Scott Brown

The world didn’t become a better place. Our absolutely dyspepsic middle eastern policy has just about everybody shaking their heads. Now, the morons want to arm the Libyan rebels so that our guys and gals over there can get our own stuff fired back at us.

‘Her Thighness’, Hillary Clinton, has been rocketing from capital to capital, braying the administration’s next change of course, change of mind, or the next whimsical pronouncement of the ‘Anointed One’, arguably the least influential person on the international scene. Notice I didn’t use the word ‘leader’.

Speaking of leadership, I’ve been watching the antics of the Republican leadership with increasing unease, bordering on anger. They still don’t get it. They had thousands of Tea Party Patriots demonstrating outside Congress and they still don’t get it.

Allow me to lay this out for you establishment Republicans once again… one point seven trillion dollars in deficit this year alone. And now these brave, brave men have the unmitigated temerity to come to the taxpaying patriots of this country with a heroic sixty billion dollars in deficit spending cuts. Words fail me…

The Marxists, in the form of Harry Reid and Upchucky Schumer, are trumpeting that our Republican intransigence will result in a government shutdown. Oh, No! Lions and tigers and bears… Oh, my! This is what has Boehner quaking? Bleating that we’re only 1/2 of 1/3 of the government? This is why he and the rest of the so-called ‘leaders’ that we, you and I, worked hard and skillfully to get elected, have the nerve to say to us that they cannot do the job that we sent them to Washington to do because it may cause a government shutdown! Shut that sucker down!

What if we shut down the government and nothing happened? Because that’s exactly what would occur. All essential services would still function. The only ones who would be discomfited would be politicians, bureaucrats and parasitic government types in their hundreds of thousands… and that’s a good thing.

I see that Repubic Scott Brown opened his mouth and labeled himself as the new primo RINO in the Senate. I’m sure McCain must be jealous. Mr Brown labeled the insignificant sixty billion dollars in proposed cuts as ‘irresponsible’. One has to wonder… has this man, who we judged to be fairly intelligent, any grasp on reality?

What slays me is that you can hear these various Republicans on the conservative radio talk circuits and they all sound like bold deficit hawks, and reiterate that they know who put them in office and with what mandate. Yet all we get out of the House leadership are these lame squeeks and bleats about why we can’t do something. Fellow Patriots, I sense another change wind blowing…

Post Script: To those of you who followed my son’s recent illness… we brought him home (he had a drug -resistant pneumonia that almost killed him) and with a few weeks’ rest he should be fine. Why in the world would any sane person want to trade the most magnificent medical system in the world for Osama… whoops, slip of the keyboard, Obamacare? Think about it.

Semper Vigilans, Semper Fidelis

© Skip MacLure 2011

I’m hearing some disturbing things about some of the people who we of the patriot movement were instrumental in getting elected to office. The whole RINO issue chaps the hell out of my hide to start with.

I’m not sure whether it’s because we’re stupid or because we don’t know how to vet our candidates. Or perhaps it’s because these undercover creatures are just so darn good at hiding who they really are that we get hoodwinked every time. I’m not buying any part of that argument.

The RINO (for the uninitiated, RINO stands for Republican in name only) has caused incalculable damage to the country because of their collective perfidy. It would have not been possible for the DeMarxist regime to pass as much of their onerous nation-destroying legislation as they have without the collusion of the so-called moderates.

Some of the names are the same ones we’ve seen time and again… selling out their party and their nation for personal gain. We’re familiar with the machinations of Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins. I won’t belabor you with the names of the RINOs out there right now, we’ll be focusing on them in detail as the electoral cycle rolls on.

Chris Christie was elected on a wave of patriot enthusiasm and endorsement. He said and did all the right things to get our support. We sort of expected it from Scott Brown… after all, a conservative Republican from Massachusetts would be a liberal just about anywhere else.

I hope the things I’m hearing about Christie aren’t true… or if they are, I’m glad we found out now. The new Conservative Republican party cannot abide people who consciously erode the principles of conservative governance.

Semper Vigilans, Semper Fidelis

© Skip MacLure 2011

What’s the first thing that pops into your head when you hear the word “Republican?”   

If you can’t think of anything positive, you’ve identified the primary problem facing the GOP in the 2010s. Despite the GOP’s recapturing of the House of Representatives as well as numerous governorships and state legislatures, the party’s public image has yet to fully recover from the beating it took during the Bush era. The 2010 midterm results were brought about by economic malaise and frustration with President Obama, not by the public’s re-embrace of Republican ideology.    

It’s still quite possible for President Obama to be re-elected in 2012, and it’s not hard to envision the GOP losing the House in two years as well. For all the chatter about America supposedly being a “center-right” country, the reality is that the country will not truly be “center-right” until Republicans finally challenge the stereotypes that have existed about the party for years. 

