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brown's campaign was motivated and well-organized and exploited the fact that brown was, and still is, a non-entity. so he wasn't particularly associated with the republicans and could fob himself off as an "alternative" that "independent" people could get with. coakley ran an appallingly arrogant non-campaign. she found herself positioned in a kind of amateurish way as part of some Establishment by virtue of ceding so much rhetorical ground to brown. from everything i've seen, she basically assumed the seat was hers.
i don't particularly see this as a referendum on the health care bill per se---but even if you see it in those terms, i would think its time to stop playing nice with the right, time to take the fight to them. take the ability to define what's happening away from them. they've got nothing ideologically to stand for, nothing politically except no to say. so take it to them.
anyway, i think the results are also more about other things....people are confused about why it is that job creation does not seem to be a particular priority for the administration at the policy level. why there's no commercial lending happening. from the viewpoint of a creeping freeze of economic activity that's hitting by degrees areas that so far have managed to duck the brunt of the republican-style meltdown, alot of what's happening in washington could be seen as misplaced priorities.
that's what i hear alot of, read alot of, in my little corner of massachusetts.
your results may vary.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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