Link: http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/obama_administration/obama_approval_index_history

For the first time, the Rasmussen poll of President Obama’s Job Approval has twice as many people (47%) saying they strongly disapprove as saying they strongly approve (23%). Total disapproval outnumbers total approval 58% to 41%. Bleak numbers for the President, but bad policies do have consequences for him, too.

Link: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-election/labor-to-form-government-20100907-14ynm.html?rand=1283837684230

Bad news down under … the three independent holdouts from the election have thrown their lot in with the Labor government.

Chris Christie nails the administration for being “mindless drones".

Of course, anyone who has worked with the federal government on anything knows this is how government operates. And the bigger government gets, the more people realize that government is the problem. And playing musical chairs, putting in smart people instead of dumb people, Rs instead of Ds, or anything like that isn’t going to solve anything. Returning power to the people, or in this case to local governments, is the only solution.

Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson attacks the Tea Party today in his Washington Post column. He claims that Republicans would do well to separate themselves from Tea Party elements, especially ones that exhibit “constitutionalism", “nativist impulse", and “political violence” in response to inferred breaches of power.

Gerson is a gifted writer with conservative and small-government tendencies. However, columns like this show that he is part of what Rasmussen calls “the political class” rather than the mainstream public.

On the question of political violence, Gerson is absolutely correct. But he connects violence with the Tea Party based on a single tongue-in-cheek comment made by one Republican candidate (Sharron Angle’s comment that, “If this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies.” By and large, Tea Party rallies have been peaceful, disinflammatory, and exceedingly tidy. More so than left-wing rallies, which are typified by disrespect for the law and litter.

On the question of immigration, Gerson is playing typical Democratic identity politics. Tancredo’s rants are reprehensible. And the movement to end birthright citizenship is an unprincipled, band-aid solution. But the other policy positions taken by Tea Party candidates, favoring better immigration enforcement and taking a stand against the Ground Zero mosque, are largely positive for the country. Furthermore, they are popular.

But it is the constitutional question where he has it all wrong. Here is what he says:

First, do you believe that Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional? This seems to be the unguarded view of Colorado Republican U.S. Senate candidate Ken Buck and other Tea Party advocates of “constitutionalism.” It reflects a conviction that the federal government has only those powers specifically enumerated in the Constitution – which doesn’t mention retirement insurance or health care.

This view is logically consistent – as well as historically uninformed, morally irresponsible and politically disastrous. The Constitution, in contrast to the Articles of Confederation, granted broad power to the federal government to impose taxes and spend funds to “provide for . . . the general welfare” – at least if Alexander Hamilton and a number of Supreme Court rulings are to be believed. In practice, Social Security abolition would push perhaps 13 million elderly Americans into destitution, blurring the line between conservative idealism and Social Darwinism.

As I have argued in an earlier post, the general welfare clause is subordinate to the power to tax. The Constitution does not state that Congress has the power to “provide for … the general welfare"; it says Congress has the power to tax in order to provide for the general welfare. And it says nothing about “spend funds” to provide for the general welfare; that is a shameless and reprehensible bit of Constitutional libel on Gerson’s part.

Of course “a number of Supreme Court rulings” have stated otherwise (Alexander Hamilton’s opinion is irrelevant here), or else we wouldn’t have a $107 Trillion liability parked on our collective balance sheet. The point is that they did so as a matter of convenience and judicial activism.

Gerson’s argument fails to point out that just because Ken Buck and other Tea Party candidates believe that these programs are unconstitutional does not mean that they want to end or even dislike the programs. It is beyond dispute that a constitutional amendment to enumerate the powers that provide for these programs would pass easily, despite the 2/3 and 3/4 hurdles. Perhaps a way to address the issue is to sponsor a constitutional amendment in Congress that specifically adds these to the enumerated powers.

The greater problem is that the slope has become so slippery that government now acts without regard to constitutionality. Many Republicans give lip service to the 10th Amendment; how is this defensible unless one can claim that no programs under un-enumerated powers are constitutional? (Oh, boy, some lefty’s going to use that against us). Even if many popular programs were found to be unconstitutional, the unwinding of some of them could take decades and could be done without affecting those who have (rightly) grown to expect the benefits; others could simply be made constitutional by amendment.

