Robert David Sullivan 2

Massachusetts takes the president down a peg

Everyone has opinions about Scott Brown's upset in yesterday's special US Senate election in Massachusetts. I expect it to be the No. 1 topic even on the sports talk shows today. I'll have more to say about the political geography as we get closer to another statewide election (yes, just 10 months away!), but the Electoral Map has already beaten me to the punch by putting yesterday's results into the context of the "10 Regions of Massachusetts Politics," noting that Brown appears to have won six of them. Biggest surprise may be that Martha Coakley seems to have won affluent, suburban Shopper's World (west of Boston), but it didn't come close to saving her, thanks to Brown's overwhelming strength in middle-class suburbs farther out from the state's urban core.

As for the policy implications, I've already likened the selection of Brown to voters using the "nuclear option," but that imagery may not be correct, given that Brown is essentially being sent to Washington to vote "no" on big, dramatic plans. The consensus is that voters are frustrated with the state of the economy, but Brown and the GOP are counseling us to sit tight and ride things out without another stimulus plan or any kind of sweeping regulatory reform. (There is talk of tax cuts, but that seems unrealistic, given that the Republicans have shown no appetite to significantly cut government spending.)

Scott Brown, the primal scream, and the nuclear option

Has there ever been a more important special congressional election than the Senate race in Massachusetts on Tuesday? I honestly can't think of one.

Hub Blog has a great roundup of coverage, including a lot of agonized comments about how they want their votes to be interpreted by the political punditry. One reader: "Let me say emphatically that my vote for [Republican Scott] Brown isn't a vote against Obama." Good luck with that. The Globe's Jeff Jacoby has already written the national spin:  

A year ago, Americans were enchanted with their new president. Today they are suffering from severe buyer’s remorse. Massachusetts may be the bluest state, but voters here are fed up too.

The Globe's Joan Vennochi dissents by saying that voters may punish Democratic nominee Martha Coakley because they're dissatisfied with local Democratic pols like Deval Patrick and Sal DiMasi. (Maybe so, but Jacoby's spin is what will play in Washington.)

If I had to predict, I'd say Coakley will pull out a win, but only because a Brown victory would be such a jolt -- like NASCAR eclipsing the Boston Red Sox in this state, or chitterlings becoming more popular than clam chowder. 

Andrew Sullivan calls the surge for Brown the manifestation of a "nihilist, populist, primal scream." I think of it as another example of a "nuclear option" (a term first coined here) in its extreme political effects. What could they be?

Brown takes lead, universal health care takes a dive

Contradicting a Boston Globe poll of a few days ago that showed Martha Coakley ahead by 15 points and a slim plurality in favor of the health care reform bill now in Congress, Suffolk University has just released a poll with Scott Brown ahead by 4 points and a clear majority against health care reform.

If true, I wonder if the real reason "liberal lion" Ted Kennedy got re-elected all those times was that he was good at steering defense contracts to Massachusetts. 

Is the state really going to pull an Emily Litella and say "never mind" after giving Kennedy 47 years in the Senate? We'll find out on Tuesday.

Coakley's impression on one P-town/DC correspondent

Andrew Sullivan weighs in on our US Senate race and offers the following explanation for the new conventional wisdom that Republican Scott Brown has a shot at victory: "perhaps Martha Coakley is a machine hack who doesn't deserve elevation."

I'm not sure that Sullivan (no relation) is following Bay State politics that closely. The knock on Coakley doesn't seem to be that she's a machine pol (she's never even served in the Legislature!) but that she's bland and overcautious. That is, she's more Michael Dukakis than James Michael Curley.

UPDATE: Sullivan takes a look at Brown and is even more scathing: "He is, in other words, a parody of the brainless bush Republican, mixed with Romney-like cynicism."

Still worrying about shrillness

This is fairly depressing to read in 2010. The Dallas Morning News has an analysis of an upcoming debate among the GOP candidates for governor in Texas, including incumbent Rick Perry and US Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. Christy Hoppe drags out the old Mars vs. Venus trope and says that Perry "must stay steady and calm." As for Hutchison:

Kay Bailey Hutchison, in her fervor to score political points, must not come across as too "shrill" – a word reserved almost exclusively to describe women in debates.

She must avoid a high-pitched tone and anything that resembles scolding. What comes across as forceful for a man is sometimes seen as churlish in a woman.

Are journalists still getting paid to come up with reinforce the idea that confident women are "shrill"? Why not go all the way and say that women candidates must be careful not to come off as heretics?

Scott Brown as Goliath killer?

The American Spectator's Jeffrey Lord compares Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown to Harris Wofford, the Democrat who won a special Senate race in Pennsylvania in 1991 by focusing on the need for health care reform -- and whose victory presaged a Democratic win in the 1992 presidential election. In this case, however, Brown is standing athwart the current health care reform bill yelling "Stop!"

From the Spectator:

What does the emergence of Scott Brown really mean?

