, and talks in the usual political bromides and “of the people” bites? How much did that bother you with John Edwards (“this son of a mill worker” – who happens to be a glossy, attractive, egotistic and wealthy trial lawyer) or Joe Biden (too many awkward moments to list, plus the incessant emphasis on the fact that he -gasp- rode the train to work)? Come on, admit it – it’s the fact that he’s a Republican who won in Massachussetts, derailing health care reform, and the fact that a competent Democratic campaign would have beat him. All this stuff in the post is just a veneer.

rjsax – re #47. Clearly you are a liberal. Invariably, when a liberal reads or hears a point of view that makes sense and against which they are incapable of arguing (whether due to limited intelligence or just ignorance), they attack the messenger rather than the message. So which is it, rjsax? Were you born with an IQ in the low double digits? Or is it that you simply haven’t had the motivation to get past the third grade? Please understand that I ask this because if your comment is the product of a birth defect rather than being too lazy to advance beyond elementary school, I will be happy to give you a pass for your bad manners. Otherwise, I might be tempted to defend myself by ridiculing you even more fiercely than you tried to do to me.

To mmccllln:1) Barreca’s blog, like all of the other bloggers, is supposed to be thought provoking. Agree with her ot disagree with her, it doesn’t matter. She has started a conversation between people about a current event. Get over yourself.2)Just because her (and many other people’s) sense of humor is not yours or Scott Brown’s for that matter, is irrelevant. When Scott Brown stepped into the limelight of running and winning a political office, he (and his supporters) have to understand people will be critical of things he says, particularly weird, off-color jokes.3)My husband owns a truck, and gasp, I sometimes drive it – in my pearls and heels! Yeehaw, but really who gives a damn? 4)If you knew anything about Gina, you would know she also chooses to live in a rural area, thus making YOUR assumption that she thinks people in rural communities are stupid, moot. I beleive the point she was trying to make was that since Sarah Palin’s “You betcha,” dumming down of language, other politicians, including Scott Brown, have adopted the same strategy – avoid multi-syllabul words, speak in simple sentences with plenty of “local” slang and be sure to tell everyone you drive a truck. It is these politicians who are callign you stupid, not Barreca.5) I have no words for this as it is petty and absolutely ridiculous.6)Barreca is one of the most highly regarded professors at UConn. Both my husband and I hold her in the highest of regards having taken several of her class. Oh and we are both registered Republicans. How’d you like them apples?!

let me summarize this dreck of an opinion piece:”I am pissed Brown won. I am pissed Brown won. I am pissed Brown won. . . “Anyone remember Obama’s crack about bowling at the White House ‘like the SPecial Olympics’?I guess a ‘sort-of God’ has more leeway.

53. mmcclllnBravo.What a pretentious whiner the author of this piece is.And duplicitous.She didn;t have the courage to come out and say she doesn;t like the pie in the face this represents to Obama, so she engages in petty sniping about the ‘sexism’, hoping to drag others onto the bandwagon.Either that, or displeasure with the substance of Brown’s political perspective sublimates into this whining. Liberal fascism? I report, you decide.

mmcc: When someone for some reason feels the need to refer to the automobile they drive and the way they occupy their day in a political discussion, you can be sure they’re trying to posture for political gain. The fact that you drive a truck is a non-issue. My dad drives a truck too (I’m posturing for political gain). When people do this the aim is to claim a set of credentials, which have nothing to do with good or bad political policy. It’s argument from the personal, self-inflicted ad hominem, designed to induce another fallacy, ad misericordiam. In modern-day English, it’s a bunch of bullshit. I argue these things based on whether they make sense and whether they work and not based on what kind of car I drive or shit I shovel or books I read or women or men with wom I have or don’t have (in the technical sense) sexual relations. Bullshit bullshit bullshit. That’s what these indignatn personal narratives add up to.bemused: You can extrapolate the MA election to national politics all you want, but of course you’d also have to extrapolate the NY election in which a Democrat won for the first time in over a hundred years (to be consistent). A slightly less myopic view would show the reality of a Democrat president with one of the largest Democrat majorities in the Senate in the history of the United States. I suppose, for you, the people only speak when Republicans win a seat? Nevermind this 59-41 stuff…

I’m surprised this isn’t mentioned more: the fact that it was Ted Kennedy’s seat means, if anything, that this election was a great opportunity for anything to happen, for anyone to step in. It’s not necessary a good assumption that just becasue Ted Kennedy occupied the seat for so long, the district itself is, demographically, as liberal as Kennedy. Kennedy, like many senior Senators who serve that long in office, became more than his policy and his voting record in that district, making his continual re-election about more than voting demographics aligning with the politics of Ted Kennedy. In other words, people voted for Ted Kennedy, and not ‘the Democrat.’ Once someone like that passes away or retires, it makes perfect sense that the electoral situation in the district changes. It’s true that this election means something, bemused. It means a lot of things, among them that the Dems need to reevaluate their situation. But like goxewu has already said (and I’ll say it less politely this time) the idea that this election is a referendum on Obama and/or the Dems is just bullshit. It’s spin, and it’s exactly what an opposition party does in this situation. But if we remain level-headed about things, it’s clear that there are a lot of reasons why Brown won that have nothing to do with the Dems’ general standing and performance. Likewise the symbolic value of a Republican in Ted Kennedy’s seat is striking; but like so many things in politics that are striking, it’s largely misleading.

liberals care more about politics than policies. Reagan and Bush were master at policy. Clinton and Obama care more about politics and they mixed politics and policies….