But the intent is not to attack current programs; it is to put a Congressional brake on the creation of new programs that are clearly not under enumerated powers, rather than leave this job to the Supreme Court, which is rather hampered by precedent. Case in point is the recently passed health reform law (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act). Protecting Social Security and Medicare is not inconsistent with the recognition that future entitlements are to be avoided. Just because a family does not want (or can not afford) more children doesn’t mean they don’t love the ones they have.

Perhaps Gerson is trying to protect Republicans from the inevitable demagoguery that would (will? does?) accompany any discussion of the constitutionality of these programs. To be sure, explaining the issue as I have in the last two paragraphs would pass over some voters whose attention span can’t get farther than the predictable “Republicans hate Social Security” response from Democrats. But the U.S. Constitution was intended to protect us from an all-powerful government and permit the citizens (not the courts, not Alexander Hamiltion) to grant more powers only after careful consideration and agreement that surpasses majority rule. We have been fighting this battle in earnest for about seventy-five years and are generally losing it because of the acquiescence of political expedients like Gerson.

There appears no positive function or endeavor of human existence beyond the reach of government power and its insidious appeal to either the “general welfare” clause or the “interstate commerce” clause. And yet a plain reading of the law says that each power must be enumerated. After years of endless aggravation and taxation under the boot of a well-heeled state, the public may be finally ready to read more than four words and indulge a constitutional argument.

***

One more thing: Gerson also says that “Tea Party populism … is inconsistent with religious teaching on government’s responsibility to seek the common good and to care for the weak.” WTF? First of all, as any Democrat will tell you, don’t force your religion on me (or anyone else). Secondly, no religion (except maybe Judaism) says it is the government’s responsibility. And that makes all the difference.

Pelosi’s comments after Gibbs’ no-head-in-the-sand assessment:

Thank God it’s not up to you.

Link: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/apr/23/government-motors-repayment-fraud/

I was as surprised as anybody to hear GM CEO Ed Whitacre claim in a recent commercial that “we have repaid our government loans in full — with interest — five years ahead of the original schedule". As pointed out by a lead editorial in the Washington Times and by a Fox News report, a government watchdog has indicated that $4.7 billion of the $6.7 billion repaid came from another bailout account, and the FTC could become involved to investigate truth-in-advertising violations. And that’s not to mention that, even if the money flow had come directly from auto sales (which it didn’t), as the administration has been trying to say, the claim in the commercial leads the listener to believe that the company is free of all bailout debt (i.e. “repaid our government loans in full” seems to mean all government loans).

So you have a government-financed company lying on taxpayer-funded commercials that the taxpayer funding has been paid back. That’s rather creepily familiar: Democratic government employees used taxpayer funds in the stimulus package to lie to the taxpayers about how many jobs were being created or “saved” by the stimulus package itself. You are paying for your government to lie to you about whether it is actually working.

There have been a lot of empty promises in the age of Obama. And much that is Orwellian. But this is about as inimical to transparency and clean government as anything I’ve yet seen.

Link: http://townhall.com/news/politics-elections/2010/04/14/bunning_endorses_outsider_paul_in_us_senate_race

See attached article. Up with the libertarian Republicans!

Link: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/04/14/how_bad_could_2010_really_get_for_democrats_105152.html

In the linked article, Sean Trende says that while it is certainly possible for Democrats to lose only a couple of dozen seats in the House in the upcoming Nov 2010 elections (if the economy improves and the Republicans “overreach"), it is also possible that they could lose upwards of ninety seats. Wow.

A couple of tasty nuggets from the article:

The Democrats are sailing into a perfect storm of factors influencing a midterm election, and if the situation declines for them in the ensuing months, I wouldn’t be shocked to see Democratic losses eclipse 100 seats.

Well, I would be. And so would most people with an eye on politics. His analysis showing parallels to perfect storm elections (bad economy, many freshmen in opposite-party districts, controversial agenda) of years long past (1938, 1894) when such things happened is respectable, though.

