The Massachusetts Vote: Local Politics and Reality
The former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neil used to say that “All politics is local.” Why Scott Brown was elected instead of Martha Coakley to replace former Senator Kennedy has to do partly with the national picture of course. But it also has a lot to do with the political picture and situation in Massachusetts and people are missing that very important side to the picture.
I don’t live in Massachusetts or even near it. I don’t know that local picture and neither do the overwhelming majority of the commentators on this election. There is voter anger against the Dems. I’ve expressed that here before. It’s also true that, from my view, Coakely never seemed like a strong candidate.
The economy is seriously down and that always has an effect on the current party in power. One of the ongoing sources of instability in the US system of government is that the voting cycle and the economic cycles are pretty much the same length. This encourages short-term bad economic behavior that the next administration has to handle. The last administration was a very good example of this.
However, the GOP and the Dems either crowing or licking their wounds are wrong. This local election is the result of forces at the local level. Some of those forces are also national but taking a lesson from one particular local special election is a strategy fraught with error.
Yet these results are already firming into a concensus of conventional wisdom in the echo-chamber of pudits and politicians in Washington. They will form their own reality separate from whatever the voters of Massachusetts intended. This new beltway reality will govern their decisions and actions. Voting works, but it doesn’t always work well.