It means that win-lose-or-draw, Scott Brown is already the Harris Wofford of 2010. Like Wofford he has played the role of the little-known, no-chance David going up against a political Goliath with health care as his sling-shot. But unlike Wofford, Brown's sling shot is the promise of effectively stopping government-controlled health care in its tracks, while tying it Wofford-like to corruption -- an argument made easy by the Ben Nelson "Cornhusker Kickback." [See explanation here.]

Politics not his strong suit?

The Globe's Adrian Walker thinks he knows exactly when things started to go downhill for Gov. Deval Patrick:

It isn’t hard to pinpoint the day Patrick lost control of his image. It was the infamous afternoon in 2008 that the Legislature voted down casino gambling and the governor was nowhere to be found to talk about it. He was in New York selling a book deal, and giving rise to the idea that he really isn’t that into this job.

It's an intriguing notion. Is Patrick's governing style (or lack thereof) a bigger liability than his policies? If so, he didn't help himself last month by admitting that he considered not seeking a second term because of the "wear and tear" he's gone through on Beacon Hill.

Ironically, he might never have become governor in the first place if his chief rival for the Democratic nomination in 2006, Tom Reilly, hadn't voiced a similar kind of squeamishness about what really makes things run on Beacon Hill, infamously saying, "Politics are not my strong suit."

Judge rules against Catholic college's plans for retirement community

A state judge has ruled that Regis College can't skirt local zoning laws in building a 362-unit retirement village in Weston. The Catholic school had argued that the development was covered by a state law giving religious and nonprofit institutions the right to build. Jonathan Saltzman reported in Saturday's Boston Globe:

After more than four years of litigation and fierce town-gown tensions, Land Court Judge Alexander H. Sands III ruled that the development was primarily a housing program, not an educational one, even though elderly residents would take college courses. As such, he said, the 750,000-square-foot project was not entitled to bypass zoning regulations under the state law known as the Dover Amendment.

CommonWealth magazine's Ray Hainer reported on the dispute in 2007, when local officials anticipated the Land Court ruling:

“The general belief is that wrapping a commercial undertaking in the guise of an educational endeavor by claiming there will be classes offered to residents and a learning experience for some of the students is misrepresenting the actual undertaking,” says Selectman Harrity, a commercial real estate broker who teaches real estate and finance courses at Babson College in Wellesley. “It would be like Babson College saying, ‘We’re going to build a Wal-Mart outside because we have marketing and managing courses, and it’ll be an educational undertaking since we’ll offer management classes to the employees.’”

Will Jill join the anti-tax brigade?

The announcement that Jill Stein will run for governor on the Green Party ticket is generally seen as another headache for Deval Patrick, who can't afford to lose any votes to his left in this fall's election. Stein, who got 3 percent of the vote and respectful press coverage when she ran for governor in 2002, is probably the strongest possible candidate for her shrub-like political party, and she's likely to get votes from people who aren't happy with Patrick's performance but who would never vote Republican.

Still, likely Republican nominee Charlie Baker would be wise to keep an eye on Stein. Her geographic base is in the more affluent parts of MetroWest Boston, which is precisely where Baker needs to peel some votes away from Patrick (much in the way that Mitt Romney made gains in this region). As long as she stays under 5 percent, her vote probably comes out of Patrick's hide; anything more, and things could get dicey for the GOP.

There's also the fact that Stein may end up as a strange bedfellow with Baker, his fellow Republican candidate Christy Mihos, and independent Tim Cahill on the issue of the state's sales tax. All three of those candidates want to repeal last year's sales tax hike from 5.0 to 6.25 percent (Mihos wants to push it down to 3 percent), and Stein said last summer that she was also against the sales tax hike -- on the grounds that it was regressive and that a graduated income tax was the better way to go.

It's not clear whether Stein will make a sales tax rollback a priority of her campaign (as the GOP nominee and Cahill surely will), but it would be interesting to see Patrick stand alone in defending last year's tax hike (and, indirectly, the Legislature that passed it). Would he look like the voice of fiscal sanity, or would he stand out for being more politically tone-deaf than the lefty Greens?

Do the people on Buzzards Bay swear like sailors?

People in one Iowa city seem to think so. The Bettendorf City Council has changed "Falmouth Court" to "Lilly Court" because too many people have trouble pronouncing the former. From the Quad-City Times:

At least one real estate agent and a builder on the former Falmouth Court in Bettendorf claim the name has hampered their ability to sell houses there. So on Tuesday, the Bettendorf City Council voted unanimously and without discussion to change the name of the cul-de-sac to a more innocuous Lilly Court. The council will have to vote twice more on the ordinance for it to become official.

“There’s one buyer on the court that believes it’s pronounced ‘foul mouth,’ and they don’t want to live on Foul Mouth Court,” Bettendorf City Attorney Greg Jager said.

This is bad news for Midwestern developers hoping to lure New Englanders with such names as Leominster Square and Billerica Estates. And while Bay Staters have warm feelings toward the municipality nicknamed "P-town," it might not be such a good moniker for a cul-de-sac in Dubuque.