Leftist publications must have been fully prepared for a Democrat loss in Massachusetts. Or they’re really fast typists.
For example, Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter posted an article that sounded promising – “The Message Democrats Should Hear From Massachusetts.” Well, sounded promising is about as good as it got.
It started off fairly well, noting that “There’s no way for the Democrats to soft pedal the historic thumping that Republican Scott Brown delivered to Democrat Martha Coakley on Tuesday in the race to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat.”
But the article quickly went South from there.
Asking “Is this a wake up call for President Obama? Yes. Does he need to show that he is listening more? Sure. But should this election kill health care? Don’t be ridiculous. Who elected Massachusetts to decide for the rest of the country whether we move forward on the bill?”
Not sure that anyone elected Massachusetts to do that, but we are pretty sure that the nation spoke out pretty firmly in the last few weeks to say that we’d rather have swine flu than this bloated pig of a bill.
But Newsweek is apparently home to math-challenged individuals like Alter who consider 33% a majority.
Alter continues: “To their credit, Washington Democrats haven’t given up. The White House is weighing a plan to pass the Senate bill immediately through the House, which would, with Obama’s signature, make it law automatically without Scott Brown or anyone else in the Senate getting another crack at it. Then the Democrats would use ‘reconciliation’ budget rules to fix problems in the Senate version with 51 votes, per the agreement Obama has been working on for the last couple of weeks. This is a messy approach but doable.”
Apparently not wanting to add to the depression quotient on this evening full of depressing news for the left, Alter neglected to mention that in all likelihood “reconciliation” will also be political suicide for any Democrat coming up for reelection this year.
The closest he came was saying, “Will they stay turned off to Democrats? It’s important not to extrapolate from the present too far into the future, even though that’s the habit in Washington. The Democrats will suffer reversals in the November midterms but it is much too early to tell how severe the blowback at the polls will be.”
Just a wild-assed guess here, Jonathan, but we think the “blowback” at the polls in November might just make Democrats long for the good old days of January.
Source: Washington Post
– Written by Patrick Michael