President Obama’s policy choices to date are wreaking havoc on the brand that Democrats cultivated carefully over the past twenty years. Bill Clinton worked long and hard to make it so that voters could say “fiscal conservative” and “Democrat” in the same sentence, but voters are finding it difficult to say that again.

This is true in spades. People don’t like seeing their tax dollars flushed down the toilet, whether through handouts, bailouts, corruption, or sloppiness. When Clinton was President, a Republican Congress reined in spending, and Democrats had to be tight-fisted. Middle-class and suburban voters had more money then, too. Economic scarcity and horizon doom were not part of the equation. Obama and Pelosi have squandered any illusion people had about Democrats being responsible with public funds. It will be a long time before they are let near the till again.

Last year witnessed the ascendance of the Tea Party movement in response to a public disgust with irresponsible federal spending, surging deficits, and anticipated future tax increases. In the shadow of residual (yet unjustified) suspicion of private sector culpability in the financial crisis of 2008-2009, most of this backlash focused not on the regulatory functions of government but on the welfare state and an endless liberal appetite for wealth redistribution entitlements.

The Just Economic Distributions (JED) ratings are the perfect metric for this populist sentiment. They measure the degree to which members of Congress respect the property of those who earned it and look with suspicion on handouts, means-testing, and class distinctions. The ratings are cannon-fodder for those who would tar lawmakers who routinely favor big-government solutions and large welfarist entitlement programs.

It is certain that legislators who favored or continue to favor welfare state policies will be embattled in the 2010 Congressional elections like never before. The following are the JED ratings for the last three years for senators who have not announced retirement and are up for re-election this year (best to worst):

Note that the deviation between the score of the latest year (2009) and the average of the last three years (2007-2009) for most of these senators is positive. This could indicate that those senators who know they are up for re-election in the 2010 cycle have decided to scale back their redistributionist tendencies.

In the Senate, top JED honors for 2009 go to Tom Coburn (OK), James Inhofe (OK), and Jim DeMint (SC), who all scored a perfect 100. Coburn and DeMint also got perfect scores in 2007, and Inhofe did in 2008. Socialist Party senator Bernie Sanders (VT) inhabits the other extreme, as he was the only senator in 2009 to receive a score of 0.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (NV) scored 25. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (KY) scored 77. The Republican/Democratic Party split continues to be highly predictive of distributive justice concerns, as the highest-scoring Senate Democrat, party cross-over Arlen Specter (PA) had the same score (61) as the lowest-scoring Senate Republican, Olympia Snowe (ME).

In the House, Reps. Paul Broun (GA-10), Jeff Flake (AZ-6), and John Shadegg (AZ-3) garnered perfect scores for their performance. On the other extreme, twenty-four Democrats shared the dishonor of having a zero score, voting for economic injustice on all 26 measured votes.

Among the House leadership, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (CA-8) scored a 9, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (MD-5) scored 17, and Minority Leader John Boehner (OH-8) scored 84. Rep. Parker Griffith (AL-5), who recently switched to the Republican Party on Dec. 22 (afer all the votes that make up the JED score), would have been the highest-scoring Democrat with a 62; now that distinction will be shared by Reps. Bobby Bright (AL-2) and Walter Minnick (ID-1), both of whom scored 61. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (FL-18) again scored the lowest among House Republicans (with 58), repeating a feat from 2008.

This year’s criteria for the Senate included twenty-two roll call votes, distributed as follows: six votes on taxes, four on health care (including Obamacare #22), three on consumer choice, two on labor issues, two on housing, two on energy/transportation issues, two on macroeconomic stimulus, and one on the federal budget. The criteria for the House ratings used twenty-six roll call votes, including: nine on labor, unemployment, and compensation issues, four on health care (including Obamacare #24), three on housing, three on the federal budget, two on the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), and one each on macroeconomic stimulus, energy, taxes, small business, and the U.S. census.

