Hang In There Baby!
Like that poster cat hanging on for dear life, I’m going waaaay out on a limb to make a bold prediction: Martha Coakley will win the Senate election.
I’m not saying this is equally a sure thing as predicting Jack E. Robinson will lose any election in which he takes part.
But there’s a new paradigm developing in the minds of Republicans that their guy, Scott Brown, can turn a blue state red and I’m just not buying it.
[By the way, please read the editorial by OMB’s Jason Pramas who giggles at the way Repubs have co-opted the color traditionally associated with communists…]
Why am I prognosticating a Coakley win on Tuesday? Because I don’t believe you base a new paradigm on ONE poll.
Recently, a voter survey originating from Suffolk University in Boston put Brown slightly ahead in the race. Oh my gosh, you would have thought the editors at all the local TV and radio stations and networks such as CNN had lost their minds at the exact same moment. A collective hysteria, if you will, which gained momentum through the bloviating of pundits desperate for an upset to talk about.
After all, who’s going to win big money gambling on two great teams with close odds (the Colts and the Saints in the Super Bowl) meeting to decide the victor when an underdog (the Jets anybody?) can be elevated to the role of supreme spoiler?
Secondly, much of the discussion is being driven by television commercials for and against the two candidates and extensively paid for by political action groups from outside the state.
[By the way, congratulations to all the broadcast stations on all the revenue this election has generated for them in campaign ads. I hope we see an increase in hiring across the TV and radio industries.]
But short of Brown’s calling Coakley a puppet and Coakley accusing her opponent of being anti-choice, how much will voters remember of all the vitriol once they step into the booth? Very little is my guess.
And so we have the mythology of Scott Brown, languishing in obscurity in the Massachusetts state legislature, rising up to slay the Kennedy mystique (a bit of a mythology itself) and the “in the back pocket of the Democratic machine” state Attorney General Coakley.
The problem with this theory of Republican ascension is that the vast majority of voters in MA belong to the ranks of the unenrolled; nearly half of all registered voters in fact. And trying to predict what they will do is like figuring out what kind of a season Daisuke Matsusaka will have.
It’s true that during the 1990’s and early aughts, Massachusetts voters installed Republican Governors and in the legislature, overwhelmingly Democrats. Former Governor Michael Dukakis has said he believes this phenomenon came from voters who believed one party should keep the other in check. But in the aftermath of the social and economic devastation wrought by the Cheney/Bush administration and a Republican controlled Congress, has there been any evidence that independents are ready to vote for gridlock rather than maintain Democratic control of the Senate?
Not at all…
Are people angry at and scared of double digit unemployment, tens of thousands of foreclosures, and cuts to education, welfare, and municipal services of all stripes. Yes, of course. But are they thrilled that federal stimulus money is filtering down to cities and towns and non-profits doing all sorts of recovery work in neighborhoods, and that the cost, for example, of having COBRA – the federal program that guarantees health insurance for families of people who lose their jobs – was slashed by two thirds by the Obama administration and recently extended for another 18 months?
They should be…
In this humble opinion, voters in Massachusetts are more sophisticated than either party gives them credit for. Citizens will remember that if recent history teaches them anything, it’s that members of the party of big business (the elephants) constantly scream bloody murder about taxes and yet gainfully accept subsidized health benefits and all the perks that taxes provide them: like police and fire protection.
Oh, and the two wars the Republicans have been saying we can’t do without for the past decade.
Finally, if you live in the Bay State, don’t forget to actually cast a vote on Tuesday; regardless of the weather. And don’t fall prey to the trap into which the professional gamblers would have you stumble: that a confident “poker” face should cause you to fold your cards.
I’m not saying this is equally a sure thing as predicting Jack E. Robinson will lose any election in which he takes part.
But there’s a new paradigm developing in the minds of Republicans that their guy, Scott Brown, can turn a blue state red and I’m just not buying it.
[By the way, please read the editorial by OMB’s Jason Pramas who giggles at the way Repubs have co-opted the color traditionally associated with communists…]
Why am I prognosticating a Coakley win on Tuesday? Because I don’t believe you base a new paradigm on ONE poll.
Recently, a voter survey originating from Suffolk University in Boston put Brown slightly ahead in the race. Oh my gosh, you would have thought the editors at all the local TV and radio stations and networks such as CNN had lost their minds at the exact same moment. A collective hysteria, if you will, which gained momentum through the bloviating of pundits desperate for an upset to talk about.
After all, who’s going to win big money gambling on two great teams with close odds (the Colts and the Saints in the Super Bowl) meeting to decide the victor when an underdog (the Jets anybody?) can be elevated to the role of supreme spoiler?
Secondly, much of the discussion is being driven by television commercials for and against the two candidates and extensively paid for by political action groups from outside the state.
[By the way, congratulations to all the broadcast stations on all the revenue this election has generated for them in campaign ads. I hope we see an increase in hiring across the TV and radio industries.]
But short of Brown’s calling Coakley a puppet and Coakley accusing her opponent of being anti-choice, how much will voters remember of all the vitriol once they step into the booth? Very little is my guess.
And so we have the mythology of Scott Brown, languishing in obscurity in the Massachusetts state legislature, rising up to slay the Kennedy mystique (a bit of a mythology itself) and the “in the back pocket of the Democratic machine” state Attorney General Coakley.
The problem with this theory of Republican ascension is that the vast majority of voters in MA belong to the ranks of the unenrolled; nearly half of all registered voters in fact. And trying to predict what they will do is like figuring out what kind of a season Daisuke Matsusaka will have.
It’s true that during the 1990’s and early aughts, Massachusetts voters installed Republican Governors and in the legislature, overwhelmingly Democrats. Former Governor Michael Dukakis has said he believes this phenomenon came from voters who believed one party should keep the other in check. But in the aftermath of the social and economic devastation wrought by the Cheney/Bush administration and a Republican controlled Congress, has there been any evidence that independents are ready to vote for gridlock rather than maintain Democratic control of the Senate?
Not at all…
Are people angry at and scared of double digit unemployment, tens of thousands of foreclosures, and cuts to education, welfare, and municipal services of all stripes. Yes, of course. But are they thrilled that federal stimulus money is filtering down to cities and towns and non-profits doing all sorts of recovery work in neighborhoods, and that the cost, for example, of having COBRA – the federal program that guarantees health insurance for families of people who lose their jobs – was slashed by two thirds by the Obama administration and recently extended for another 18 months?
They should be…
In this humble opinion, voters in Massachusetts are more sophisticated than either party gives them credit for. Citizens will remember that if recent history teaches them anything, it’s that members of the party of big business (the elephants) constantly scream bloody murder about taxes and yet gainfully accept subsidized health benefits and all the perks that taxes provide them: like police and fire protection.
Oh, and the two wars the Republicans have been saying we can’t do without for the past decade.
Finally, if you live in the Bay State, don’t forget to actually cast a vote on Tuesday; regardless of the weather. And don’t fall prey to the trap into which the professional gamblers would have you stumble: that a confident “poker” face should cause you to fold your cards.
posted by I.B.I.S. Radio at
5:24 PM
1 Comments:
see now I wish I had bet against you yesterday ... but I didn't want to be nailed for illegal gambling ... lol ... you got guts though, David, for trying to call the race ...
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