There are communities all across America filled with people who react with horror and disgust when they hear the word “Republican.” Despite Scott Brown’s historic Senate victory a year ago this month, his party’s losses in the Massachusetts midterm elections demonstrate that the Bay State is one such community. As Boston Phoenix political reporter David Bernstein noted on November 8, “To most Bay Staters (in fact, most New Englanders), ‘Republicans’ are anti-intellectual, vitriolic, reactionary, ‘Party of No,’ Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Tea Party, Southern ideologues. ‘FOX Republicans,’ if you will.”   

Republicans can spend all day denouncing these stereotype as false, or lambasting media, academic and entertainment entities that are viewed as perpetuating these stereotypes—but wouldn’t it make more sense to simply shatter these stereotypes?  

Republicans need to ask themselves the following questions:  

1. Would supply-side economics be held in contempt by large numbers of Americans if Republicans and conservative-leaning media entities made a point of demonstrating that supply-side economics benefited the vast majority of Americans, not just the wealthy?  

2. Would the notion of Republican anti-intellectualism have such currency if Republicans and conservative-leaning media entities did a better job of spotlighting the right’s intellectual class? The recent Fox News special The Right, All Along: The Rise, Fall & Future of Conservatism did a commendable job of reminding viewers of the right’s intellectual heritage, but the broadcast was the exception to the rule.  

3. Would the idea of Republicans being scornful of science even exist if Republicans and conservative-leaning media entities had more prominent figures who regarded environmental science as something other than “the new refuge of socialist thinking,” as Rush Limbaugh called it in his 1992 book The Way Things Ought to Be?   

4. Would the concept of Republicans-as-theocrats be as strong as it is in the minds of millions of Americans if Republicans and conservative-leaning media entities were more vocal in embracing a federalist approach to social issues, as Jonah Goldberg recommended in Reason Magazine last year?   

The Democratic Party can only prosper if Republicans fail to address the underlying, long-standing issues that still make so many Americans uncomfortable with the GOP: the idea that Republicans lack empathy, don’t give a damn about anyone who’s not already a billionaire, loathe gays and single mothers, secretly desire Christian Shari’a, believe mankind plays no significant role in climate change, are obsessed with spending trillions to democratize the Middle East, regard public education as a wasteland and are generally selfish, uncaring jerks.   

There’s nothing wrong with demonstrating empathy. “Compassionate conservatism” may have been an empty slogan, but if Republicans and conservative-leaning media entities don’t do a better job of showing that the GOP is not as hard-hearted as it’s often made out to be, the 2010 midterms will go down in history as a fluke.  

The last decade was an awful one for the Republican Party. Twenty years after Ronald Reagan’s ten-point victory over President Carter, George W. Bush—the man who was promoted in some conservative circles as Reagan’s true ideological heir—barely got past Vice President Al Gore in the Electoral College and lost the popular vote. Four years later, Bush beat Senator John Kerry by three points, hardly a “center-right” blowout. Republicans lost control of the House and Senate in 2006 and surrendered the White House in 2008. Were it not for pro-GOP momentum generated by the Tea Party movement, as well as the aforementioned public frustration with Obama, the party would still be a sickly elephant ready to be put down.    

Too many Republicans still think of themselves as representing the country’s natural majority. This mentality leads to laziness, shortsightedness, arrogance and a failure to recognize and fix key problems. Republicans would be much better off thinking of themselves as a minority group, one that must confront and overcome stereotypes in order to obtain success and social acceptance. Before Republicans can change minds, they must first change their own. 

(Cross-posted at Notes from D.R.)

I told a friend last night - via Facebook private message - that email is still the best way to get a hold of me.* I gave him my work email address, which is the one account out of seven I currently monitor to which I will usually give an immediate response. It's also one of two accounts pushing to my smart phone, so I can receive/respond on the go.

The ways in which we send, receive, and store information have been constantly revolutionizing politics for nearly 600 years, since Gutenberg first invented the printing press. Customer relations management (CRM) systems have become increasingly important (indeed useful and necessary) in the political sphere, as candidate and issue campaigns build vast, scalable email lists for purposes of campaign communication. Somewhat curiously, I have all issue and candidate campaign email delivered to my American University address - which also pushes to my smart phone, but which I rarely actually read.

But let's assume just for a second that I consolidate my email accounts into just one, and I take time to read more than I do now - and a political campaign was able to reach me (in theory) 24 hours a day. Why is it, in this world of nearly instantaneous, targeted, scalable communications, that we still rely on direct mail fundraising? When does the 140-character tweet, the Facebook status update, or even the 30-second YouTube video replace a clunky, 5-page typed fundraising ask - double-spaced in 12 pt. Courier New font - and on pink stationary, no less? Does it ever? What about when we move all of our CRM solutions to the cloud, and we're realizing huge cost savings in our campaign budgets because of it (this is speculative, I'll admit)?

I remember from my Leadership Institute training days back in college that conservatives tend to make quite a bit of money on direct mail fundraising campaigns - my own experience tells me that you're doing well to just break even, particularly if you're using consulting services. Maybe my metrics are a little bit off, and I'm not considering how a mail piece to an identified voter/supporter may energize them, arm them with talking points, and ask them to tell 5 of their neighbors about my candidate or issue. Maybe I need better mail pieces.

