The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
Rest in Peace
There are many things to say about Republican Scott Brown’s victory in yesterday’s special election for U.S. Senate. Let’s start with this one: It demonstrates how ideological and out of touch are America’s so-called mainstream media.
For the past six months, a Democratic president and the Democrats who run Congress have been trying to push through increasingly unpopular legislation for a federal government takeover of the health-care system. They ignored the voices of angry, frightened voters who showed up at town-hall meetings last summer to object to their plan. They ignored the dramatic electoral turn against Democrats in New Jersey, Virginia and elsewhere in November. They strong-armed wavering legislators into casting pro-ObamaCare votes that may prove politically suicidal.
They seemed on the verge of imposing this monstrosity on an unwilling nation–until Massachusetts voters had their say. The commonwealth is one of the most liberal states in the country. Barack Obama carried it by a margin of almost 26%. It last elected a Republican to the Senate in 1972, the same year it was the only state George McGovern carried. Yet Scott Brown won a solid victory, 52% to 47%.
As we shall see below, a significant number of Democratic lawmakers–who actually have to face the voters from time to time–got the message. The same cannot be said about our counterparts in the liberal press. Here’s a New York Times news story by Michael Cooper:
Although the race has riveted the nation largely because it was seen as contributing to the success or defeat of the health care bill, the potency of the issue for voters here was difficult to gauge. That is because Massachusetts already has near-universal health coverage, thanks to a law passed when Mitt Romney, a Republican, was governor.
Thus Massachusetts is one of the few states where the benefits promised by the national bill were expected to have little effect on how many of its residents got coverage, making it an unlikely place for a referendum on the health care bill.
So let’s see if we have this straight: A state that is ideologically far enough to the left to have passed its own version of ObamaCare votes for a candidate who promises to block the effort to take this nationwide, and that’s not a referendum?
Several readers wrote to us to note that the Times has not weighed in with an editorial on Brown’s victory. There’s a benign explanation for that, which is that the Times’s editorialists go to bed earlier than their counterparts at, say, The Wall Street Journal. But the Times’s little sister, the Boston Globe, did weigh in:
Yesterday’s results need not–and must not–stop the fundamental reform of the nation’s health insurance system.
Brown’s strong win does not negate the resounding mandate that President Obama and Democrats in Congress received in 2008 to address escalating health costs, which are strangling businesses while pricing coverage beyond the reach of tens of millions of Americans. Both houses of Congress have already passed credible reform bills. At this point, President Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi should bring the legislative process to a close by pushing House members to pass the Senate version. . . .
[Brown’s] call for Congress to “go back to the drawing board” is unrealistic in a climate of growing impatience.
Who exactly is impatient, besides the Boston Globe editorial board? Well, there’s Jonathan Alter of Newsweek:
Should this election kill health care? Don’t be ridiculous. Who elected Massachusetts to decide for the rest of the country whether we move forward on the bill? . . .
Any moderate House Democrat with half a brain should vote for the Senate bill, which is much more to their liking than the House bill that many of them supported in November. Of course it’s the half-a-brain part that’s a cause of worry. Some of these guys are as politically clueless as Martha Coakley.
And there’s Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post:
As U.S. House Speaker Tip O’Neill of Massachusetts famously reminded, all politics is local. There are lots of reasons other than derailing health reform why normally liberal Massachusetts voters may have wanted to send an angry signal to the state’s political establishment. For Democrats in Washington, the danger now is not that they will ignore the election returns, but that they will misread them and sound a premature retreat from a historic and game-changing opportunity.
Now let’s hear what Democratic politicians are saying. First off, there’s Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, who is smart and very, very liberal. USA Today quotes him:
He said Brown’s victory means Congress will have to “start over on health care” and said he will vote against any bill rushed to the floor before Brown can be sworn in.
Who do you think has a better sense of what’s realistic, the Boston Globe editorial board or a guy who’s actually won 15 elections? The American Spectator has a longer Frank quote:
“I have two reactions to the election in Massachusetts. One, I am disappointed. Two, I feel strongly that the Democratic majority in Congress must respect the process and make no effort to bypass the electoral results. If Martha Coakley had won, I believe we could have worked out a reasonable compromise between the House and Senate health care bills. But since Scott Brown has won and the Republicans now have 41 votes in the Senate, that approach is no longer appropriate. I am hopeful that some Republican Senators will be willing to discuss a revised version of health care reform because I do not think that the country would be well-served by the health care status quo. But our respect for democratic procedures must rule out any effort to pass a health care bill as if the Massachusetts election had not happened. Going forward, I hope there will be a serious effort to change the Senate rule which means that 59 votes are not enough to pass major legislation, but those are the rules by which the health care bill was considered, and it would be wrong to change them in the middle of the process.”
National Review Online quotes Sen. Jim Webb, a moderate Democrat from Virginia:
“In many ways the campaign in Massachusetts became a referendum not only on health care reform but also on the openness and integrity of our government process. It is vital that we restore the respect of the American people in our system of government and in our leaders. To that end, I believe it would only be fair and prudent that we suspend further votes on health care legislation until Senator-elect Brown is seated.”
ABC News heard from another moderate Democrat, from Indiana, yesterday afternoon:
Even before the votes are counted, Senator Evan Bayh is warning fellow Democrats that ignoring the lessons of the Massachusetts Senate race will “lead to even further catastrophe” for their party.
“There’s going to be a tendency on the part of our people to be in denial about all this,” Bayh told ABC News, but “if you lose Massachusetts and that’s not a wake-up call, there’s no hope of waking up.”
Webb and Bayh both come from states that Obama was the first Democrat to carry since 1964. But WSJ.com quotes Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, who is reputed to want the majority leader’s job, and thus is eager for his party to maintain its majority, and who sounds a similar note:
“The country is speaking to us, and we will show we hear them in the agenda we pursue over the next year. Our focus must be on jobs, the economy and delivering for the middle class.”
Now it’s true that Democrats at the top are slower to get the message. Politico quotes White House aide David Axelrod: “I think that it would a terrible mistake to walk away now. If we don’t pass the bill, all we have is the stigma of a caricature that was put on it. That would be the worst result for everybody who has supported this bill.” The Associated Press reports that “Majority Leader Harry Reid says Senate Democrats will press ahead with President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul.” And Reuters reports that “[Speaker] Nancy Pelosi said on Wednesday Democrats will push ahead with a sweeping healthcare overhaul despite a Republican win in a special Senate election in Massachusetts.”
But watch how Pelosi’s No. 2 weasels out of this position in a Politico report:
Asked if the House can pass a final health reform bill in the next 15 days, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said “yes.”
UPDATE: Hoyer’s office quickly sent out a note clarifying–which is to say they don’t want anyone thinking he actually predicted health care WILL pass in the next 15 days, as we initially blogged, just that it CAN be done.
“A question was asked in Majority Leader Hoyer’s pen and pad briefing this morning about whether it was “feasible” to pass a health reform bill within 15 days, before the certification deadline of the newly-elected MA Senator. His answered yes, but he did not say that it would be passed in that time, so please do not twist his words to suggest otherwise.”
Even President Obama tells ABC News that “the Senate certainly shouldn’t try to jam anything through until Scott Brown is seated.” It wasn’t easy for Pelosi and Reid to produce the majorities they needed to get affirmative votes on ObamaCare last month. Yesterday’s election made it much harder to hold the party together.
They still have the unwavering support of liberal journalists, who have never been elected to anything. But if they’ve lost Barney Frank, they’ve lost Middle America.
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