PrintJanuary 12, 2010
The Second Boston Tea Party?
The Democrat leftism of Massachusetts is legendary. When Nixon ran against McGovern in 1972, McGovern lost every state of the union...except Massachusetts. The Reagan Landslide in 1984 is the only time in the last fifty years when Massachusetts voted for a Republican presidential candidate. Last year, Obama won Massachusetts by a whopping 61.8% of the vote, about nine percentage points more than his national average.
The Massachusetts state legislature is just as profoundly Democrat and leftist. Democrats in the State Senate outnumber Republicans by 35 to 5, and in the State House, they outnumber Republicans by 143 to 16. The State of Massachusetts has six different statewide elective offices: Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Secretary of the Commonwealth, Treasurer and Receiver General, Attorney General, and State Auditor -- and every single one is a Democrat.
Look around the country at state governments. No big state has anything like the overwhelming partisan domination that Massachusetts does. Indeed, very few states in America have such lopsided partisan control of state government offices as Massachusetts.
What is true at the state government level is just as true at the congressional level. Massachusetts has ten House seats in Congress. All ten are Democrats. Actually, that understates the monolithic nature of Democrat control of House seats in Massachusetts. All the House seats after the 2004 election were Democrats, and Republicans contested only five of those ten House seats. All the House seats were Democrat after the 2006 election. In that election, Republican contested only three of the ten House seats. Last year, Republicans actually contested four out of ten House seats in Massachusetts, although the Republicans were clobbered in each race.
The last time a Republican won a Senate race in Massachusetts was in 1972, when Edward Brooke won. Indeed, the last time any Republican seriously challenged Democrats for a Senate seat in Massachusetts was fifteen years ago, in the 1994 midterm election, when Mitt Romney ran against Teddy Kennedy. When Teddy Kennedy died -- in the midst of being lionized by the left in a grandiose funeral intended to make his memory much greater than he himself ever was -- the Democrat leadership behaved shamelessly.
First, Democrats tried to pull a "Wellstone." Senator Paul Wellstone in Minnesota died in a tragic plane crash during the 2002 campaign. Rather than have a dignified funeral for a liberal Democrat who was genuinely respectful by many people, the Democrat Party in Minnesota turned Paul Wellstone's funeral into a partisan festival. Democrats also despicably lambasted Norm Coleman, an equally well-regarded Republican candidate, during these proceedings. Democrats have similarly tried to whip sympathy for the dead Senator Kennedy into support for health care "reform."
Second, Democrats repealed the law that required a special election to replace Kennedy (because Democrats were afraid in 2004 that if John Kerry won the presidency, Mitt Romney would have the opportunity to appoint a Republican to fill his unexpired term) and made a new law that allowed a gubernatorial appointment and then a special election. The sole purpose of this new law was to ensure that Democrats had an extra Senate seat during the health care debate in Congress. The cynical change in Massachusetts election laws, like the efforts to tie the dead senator to federal legislation, stinks. Ironically, the ploy may backfire.
Democrats, with understandable confidence, expected any member of their party to simply walk to victory in the special election, which was scheduled by the Democrat governor for January 19, 2010. In the interim, the Democrat governor could appoint an innocuous cipher Democrat senator, voting in lockstep with whatever the Democrat leadership wanted, to fill in until the special election.
Sure, tea parties had been held all over the nation, indicating a very real, very passionate, and very serious challenge to the catastrophic economic policies -- both implemented, like the stimulus, and proposed, like health care -- pushed by the filibuster-proof Senate, the dictatorial House leadership, and Obama. The idea that Americans everywhere might be appalled by what is happening in Washington seems not to have occurred to the insulated politicians, who utterly ignored tea parties in their states and districts, not to mention phone calls, e-mails, and faxes from their constituents.
The challenge which Republican Scott Brown is making in Massachusetts to win the special Senate election against Democrat Martha Coakley ought not to be a huge surprise. As I noted in August, conservatives outnumber liberals in virtually every state of the nation, including Massachusetts. In the hotbed of leftism, Kennedy's home state, the Gallup Poll reported earlier this year that 30% of respondents identified as conservative, while only 29% identified as liberal. So when a Democrat pollster actually shows Brown leading by one point, that also ought not to surprise us. Political debates are increasingly between conservatives and liberals, and as poll after poll has shown us in recent years, conservatives outnumber liberals and are the largest bloc in American politics.
What we are witnessing, whether Brown ultimately wins or not, is a Second Boston Tea Party. The people -- meaning the ordinary voters of Massachusetts, who will have to endure the consequences of a very unpopular health care measure and an increasingly unpopular president -- will speak next week. Washington insider punditry and the smug bosses of the Democratic Party, who bribed Ben Nelson with noxious privileges which offend even the benefited Nebraskans, may well hear the loud voice of average Americans at last. If by some miracle Brown wins, then the filibuster-proof Senate is doomed, along with plans to pass a murky, ugly, leviathan health care bill. If Brown comes close to beating Coakley, then no Democrat in America can feel safe outside deeply gerrymandered congressional districts. The mere fact that Democrats are sweating now means that the Second Boston Tea Party has sent a clear, strong message to Washington: You work for us, and not the other way around.
Bruce Walker is the author of two books: Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie and The Swastika against the Cross: The Nazi War on Christianity.
