Though I’m currently in Canada, I can’t help but wish I was back home in Boston, especially on nights like tonight when there’s an election on. Especially on a night when a Massachusetts senate seat, held for almost my entire life by Senator Ted Kennedy, goes Republican:
In a victory few thought possible just a month ago, Republican Scott Brown defeated Democrat Martha Coakley Tuesday in the race for the U.S. Senate seat formerly held by Ted Kennedy — a win that could grind President Obama’s agenda to a halt and portend huge losses for Democrats in the November midterms.
MarthaCoakley barely phoned her campaign in, no doubt assuming that the fact that she was a Democrat meant that she would win the seat in a walk. But she also made some stupid mistakes:
First, she insisted that her time was better spent shoring up the backing of the Bay State’s political establishment than conducting a retail campaign. When the Boston Globe pressed her on the wisdom of focusing her energies on party apparatchiks, she spat back: “As opposed to standing outside Fenway Park? In the cold? Shaking hands?”
She followed up her Fenway freakout by brazenly calling Curt Schilling — the ace pitcher on whose bloody ankle the Red Sox were carried to their first World Series victory in nearly a century — a “Yankees fan.”
I’m not sure this will grind President Obama’s agenda to a halt – some shenanigans may already be afoot – but maybe, just maybe, the Democrats will slow down for a few minutes to actually listen to the will of the people.
Wasn’t it that failure to listen to the people that caused that first tea party – in Boston Harbor?