NYT: "Just Another Massachusetts Miracle"

Tobin Harshaw (NYTimes):

Scott Brown, a little-known Republican state legislator, will be the next junior senator from Massachusetts, and the message for Democrats is: “it won’t much matter”? Well, at least in terms of health care reform, writes Paul Waldman at the American Prospect, who sees two paths ahead:

The first path would be for the House — where they have this strange tradition in which the majority rules — to simply pass, as is, the bill that already passed the Senate…. The other path — and the preferable one, from a policy perspective — would be to get the bill done before Brown is sworn in. Keep in mind that the White House and congressional leaders are nearly done hammering out the differences between the two chambers’ bills. Though reports about what is in this version are sketchy, it looks to be a considerable improvement on the Senate bill. They have to get a score from the Congressional Budget Office, which takes a few days. Then depending on how the bill is offered in the Senate, a vote could come within a few days after that. In other words, no matter what happens in Massachusetts, if Democrats decide to move things through quickly, we could get a vote on health care within 10 days.

Is this fair play? “Republicans will, of course, scream and cry about how awful Democrats are being, which is usually more than enough to make some Democrats knuckle under,” writes Waldman. “The public doesn’t give a damn about process. They care about results … The second reason Democrats shouldn’t hesitate to play a little hardball is this: They are doing what they were elected to do.”

True, but then has doing what they feel they were elected to do really paid off? Food for thought from Rasmussen’s exit polls:

Health care has been a huge issue in this election. Fifty-two percent (52%) of Brown voters say it was the most important issue in determining their vote. Sixty-three percent (63%) of Coakley voters say health care was the top issue:

· 78% of Brown voters Strongly Oppose the health care legislation before Congress.

· 52% of Coakley supporters Strongly Favor the health care plan. Another 41% Somewhat Favor the legislation.

· 61% of Brown voters say deficit reduction is more important than health care reform.

· 46% of Coakley voters say health care legislation more important than deficit reduction.

· 86% of Coakley voters say it’s better to pass the bill before Congress rather than nothing at all.

· 88% of Brown voters say it’s better to pass nothing at all.

· 22% of Democrats voted for Brown. That is generally consistent with pre-election polling.

Commentary’s Jennifer Rubin urges fellow conservatives to take that last number in context: “Twenty-two percent sounds like a lot, but this is, after all, Massachusetts. We’ll see how those independents voted and whether that mysterious ‘enthusiasm gap,’ which has bedeviled Democrats, is enough to put Scott Brown over the top.”

“Maybe not everyone in their party is willing to put their heads down and bully through as if nothing has happened after losing elections in Virginia, New Jersey, and perhaps Massachusetts,” writes Betsy Newmark, who surely thinks Paul Waldman is among the ostriches. “Some Democrats want to push through their same health care plan that people are rejecting. You have Dick Durbin, the number two Democrat in the Senate, openly discussing the ‘nuclear option’ - pushing through the Senate bill in the House and then trying to adjust things through reconciliation.”

Newmark points to Joe Lieberman and to Senator Evan Bayh’s comments that “There’s going to be a tendency on the part of our people to be in denial about all this … [but] if you lose Massachusetts and that’s not a wake-up call, there’s no hope of waking up,” but her (fairly gleeful) assessment is that “it’s no coincidence that both Lieberman and Bayh are associated with the Democratic Leadership Council. Maybe they are hoping that they can take back their party, but I think the era of the DLC has passed with Clinton’s presidency. The inmates have now taken over the asylum.”

Ramesh Ponnuru of the Corner doesn’t think much of those inmates’ first instincts: “There are a lot of signs that the Ds are going to go on an anti-Wall Street jag to try to save themselves. If their political assumptions are correct, shouldn’t the bank tax—which Brown opposed—have worked better for Coakley?”

Of all the Democrats who voted for Brown, the most unlikely may have been Ray Flynn, the former Democratic mayor of Boston. He explained his reasoning on XM radio’s Potus channel: “People feel like their vote is being taken granted with this powerful, one party state, and with one-party government in Washington. People want a little coalition, and a little respect… I don’t know how you regroup from something like this. There are going to be a lot of problems in the Democratic party from here on out.”

Those problems have been apparent for a while to those who have been paying attention to this race, so much so that by mid-day team Coakley was already trying to shift the blame to the national Democratic Party, even leaking a much-discussed memo, which received a well-deserved fisking from the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder. “The campaign is already blaming national Democrats for the worst performance of a candidate in living memory,” adds his colleague Andrew Sullivan. “The campaign does seem very Emily’s List: smug, elitist, arrogant and in the end, stupid and gutless.”

HughS at the conservative site Wizbang, however, is happy to see the blame shared:

Predictably, the White House is spinning the “bad candidate” meme while the Coakley camp is pointing a finger at the tin eared, obtuse political strategy of a White House consumed with cramming unpopular policy down on an already energized electorate … There are only two egos inside the White House that are capable of ignoring what has become common knowledge among the electorate since the Virginia and New Jersey gubanatorial elections, the retirement of several Democratic incumbents and a free fall in approval ratings for a President that won office a mere year ago …

Tonight another Democratic head topples into the basket of political hubris and the two monumental egos in the White House are still blaming others as they ignore their own peril. Smart White House staffers should be reading up tonight about what ultimately happened to Robespierre because their bosses are plainly out of touch with the mob they have summoned.

TPM’s Brian Beutler and Eric Kleefeld have the early word on what they see as a nefarious Republican plot: “In preparation for what they expect to be Republican Scott Brown’s victory in the Massachusetts Senate special election tonight, conservatives and Republicans have unearthed a novel and ironic precedent, which they’re using to argue that, if he wins, Brown should be seated right away as the 41st vote against health care reform. Senate rules require that all newly-elected Senators be certified as winners by their home states before they can be sworn in.”

Shifty stuff, but as Beutler and Kleefeld admit, there is precedent: “On November 6, 1962, none other than Ted Kennedy himself won a special election to fill his own brother’s Senate seat in Massachusetts, and was sworn in the very next day–two full weeks before his victory was certified, and three weeks before that certification arrived in Washington.”

Indeed, any accusations of procedural shenanigans by the Republicans are going to sound a little weak considering the full frontal flip-flop the Massachusetts Legislature pulled to get Paul Kirk installed in the Senate after Ted Kennedy’s death.

What next? Well, as if we didn’t know already, Alex Isenstadt of the Politico has the answer:

As the battle for the Massachusetts Senate race comes down to the wire, both sides are racing to put legal teams in place in case of a too-close-to-call finish — or a Republican victory that doesn’t result in a quick seating of the new senator …

Daniel Winslow, a partner at the Boston firm Duane Morris who is heading up Republican Scott Brown’s legal team, and Sean Cairncross, an attorney for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, are leading the GOP legal effort. POLITICO has also learned that Marc Elias, a partner at the Washington firm Perkins Coie who served as Al Franken’s lead attorney during the prolonged recount battle after the 2008 election, has arrived in Massachusetts to head up the Democratic legal team.

Isenstadt informs us that the man who will play the lead role in the fight over seating Brown, Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin, says he’s going to play it straight and fair. “I am going to do everything that I can to give the winner, whoever that winner is, the credentials they need as soon as possible .. My reputation precedes me. I’m not going to sacrifice my reputation for any race of any kind.”

Sounds good, but it raises the question of what that preceding reputation amounts to — it was Galvin, after all, who quashed any challenges to the slippery manner in which Paul Kirk went to Washington.