Tag: Massachusetts

President Obama (henceforth to be known as Philosopher-King Obama from a Victor Davis Hanson post today) told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos his thoughts on Scott Brown’s Massachusetts victory:

Here’s my assessment of not just the vote in Massachusetts, but the mood around the country: the same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office. People are angry and they are frustrated. Not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years, but what’s happened over the last eight years.

Now, Brown did campaign specifically on stopping Obama’s Health Care fiasco, he hammered the Obama Administration for Mirandizing the BVD-Bomber and generally granting terrorists full Constitutional protections, and he did repeatedly say Obama’s reckless spending was unconscionable. Only the last of those things angered people about George Bush.

What Scott Brown and the voters in Massachusetts apparently did not understand is that This Is Still George Bush’s Fault by a factor of 8 years to 1. That won’t be even until the end of an increasingly unlikely second term, because what Obama seems not to grasp is that the campaign against George Bush was run – by Martha Coakley.

Mr. Philosopher-King, let me try and explain this to you a in different way. Many of the people who voted for you would prefer to have George Bush back. Many of them voted just last Tuesday. Some things are about you.

By now you have to be considering an amendment to the Health Care bill to expend all the resources the Feds can bring to bear for the express purpose of keeping George Bush alive into the next century.

Anger at Bush did help Obama win, of course, but for him to conflate that with the very specific issues Scott Brown campaigned on – in a special election in the bluest state in the union – is mendacious. It indicates the aftershocks of Tuesday reverberate, but are not understood. Obama’s analysis could not have been much better crafted to fan the flames of disgust with his performance. He does think you are stupid and he just said it again.

Victor Davis Hanson can help us gauge the ongoing damage with this gem: The Democratic Reaction Richter Scale

The Democratic statist transformation suffered a sudden earthquake in Massachusetts last night. How can we measure the severity of the upcoming reaction aftershocks?

The subsequent damage will depend on the magnitude of the next round of shaking—a 7 aftershock ensuring rubble, a 1 suggesting that rebuilding can proceed.

Go read the scale.

I think the Philosopher-King’s analysis of the vote rates a 6.3. On the face of it, it hovers between a 5 and a 6, but the Philosopher-King himself said it, not a minion, and he does blame Bush.

This was the moment when the rise of the statists began to slow and the plan, it began to reel. And the voice of the jackass was muted throughout the land.

Obama, in a robocall for Coakley this weekend:

“A lot of people don’t even realize there is an election on Tuesday to fill the unexpired term of Ted Kennedy,” Obama says in a robocall that state voters began receiving Friday. “They don’t realize why it’s so important.”

Anyone who did not know there was an election today in Massachusetts should pretend there isn’t one. How could such an ignoramus dare cast a vote?

I guess that’s Obama’s point about his base.

Update- 2:58 PM
Apparently, that last sentence was not as clear a message as it could have been. Let me try again.

The smartest person ever to be President agrees to record a robocall in support of a candidate the White House privately acknowledges to be a hopeless buffoon. A bear of little brain, so to speak.

In the robocall the President urges people, who 3 days before the most exciting, publicized, gripping, contentious, utterly amazing contest in Massachusetts politics in more than a generation don’t even know there is an election, to vote for his candidate. If the election has somehow escaped their attention entirely, Obama still wants them to turn out and vote.

Does the President realize how insulting his assumption about Democrat voters is to Democrat voters? Did he pause to think what it means to this Republic for the President to explicitly urge the uninformed and disinterested to vote?

Time magazine-
The Kennedy Succession: The Coming Scramble

The UK’s Guardian–
Obama absent from campaign for Kennedy’s seat

The Boston Herald–
Candidates for Kennedy seat make final money pitch

The Newburyport Daily News–
Kennedy seat hopefuls battle in final debate

The Toronto Star–
Kennedy seat race becoming health care referendum

The Boston Globe–
Analysis: Race for Kennedy seat taking on greater significance

And even David Gergen – erstwhile moderator of the Scott Brown/Martha Coakley debate and director of the Center for Public Leadership at the, ahem, John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University – all refer to the seat being contested in Massachusetts as the “Kennedy Seat.”

If it is indeed a dynastic succession that’s needed, we’ll have to see Coakley’s DNA credentials. A blood relationship to either Teddy or George III would seem necessary.

Scott Brown was up to the bias (of which that “Kennedy seat” presumption is but one example) from the moderator, however. The Q&A is on video here. Watch it.