A pretty remarkable thing happened this past Tuesday. In Massachusetts, in a record turnout for a special election, voters selected a Republican to replace Ted Kennedy in the U.S. Senate. Mr. Kennedy had held that seat since 1962. Massachusetts is probably the most liberal state in the nation where almost every office holder from garbage collector on up is a Democrat. This election wipes out the Democratic supermajority in the Senate and now means that Republicans with 41 votes can now successfully mount filibusters to stop Democratic legislation. The winner, Mr. Brown, specifically campaigned on "being the 41st senator" that would enable Republicans to defeat health reform and slow down, if not stop, the Obama/Pelosi agenda. What Duffy found especially interesting is that 51% of the voters in Massachusetts are Independents. Republicans only make up about 11% of the electorate. It was the Independents, voting 2-1 for the Republican, that swung the election to Mr. Brown who won 53% of the vote, about what Obama got nationwide in 2008.
The voters of Massachusetts knew exactly what they were doing. A win for Brown would mostly likely stop the 2,700 page health bill from becoming law as well as throw a big fat monkey wrench in the Obama agenda. What made it especially embarrassing to Obama was that he spent all day Sunday in the state campaigning for the Democratic candidate who had a 30 point lead in the polls only a month before. Talk about a slap in the face!
Duffy read the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today after the election and was struck by the initial sense of denial by the Times then followed a day later by a particularly, even for the Times, bitter denunciation of Obama and his staff for allowing this to happen. The Journal was gleeful as one might expect and the USA Today opined this election could be the beginning of the end of the whole liberal Democratic agenda.
As much as the Democrats are pointing fingers and blaming everybody and anybody for their defeat, Duffy thinks that it simply boils down that the Massachusetts voters made a stand and said, "enough is enough!". Specifically the bloated, incomprehensible, loaded with mandates and taxes, health care bill and more broadly the wild spendthrift overreaching Obama/Pelosi Democratic socialist agenda. The people in this country are concerned mainly above all else, JOBS! The unemployment rate has increased 20% under Obama with no end in sight, foreclosures are still increasing, businesses large and small are still going bankrupt and the Obama administration, led by the nose by a small bunch of ultra-liberal Democrats, have spent a year on a "health reform" bill that 65% of the people don't want! As Duffy has said time and again, the health care system in this country needs to be reformed. But first Obama needs to do everything in his power to GET PEOPLE BACK TO WORK! Health reform, the environment, immigration, all this stuff can and should wait until the economy is fixed. And it's far from being fixed. This should be a wakeup call. Probably for Obama, probably not for Pelosi. Expect to see Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate leader, retire this summer.
A word about Haiti. No worse off country in the Western Hemisphere could have suffered a worse calamity than Haiti. A cesspool of a country, that over a hundred years and billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer aid, with very little to show for it, will now require billions of dollars and years of assistance to rebuild. This all should be done but Duffy hopes that this time, many other countries, especially in Latin America, contribute a large share of both money and assistance to rebuild that miserable country. As always, the U.S. will be the largest benefactor but we shouldn't have to shoulder the whole burden ourselves for the long haul.
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