The complete 2009 JED results are available at www.tonyquain.com/ratings.php. The scores are intended to reflect the percentage of legislators in the members’ respective chambers who are more likely than the scored member to vote for policies that tax success and subsidize failure. The JED ratings introduction page referenced above outlines the JED rating system.

Link: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6213R520100310

On May 25, 2009, President Obama and Congressional Democrats set a deadline for the end of July for passage of a health care bill.

On July 23, 2009, when lawmakers said they could not get it done by the August recess, President Obama set a deadline for December. “I want it done by the end of this year,” Obama said. “I want it done by the fall.”

Democrats lost the ability to pass bills in the Senate without Republican support after Scott Brown was elected U.S. Senator from Massachusetts on January 19.

Yesterday, President Obama set a deadline of March 18 for Congress to find some way to push a Frankenstein bill through without Republican support.

The linked Reuters article shows how this deadline is being received by his fellow Democrats on Capitol Hill. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D, MD) said, “None of us have mentioned the 18th other than [Obama Press Secretary] Mr. Gibbs". No Democratic lawmaker even gave lip service to upholding the deadline.

Dick Durbin, the John Madden of politics:

“Deadlines are both a blessing and a curse,” said Richard Durbin, the No. 2 Senate Democrat. “They are a blessing because they get you focused on making a decision but they are a curse if you can’t make them, and this has happened over and over again.”

Nancy Pelosi, a progressive for progress:

“We’re making good progress and if we get some final figures from the Congressional Budget office we can even make more progress,” she said.

Of course, health care reform is not the only area where Barack Obama has set deadlines and let them lapse. The closing of Guantanamo Bay was supposed to happen within a year of taking office, and it’s still open. A decision on the augmentation of troop levels in Afghanistan was supposed to come in July, then November, but wasn’t made until December. And of course, Iran passed its September and December deadlines to make concessions on its nuclear program without any consequences whatsoever.

With all these fake deadlines, what respect does this Democratic Congress have for our Democratic president? About the same respect that foreign leaders have for him.

Back in July of last year, asked why he felt so strongly about his deadline for the end of that month, Obama replied, “because if you don’t set a deadline in this town, nothing happens.” Someone needs to explain the difference between setting a deadline, and enforcing it.

After one or two empty threats, people get wise to the fact that you can walk all over someone. Children figure this out with soft parents. So after three missed health care deadlines (and various others), what have the sharp minds on Capitol Hill figured out? What have the American people figured out? What have our allies and enemies abroad figured out? That like much of his rhetoric, Obama’s deadlines are meaningless.

If President Obama can not stand up to Congress and show that missed deadlines have consequences, how can we expect that he will stand up for our country?

In fact, liberal policies are all inherently acquiescent. If someone fails to pay their mortgage, liberals demand banks give them time and taxpayers give them money. If automakers can’t sort out their own problems and hurl themselves toward bankruptcy, liberals bail them out with our earnings. If a welfare recipient screws up and has a fourth child, liberals give them even more of other people’s money. If foreign nations fail to live up to their diplomatic agreements, liberals pursue … more diplomacy. In every case it is about (supposedly) solving the problem in the moment, rather than seeing how such acquiescence creates the problems in the first place. They may claim it is about forgiveness. It is not. It is about weakness.

Public funding of abortions is equivalent to food stamps for cannibals.

Link: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/news/ap/politics/2010/Jan/21/supreme_court_rolls_back_campaign_spending_limits.html

The Supreme Court just ruled (5-4) that corporations are free to spend money independent of candidates’ campaigns.

See the linked article for details.

This is in line with what I always thought is a principled way to solve the free-speech/corruption dichotomy of American campaign finance law: prohibit contributions of money to political candidates, but allow people (and organizations such as labor unions and corporations) to spend as much as they want talking about the candidates. This avoids direct contributions that fuel corruption, but also avoids limitations on free speech.

Democrats should consider themselves lucky. They got their wake-up call with one Senate seat up for grabs. It could have been 34 Senate seats and 435 House seats. Then they really would have been crying in their lattes.

