5. The Senate campaign. When the most interesting thing to come out of the campaign for Ted Kennedy's U.S. Senate seat was Republican candidate Scott Brown's happy trail, you know our democracy is in trouble.
Coakley's Campaign Sucked
It goes without saying that Martha Coakley's campaign was one of the monumental failures in Massachusetts political history. She and her staff seemed to take a vacation between the Democratic primary on December 8, and last week, by which point they were already seriously screwed. Her campaign was so terrible that it made Bostonist's list of Things We Hated in 2009. She blew what was once a 30 point lead by acting as if her election was a foregone conclusion, and that made a lot of people very angry.
The Health Care Bill is Bad; Its Press is Worse
Coakley campaigned as the 60th vote in favor of the Senate's landmark health care reform bill. Scott Brown ran as the 41st vote against it. Pundits have read this race as a referendum on health care reform, and, in a way they're right. But not for the reasons they think.
Looking at Brown's campaign literature, he did not campaign against the idea of universal insurance coverage, which the bill would enshrine. How could he? Massachusetts is rightly proud of the fact that 98% of our citizens have health coverage. Instead, Brown campaigned on the idea that we should "slow down" health care reform so that we could "get it right." In a state where it's hard to find a doctor and high deductibles keep people from even trying, that doesn't sound so bad. Neither does putting the brakes on a bill that made the same mistake that Massachusetts made by failing to control costs by statute, resulting in an unnecessarily expensive program.
People hate the health care bill. Progressives hate it. Teatards hate it. And, as we've seen, many independents hate it. It's a bill that's especially hard to love in Massachusetts, a state that already has many of its strongest attributes—universal coverage and bans on denying coverage for pre-existing conditions. What's in it for us? Brown tapped into this sentiment and rode it to victory. That he's wrong doesn't make the victory less real.
Coakley failed to show Massachusetts voters that the national health care reform has something for them. Namely, massive expansions of Medicare eligibility and strict limits on annual out-of-pocket spending—a hedge against the rapacious premiums and deductibles that we're paying today. Helping out the rest of the country is well and good, but if Coakley had hammered home the simple point that health care reform will start benefiting each and every Massachusetts resident the day that it goes into effect, she might have won.
Massachusetts Voters Don't Realize That Deval Patrick is Not President
Scott Brown spent a lot of his campaign talking about taxes. And it turns out that people were very angry about them. The astute among you might point out that no new national taxes have been levied recently, and you're right. Scott Brown, and his legion of voters, were angry about the Massachusetts state sales tax increase that Deval Patrick signed into law last May. You remember? The one that kept the Commonwealth from becoming the east coast's answer to California?
Brown's campaign began with him driving his truck around the stupider parts of the state getting voters in a tizz about how high their sales tax is. He even introduced the evil spectre of a gas tax. What he didn't do was explain how he was going to combat these Massachusetts state taxes from the U.S. Senate. But you don't need a strong sense of logic when you're really, really angry, right?
Massachusetts Can't Vote for Women
It's a state that has only had one female governor—and she got there by mistake—and has never had a female senator. Need we elaborate?
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