Reports aplenty - anyone reading them?
Thursday, January 21, 2010
THERE'S NOTHING JOURNALISTS LIKE more than a public figure who puts out open and direct statements – unless of course it’s one who lies, and we get the chance to probe mercilessly. So you’d think it would be laudable for President Barack Obama to have confessed (through spokesman Robert Gibbs) that he was “surprised” at the Democrats’ stupendously bad showing in Massachusetts.
The presidentially pre-approved phrase in full was, I know, “surprised and frustrated”. We would agree, I'm sure, that “frustrated” is certainly understandable.
But “surprised”? That must boggle any careful observer’s mind. Did the President really mean he had no notion?
Without belaboring the similarities that espionage in alien territory can be said (maybe simplistically) to share with domestic, ward-level politics - and, for that matter, with good old shoe-leather reporting - it’s fair to point out that Democratic tacticians have only themselves to blame for not seeing the disaster coming.
Two inescapable truths formed a background to the fight for the late Ted Kennedy's US Senate seat, which he'd successfully held through - it's worth restating - four decades. One was the sheer complacency of the state’s Democratic Party, evidenced by lackluster stump-work and by an unexciting (to be charitable) choice of candidate in the first place, Attorney General Martha Coakley. The other was the Republicans’ no-brainer decision to fight this special election on the battleground of Obama’s healthcare changes. It was a no-brainer in view of the Bay State’s very evident status as a special case in healthcare provision.
Local media back in the late fall and early winter were already making it clear, to any outsiders willing to check in, that Massachusetts voters are pretty happy on the whole with their own, state-specific healthcare arrangements. The Mass Plan, signed into effect in 2006 by the Republican then-Governor Mitt Romney, one of last year's failed runners for the party’s Presidential nomination, has had quite long enough to become an established part of the state’s political and social landscape.
So GOP candidate Scott Brown (above right) was handily enabled to make hay, not only with the enormous additional costs entailed in the Obama plan – but also with perceived threats to Medicare’s coverage, which has been, rather prominently and deliberately, left unaffected by the Romney overhaul.
Newspapers from Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard to Pittsfield and North Adams were buzzing with the arguably myopic but lapel-grabbing message that (according to, for instance, the Sentinel & Enterprise in the declining industrial town of Fitchburg, on December 12): “Massachusetts doesn't need a federal plan, as 98 percent of residents have insurance”.
There was also the repeated polling evidence from at least eight weeks ago that voters cared a lot more, given the severity of unemployment state-wide, about hard-pressing bread-and-butter economic issues than about health reform (which for good measure was all-too-easily labeled with the crude but evocative tag “Trillion Dollar” in Brown’s TV and poster ads).
In a reaction familiar to us from the world of America’s spies, the Democrats at state and national level are now all pointing fingers of blame at each other, even as Robert Gibbs tried (in that confessional mode I began with) to claim some higher moral ground, and acknowledged that the White House "must bear some” of that blame. Oh, and by the time he sat down with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, the Chief Executive also said he'd gotten over his surprise.
As the shock dissipates for all, the Democrats have to admit that their defeat - to use terminology reserved until now for sloppy Qaeda-watching by that oddly-named confederation, our “Intelligence Community” - has been "a failure to connect the dots”.
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WHILE WE WERE ABLE to follow the real drift of voter opinion thanks to those very locally-based media outlets across 300 or more townships, I can’t leave this story without reflecting on the single metropolitan giant of Massachusetts media, the Boston Globe.
It’s owned of course by The New York Times, and like many a big regional paper - and indeed the Times itself - its management has been cutting back seriously on its (unavoidably expensive) local coverage. It sure has lost its street-smarts in the process.
A typical Globe editorial in late December asked in its headline: "CAN SCOTT BROWN WIN?”, and it answered its own question definitively. “Short of a political miracle - no. The Bay State's political DNA - Democrat to the core - will overcome any of Coakley's personal weaknesses”.
This editorialist - who is glad now, I am sure, for his or her professional anonymity - wasn’t even seeing the dots, let alone connecting them.
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