How progressives and supposed unbiased journalists in the last few days, both in anticipation of Brown’s victory and in its aftermath, have been telling Democrats in Congress to push forward with health care reform regardless? Heaps. Here’s a small sample:

The Boston Globe editorial board
Ezra Klein
Dan Kennedy
Jacob Hacker, Daniel Hopkins
Paul Waldman
Tim Fernholz
Jonathan Alter
Jonathan Cohn
Jonathan Chait (are all these guys named Jonathan?)
Paul Krugman
… and on and on.

These people will kill the left-wing agenda for decades. My greatest hope is that the Massachusetts election would come and go, Brown would get elected, and these people will convince Democrats to carry on their merry way to the political abyss of government-run health care. It would have been better if this Great Warning was hidden, but it’s just as good if it’s out in the open and is completely ignored.

Part of their problem is the human urge to be utterly defiant. No, they scream, what we are doing is not illegal! We can dither on seating Scott Brown! We can find creative legislative solutions to pass Obamacare! You will not kill our agenda with the election of merely one senator!

Do Republicans or conservatives claim that what the Democrats are doing is illegal? That the Democrats can’t find a crafty way to pass Obamacare? That Senator-elect Brown speaks for more than just Massachusetts? No, no, and no.

These fools are confused. People, through their words and their votes, are not telling them what they can and cannot do. They are telling them what they should or should not do. Not even what they should do “for the good of the country” or “to obey the public trust” or anything like that. But what they should do for their own good. But they don’t listen. Hooray! Down with the progressives and their odious agenda! Off the cliff they ride and … (dusting off of hands) … good riddance!

Here is my prediction for the U.S. Senate special election in Massachusetts today:

Brown 53%, Coakley 45%, Kennedy 2%.

First, I analyzed all polls taken on the last day of polling:

Note that the PPP poll was taken over Saturday and Sunday and the ARG and DailyKos polls were taken over Friday, Saturday, and Sunday; I have adjusted the LV and # totals for these polls to show only the number of respondents reached on Sunday (I simply divided by 2 or 3, not having the exact raw numbers from the poll). I did this because the high amount of late interest (TV ads, outsider visits) in the race puts a premium on fresh data; having a smaller sample size and single day (Sunday) bias was sacrificed as a result.

From here, I determined the expected vote total for Kennedy, since not all polls asked about him. This would be 2.1% (24 out of 1171 asked). Then, I determined the response for the rest of the vote by the fration of the two-party voters that said (on Sunday) they would vote for them, and multiplied this by the number of remaining vote percentage (97.9%). So this gave me 52.7% to 45.2%.

Link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704586504574654602781512842.html

The attached WSJ article is a fairly reported rundown of events so far in the Massachusetts special election to fill the U.S. Senate seat vacated by the death of Sen. Edward Kennedy. Of special note, however, is the following paragraph:

Support for the state’s universal health-care law, close to 70% in 2008, is also in free fall; only 32% of state residents told Rasmussen earlier this month that they’d call it a success, with 36% labeling it a failure. The rest were unsure. Massachusetts families pay the country’s highest health insurance premiums, with costs soaring at a rate 7% ahead of the national average, according to a recent report by the nonpartisan Commonwealth Fund.

What Obamacare (the Frankenstein conference report of the two major health reform bills that passed the House and Senate) offers is not exactly the same as what the state of Massachusetts offers. To be sure, it is worse. But its goal of universal coverage and its means of an individual health insurance mandate make the Massachusetts law a fair laboratory experiment for what change in this direction would bring, in costs, in premiums, and in public opinion.

The Massachusetts Senate race is not just a thermometer of how the most liberal state in the country feels about the Obamacare legislation in Congress; it measures how the most liberal state in the country feels about the closest thing to an experiment of Obamacare.

A new Suffolk University poll relased last night has Brown ahead of Coakley 50%-46%. Incredibly, Coakley’s fav/unfav numbers are 49/41, while Brown’s are 57/19.

