First Bob McDonnell won the Virginia Governor’s race, then Chris Christie captured New Jersey’s and now Scott Brown takes the Massachusetts U.S. Senate race. Oh, my! Like McDonnell, Brown trounced his Democrat opponent Martha Coakley with a sizeable lead 52.7% to 46.3%. Three strikes against the Obama agenda is becoming more than a fluke, as Democrats tried mightily to convince themselves last year amidst the losses in Virginia and NJ. The American people are speaking out loudly and clearly against the high-spending, free-wheeling, government overhaul agenda of President Obama and his Democratic cohorts in Congress. Looks like the mighty three Republicans have started a trend.
The president doesn’t believe polls that show support for his health plan dropped to a mere 35% and a Quinnipiac poll shows his approval rating (45%) equals his disapproval rating. But maybe he’ll start waking up as more GOP candidates are elected into office.
People are concerned about jobs, having money to pay bills, feed their families, and the economy. In Obama’s first year of office, the country hasn’t gotten better. The $787 billion stimulus, of which only a third has been spent, was supposed to create jobs and stop unemployment from topping 8%. But it hasn’t created jobs and unemployment has reached 10%. The administration’s Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) which was supposed to help 4 million people keep their homes has only resulted in 900,000 borrowers receiving loan modifications and of those only about 80,000 are permanent.
And if you’re one of those borrowers, who has been responsible, paying your mortgage and looking to refinance, there is no solution for you, even though banks received hundreds of billions of dollars in bailout money, much of which is being repaid. Then there’s that whopping deficit which is estimated to grow to $10 trillion by 2019, 6% of the gross domestic product.
No wonder Brown got elected with his anti-tax and spending campaign. Americans want lawmakers to address the country’s real problems and put the brakes on the Obama agenda going nowhere. Like McDonnell, Brown appealed to independents who feel Obama has swung radically to the left and aren’t happy about it. Brown’s win gives the Senate that 41st powerful vote which will enable Republicans to block legislation such as healthcare reform, engineered by the now 59 seat Democrat majority. Democrats now lack the 60 votes to stop a Republican filibuster in the Senate.
The Obama razzle, dazzle magic has lost its luster for many Americans. Even though he came to the rescue like a superhero to do a last minute campaign appearance with Corzine and Coakley, Obama couldn’t help either candidate regain their leads. Over and over again lately, in casual conversations, young and older people who voted for Obama tell me they are “very disappointed” in his performance.
Scott Brown’s election to the Senate is good news for Americans because it will help bring the country’s policies back towards the center where the majority of Americans are politically (37% depending on the poll). Brown is also a breath of fresh air to the GOP. Similar to McDonnell, Brown ran a campaign focused on the bread and butter issues of the day, jobs and the economy and steered clear of divisive social and religious issues like abortion and same-sex marriage. I say hip, hip, hooray for Brown and McDonnell, a new breed of GOP candidates: likeable, practical solutions, politics that can win.
5 responses so far
1 Newman // Jan 21, 2010 at 10:18 am
Hmmm. Nothing blindingly OBVIOUS in this deep-dive of an article. This woman writes like she is a reporter for a high school newspaper.
2 mlindroo // Jan 21, 2010 at 10:36 am
> The president doesn’t believe polls that show support for his health plan dropped to a mere 35%
> and a Quinnipiac poll shows his approval rating (45%) equals his disapproval rating. But maybe
> he’ll start waking up as more GOP candidates are elected into office.
First of all, Obama remains relatively popular in Mass. and even Scott Brown says he does not want to end RomneyCare which basically is a more liberal version of the Obama health plan! As for opinion polls, those change from month to month. Half a year ago a majority of Americans approved of health care reform after all.
> People are concerned about jobs, having money to pay bills,
> feed their families, and the economy.
That’s more like it…
People are suffering and they take it out on the party in power. I don’t think President John McCain / VP Sarah Palin would be in any better shape than Obama currently is, if they somehow had won the 2008 elections.
> In Obama’s first year of office, the country hasn’t gotten better. The $787 billion stimulus,
> of which only a third has been spent, was supposed to create jobs and stop unemployment from
> topping 8%. But it hasn’t created jobs and unemployment has reached 10%.
Even most center-right economists regard the stimulus as a good thing! Without it, the job losses may have been even worse. It would be insane to cut government spending on e.g. unemployment benefits during the worst recession since the 1930s, even if it increases the deficit in the short term.
> Scott Brown’s election to the Senate is good news for Americans because it will help bring
> the country’s policies back towards the center where the majority of Americans are politically
> (37% depending on the poll).
After two decades of bitterness and partisanship, it seems quite unlikely that most Representatives or Senators are centrists… Due to low voter turnout and the first-past-the-post “winner takes all” format, most elected politicians in Congress are now either staunch conservatives or liberals (or at least they keep voting that way).
The Senate Democrats’ health care reform attempt is not at all some wild-eyed liberal project! It is far more conservative than Nixon’s mid-1970s proposal, which BTW was MORE liberal than Clinton’s 1994 reform. It in fact seems to be too “right wing” for SCOTT BROWN of all people, and lack of enthusiasm on the far *Left* now seems to be a major problem. The NetRoots *and* the TeaPartyrs both absolutely hate the health care bill, but for fundamentally different reasons. If the political system was working, this would be regarded as a centrist initiative. Yet Ben Nelson, Max Baucus and Joe Lieberman (and Olympia Snowe too, if she’d dared to stray off the GOP reservation after the Dems basically addressed all her complaints about the bill…) are now disliked by everybody. It’s crazy, really.
MARCU$
3 balconesfault // Jan 21, 2010 at 11:04 am
Polling done in Massachussets showed that by a 6-1 margin, Obama voters who stayed away from the polls on Tuesday felt that the current healthcare bill doesn’t go far enough towards guaranteeing universal coverage.
4 sinz54 // Jan 21, 2010 at 12:15 pm
mlindroo:
But I do think the nation would be in better shape if Romney were President.
And we would have a better health care reform package too.
5 balconesfault // Jan 21, 2010 at 1:46 pm
And we would have a better health care reform package too.
Well, yeah. Because 40 Republicans (now 41) wouldn’t stand foresquare opposed to any reform broader than eliminating the right to sue for malpractice and gutting the ability of states to regulate health insurance practices.
If a Republican President proposed efforts to expand direct Governmental involvement in moving towards Universal Healthcare, he’d probably be able to drag 10-15 Republican senators along. Obama has absolutely no chance of getting more than one or two, and the odds are that he has no chance of getting any.
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