A wicked good Senate win

Scott Brown connected with voters.

It was the final nail in Martha Coakley's coffin and it came around 3 p.m. yesterday when I got an e-mail update that Ray Flynn just announced he voted for Scott Brown in the special election to fill the U.S. Senate seat left open by the death of Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass.

Who the heck is Ray Flynn, you ask? He was the 52nd mayor of Boston until President Bill Clinton appointed him U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See (that's the Vatican). Think Big Democrat and even Bigger Irish Catholic.

If you told me that I would see the day when an Irish Catholic, former Democratic mayor of the one of the Bluest cities in one of the Bluest states in the nation would vote for a Protestant Republican state legislator to fill Ted Kennedy's U.S. Senate seat, I would have told you, as they might say in South Boston, get the #$%& out!

As it turned out, that was the latest of a long line of events that Democrats never saw coming in the special election to pick the heir to the Kennedy legacy.

Most of America only saw the comedy of errors that was Democrat Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley's snake-bit campaign in its final throes...from her avoidance of public debate and her less-than-ready-for-prime-time performance in the only televised debate of the campaign....to her calling pitcher Curt Schilling (who had endorsed Brown) a Yankee fan on statewide radio -- that's right, the same Curt Schilling who led the Red Socks to not one, but two World Series Championships after a century of heartbreak, in a state where the Holy Trinity and the 'Sox' are looked upon with similar zeal and reverence...to her suggestion to Roman Catholics (who make up more than 40 percent of the Bay State electorate) that maybe they shouldn't work in Emergency Rooms if they don't like Democrats' push to require all health care workers to provide abortion services and counseling as part of the health care reform package being debated in Washington.

Whew, that's a lot to get in one sentence...let alone in the final week of a heated campaign, just as the last undecided voters are making up their minds, which is what Coakley did. It was as if her campaign made list of things not to do and then, in the final 10 days, went out in did them.  It was the most bizarre thing I've seen my years as a political hack.

But as bad as Coakley was as a candidate, she should have won is the most liberal state in the nation, from where a Republican has not represented it in the U.S. Senate in more than 30 years. So, what happened?

One: Scott Brown was and is a kick-a$$ candidate. He connected with ordinary people who felt left behind by the Harvard Square liberals who control Democrat politics in Massachusetts. Because he was a relative unknown, the Democrats discounted him as a serious threat (although a poll conducted by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee last fall showed Coakely only leading the upstart by 15 percentage points, according to the Washington Post). This gave Brown time to introduce and define himself to voters before the opposition did; Brown was up with campaign ads over the Christmas holiday while Coakley didn't start until two weeks ago. Who voters saw was an attractive man with an attractive family, a conservative who was not so rigid that he seemed unreasonable to Independents and moderate Democrats. He talked about "conservative" values that a lot people share...about being fiscally responsible, of how we are right to be skeptical about government wanting to nationalize (i.e., take over) one-sixth of the nation's economy under the guise of health care reform, on the need to get government out of the way of businesses that want to create jobs, and that war on terrorism is far from over and we should demand our nation prosecute this war with an eye on winning it. Brown's line during a rally on Sunday kind of summed it up: "I'm Scott Brown. I'm from Wrentham. I drive a truck and I am asking for your vote." When Coakley and the Democrats tried to strip the paint off of him as George W. Bush with a New England accent, no one bought it.

Two: Congressional Democrats and President Obama over-played their hands on health care. They took the election victories of 2008 as a mandate to move forward with a Leftist agenda that the vast majority of Americans don't support. Walk into a coffee shop and ask people what they think of the Internal Revenue Service, and then ask them if they want the same bureaucracy that runs this paragon of government efficiency to make life and death decisions about your spouse or child. If you do, you will have no trouble understanding why majority of people don't like the health care take-over legislation being debated on Capitol Hill. Democrats never bothered to ask, and now they are paying the price. A smart man said once, "It's the economy, stupid." It's hard to get worked up about the uninsured when you're one of the one in 10 Americans who doesn't have a job. After bailing out the corporate greed of Wall Street, the Democrats and President Obama ignored the people directly impacted by the avarice of capitalism who are now paying the price on the unemployment lines. Karma has a way of coming around.

Three: Democrats, and their sycophantic friends in the national media, have consistently underestimated the growing discontent among the multitude who live between the D.C. Beltway and the Hollywood Freeway. The elite on the Left and at the networks have called these folks everything from gun-hugging anarchists to practitioners of lewd acts. But the American Intelligentsia has not been able to conveniently explain them away.  These are real people, have families and vote. They are distrustful that government fix all that ails us, and they are dead tired of politicians who say one thing to get elected and do the opposite once in office.  The Democracy of the Internet has made it impossible for elected officials to hide behind carefully crafted news releases to the folks at home while remaining cozy with the special interests that fund their reelection coffers and ply them with swanky dinners at the Capitol Grille. Ignore these people at your peril. 

That said, there are some admonitions I want to pass on my Republican friends and colleagues who feel the need to gloat over the Brown victory, as well as recent Republican victories in the New Jersey Virginia gubernatorial races.

Voters are rejecting President Obama and the national Democrats' policies -- especially on health care -- but not out of anything Republicans have done. We're just Brand X at a time people are looking for a new soap.  Remember, the people who are turning their backs on the President and Democrats are the very same who kicked Republicans to the curb in the last two elections.

Republicans took control of Congress and the statehouses in the 1990s because we stood up and said, "We are not those bums and if you give us the chance, we will make the tough decisions that need to be made." For a while we did that and produced results. But then we turned into "those bums" and voters showed us the door.  If Republican are going to win at the national level -- and here in Michigan -- we have to articulate a strong vision for what we will do if given the keys of power and the, and convince the people we are, again, worthy of their trust.

Scott Brown showed us that a solid conservative can win in a Blue state. That's reassuring for us here in Michigan, who have languished under seven years of inept Democratic leadership that has seen this great state go from being the engine that drove the nation's economy to a rust bucket everyone is ashamed to ride in. Brown did it by not making apologies for his conservative principles, and then reached out to Republicans, Democrats and Independents and showed a willingness to work on the issues where we share common ground: the need for good-paying jobs, a smaller less costly government that works, winning the war on terror.

So, to my Republican friends: OK, gloat, but only a little, and then get back to work. Today, the wind is on our backs but there a lot of ground to cover between now and November 2. The Democrats will not be caught so flat-footed next time.