Here is a graph of all polls in the race from www.pollster.com:
2010 Massachusetts Senate General Election

Some other articles on the race:
Boston Herald (Van Sack): Scott Brown surges ahead in Senate race
Washington Examiner (York): Dems prepare to explain defeat, protect Obama
Washington Times (Miller): Massachusetts Tossup Threatens Obama Agenda
Wall Street Journal (Rabinowitz): Martha Coakley’s Convictions
Washington Post (Johnson): Mass. Senate poll shows shift toward GOP candidate
Townhall (Goldberg): Dems Feeling Heat Over Kennedy Seat

Link: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/news/ap/politics/2010/Jan/14/promises__promises__many_obama_pledges_unkept.html

The Associated Press better be careful, or liberals will start saying they’re a subsidiary of Fox News.

In the attached article, AP reporter Philip Elliott details the unkept promises of President Obama. Or at least the big ones. And it still makes for a long article.

The last line of the article is telling. In response to a question about the failure to ban lobbyists from serving in the administration, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs says, “Even the toughest rules require reasonable exceptions.” A presidency of principle, this is.

Link: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/politics_nation/2010/01/in_recent_special_elections_so.html

Mike Memoli reports at RCP in the above link that U.S. senators in special elections have not in the past taken as long to seat as Democrats are envisioning with Massachusetts if Republican Scott Brown wins the special election next Tuesday. Their analysis shows that, in the eight special elections to the U.S. Senate since 1990 that resulted in new senators, the least number of days between election and swearing-in was two while the most was twenty-four and (by my analysis of their analysis) the average was two. So unless the election is very close, it is reasonable to think that the winner would be seated by the end of January. He also notes that the maximum amount of time cities and counties have to deliver their results for certification is 10 days. So that’s the maximum it should take for the results to be certified.

Of course, that’s counting on the Democrats to play fair. If there is one trait that Democrats do not possess, it’s fairness.

Link: http://www.foxsmallbusinesscenter.com/scitech/2010/01/08/google-censoring-islam/

As reported by Fox Business News in the attached article, something or someone at Google is stopping you from getting auto-complete information about Islam. Type in “Christianity is” (or Buddhism, or Judaism, or Atheism, or any other religion) and google will automatically suggest a completion of your sentence, based on what the most popular queries have been. But type in “Islam is” and nothing comes up.

As the article reports:

A Google spokesman explained that the weird absence of results is just a software problem: “This is in fact a bug and we’re working to fix it as quickly as we can.” But the company would not respond to requests for clarification.

This sounds like a fib. If you type in “Muslims are” you also get no auto-complete, but you also get this with other religions (e.g., “Christians are", etc.). Yet you do get an auto-complete if you use philosophical (e.g., “Republicans are", “liberals are"), rather than religious adherents. So Google must be singling out religions for this ("[adherents] are") exclusion and Islam especially for the other ("[religion] is") exclusion. Shame on them for their selective sensitivity and for their cowardice.

Link: http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/unhappy-new-year-%E2%80%89%E2%80%89%E2%80%89%E2%80%89-democrats

Fred Barnes has a wonderfully exhaustive analysis of the 2010 election prospects for the Republican party. The upshot: Republicans stand to make big gains and have a lasting surge in popularity. In the words of Kevin McCarthy (CA), House Republican Deputy Whip, the challenge is to make sure we have the candidates in place to take advantage of the situation:

You get enough people on their surfboards, you send them in the right direction and see how many can get to shore. If the wave is big enough, we get there. But if you don’t have them out there and you see the wave coming, it takes too long to paddle and try to turn around and catch it, so you gotta be prepared.

This means recruiting candidates to challenge every Democrat in Congress, no matter how entrenched or how popular. Like I said in my last post, if we can win (or be competitive) in Massachusetts, we can win anywhere. After their hubris of the past year, no Democrat in Congress deserves the comfort of a “safe seat".

The special election in Massachusetts to fill the U.S. Senate seat vacated by the death of Edward Kennedy is turning out to be quite a contest. Much to the dismay of Democrats, Attorney General Martha Coakley is no longer considered a shoe-in when the voters of the bay state go to the polls on Tuesday, January 19th. In fact, one poll has Republican challenger and state senator Scott Brown leading the popular Democrat 48% to 47%. This bastion of liberalism which has not a single Republican in its Congressional delegation may be turning red in the age of Obama.

The poll in which Brown leads, produced by Public Policy Polling of North Carolina, was from an automated telephone survey of 744 likely voters from January 7th to 9th. However, an earlier poll by the Boston Globe of 554 likely voters from January 2nd to 6th had Coakley leading by 15 points. A Rasmussen poll on January 4th of 500 likely voters had Coakley leading by 9 points, 50% to 41%.

Much of the variation in the poll results may be occurring because of the different ways the polling firms attempt to gauge the likelihood of the respondent to vote. With health care reform a major issue in the campaign, Republican voters in the polls appear to be very energized and much more likely to show up, especially given that it is a speical election with no other items on the ballot. Just how much more likely becomes tricky to quantify.

Another important variable in the race is that Scott Brown is still relatively unknown to statewide voters, while the Attorney General has wide name recognition. This has helped Brown rise in the polls as voters get to see the contest as a two-person race, but evaentually could limit his ascent as his negatives catch up with Coakley’s.

On the Intrade prediction markets, contracts for Scott Brown indicated a 10% chance of winning the contest up until a few days ago. It rallied to 30% briefly when the PPP poll came out and now stands at 14.5 (a contract that pays off at $100 can be purchased for $14.50). (Unsurprising disclosure: I own some of these contracts myself).

If the Republican can pull off an upset, it is likely to rattle the Democratic establishment to its core. While Republicans have been very successful in state politics (4 of the last 5 governors have been Republican), in Congress Massachusetts has been devilishly blue: the last Republican U.S. senator was thirty years ago (Edward Brooke 1967-79); and the last time any of the ten House seats was Republican was from 1993-97. Only four other states had a higher ration of Obama voters to McCain voters in the 2008 presidential election (HI, VT, RI, NY). The implication for the November 2010 Congressional elections is clear: if a well-funded and better known Democrat can not beat a Republican for an open seat in one of the most liberal states in the country, Democratic incumbents will have tough contests all across the nation. If Massachusetts goes Republican, where is a Democrat safe?

Nevertheless, while health care reform has been the biggest issue in the campaign so far, it appears unlikely that Brown will be able to affect its outcome even if he wins the race. Democratic lawmakers intend to have a vote on the final conference bill before President Obama’s State of the Union address in mid-February. Interim U.S. Senator and Democrat Paul Kirk, who was controversially put in Kennedy’s seat in September by Democratic Governor Deval Patrick, has said that he will vote for the bill regardless of the expressed will of the voters of Massachusetts in the special election. Also, Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin has said that he will not certify the election results until Feb. 20, a month later. Although House Speaker Nancy Pelosi swore in Bill Owens, who won a special election to New York’s 23rd district last fall, just two days after he was elected (and weeks before his election was certified), allowing him to vote for the health care bill in the House just two days later, Democrats are notorious for nefariously employing different rules for themselves than for others, and are likely to wait until Brown is certified before allowing him to serve if he wins. That’s just the kind of people they are.

The candidates face off in a debate at the University of Massachusetts tonight.

Link: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/01/08/conservative_libertarianisms_comeback__99823.html

David Paul Kuhn of RCP comments on the surge of libertarianism over the past year.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/us/politics/08terror.html?hp

The link is for the New York Times story on Obama’s comments Thursday introducing a report on improving airport security and the Christmas Day terrorist attack over Detroit. The Times reports:

The president said the missteps were not the fault of one individual or agency. He took responsibility for the failures, saying, “The buck stops with me.”

Obama’s actual comments were the following:

… I am less interested in passing out blame than I am in learning from and correcting these mistakes to make us safer. For ultimately, the buck stops with me. As President, I have a solemn responsibility to protect our nation and our people. And when the system fails, it is my responsibility.

In the United Kingdom, or in other countries where honor has real meaning, actually taking responsibility does not just mean saying, “I take responsibility,” or the more wishy-washy “it is my responsibiilty.” It means you take the consequences. It means that you resign.