Not only in my experience are dollar-for-dollar returns on direct mail doing well to break even, but isn't this social tree 1.0? Isn't this what social media was supposed to solve, in terms of reach, velocity, and scale? I posited in my undergraduate thesis - flying in the face of practical, conventional wisdom - that there's some kind of interpersonal transaction that takes place when one voter connects with another that technology can't replace, and I don't mean to waffle on that conclusion - but I do wonder, as our technology evolves and more milennials and digital natives reach voting age, whether or not direct mail is a worthwhile long-term investment. For the meantime, it's probably okay to assume that the average voter views the on-paper direct mail piece as more authentic or genuine an instrument than something that flies across their computer screen or smart phone, and for that reason, direct mail is still useful.

Candidates and causes also have a swath of social media and social networking tools at their disposal, tools that reach millions of end users (if leveraged properly) and which are also dirt cheap to a campaign, if not altogether free. Rob Willington of RebuildTheParty.com demonstrated as much in Scott Brown's bid for Sen. Edward Kennedy's U.S. Senate seat in a special election following Teddy's death (wait a minute, that wasn't Teddy's seat - it's the people's seat). Rob's use of text-messaging, geolocation applications, YouTube, Ning, and Facebook makes a really interesting case study in the use of these tools on the Right in the MyBO era.

Another important long-term consideration for campaigns on the Right is cost. I asked Willington during a Personal Democracy Forum conference call back in March, and I'm paraphrasing here, "Given the availability of free online tools, why should campaigns invest in proprietary enterprise architectures (e.g. www.CandidateName.com)? Will they be useful in the long-term for anything other than an online depository for campaigns?" His answer - and it's a good one, and again, I'm paraphrasing - was that a proprietary enterprise architecture anchors the spectrum of social media tools the campaign uses (each having its own brand recognition) with the candidate's brand, and acts as a vote getter. You can download and listen to the podcast here.

But given this, it shouldn't be long, in theory, before we totally scuttle on-paper direct mail pieces for fundraising purposes (messaging and relationship-building purposes notwithstanding). Additionally, in order to be really successful in the long-run, these tools need to build relationships: voter-to-voter and voter-to-candidate/voter-to-campaign. Melissa Clouthier has an interesting political spin on Mashable's "21 Rules for Social Media Engagement." Clouthier's conclusions assume a high-level of social media adoption across campaign space, and while candidates on the Right are dominating some social media channels, they don't own the Internet anymore:

In the long-run, the best "technology candidates" on the Right - as is the case with all other technological paradigm shifts - will be the early adopters, like Scott Brown. The candidates who do a great job of building relationships through social media on the campaign trail will have the highest chance of success in using tools while in office, both to foster transparency and to protect incumbency. In the meantime, the Right needs to continue developing an accurate, meaningful set of metrics to measure the success of social media strategies against traditional strategic results to make sure that candidates and causes get the highest ROI and the largest reach per dollar spent.

George Scoville also blogs at Liberty Pundits and his personal site Intelligence, Please... He invites you to follow him on Twitter (@stackiii).

* The double irony of this isn't lost on me. Not only is Facebook not very well known for its privacy at the moment, but I sent a Facebook message to relay an enterprise email address.

Awhile ago I suggested it was time to focus on some high value targets for 2010 in the wake of the Scott Brown victory. 

Barney Frank comes immediately to mind.  He's vocal. He's liberal to the core. And he was wrapped around the failed financial regulatory agenda of the past decade that led to the collapse of the housing industry and the financial markets.

Really, If the public is outraged over Bailout Nation, it would seem they would have little use for the guy whose lax lending agenda created the necessity for bailouts and then was the architect of the bailouts themselves.

Frank's gerrymandered district was until January 19, 2010, thought of as a Democratic stronghold. Then something funny happened. It was carried by Scott Brown.

I also note Frank doesn;t seem prepared for a serious challenge as he only has $400K COH, an advantage one good moneybomb could quickly erase.

So the elements are there for a really hot fire. The problem here is upon review of the Brown performance, it was strongly due to an outstanding showing in a blue collar region 50 miles from Frank's home base. This should be an opportunity. But unless conservative or Republican activists jump in here and make something happen it will be a wasted opportunity.   

 The two candidates thinking now about challenging Frank are perennial candidate Earl Sholley and newbie Keith Messina.  

Neither's gonna get it done.

Sholley's tried before with dismal results. He got 24% in 2008, running behind John McCain even in his own hometown.  Morevover his persona--born in PA 60 years ago; owner of a horticulture business in a small suburb; known for lots of lawsuits--doesn't suggest he has a big upside in an ethnic Democratic district.  No matter how  revved the Tea partiers get over him; there's not enough of them to win here.

Messina lacks controversy, but his website offers little sense he's tied in enough to this district to unseat a 30 year incumbent.

We need a new candidate here

Someone who can exploit Frank's deficiencies and force him to play defense. Someone with sufficient roots here to "look" the part of an effective representative.

Here's where geography and ethnicity kicks in and we turn the gerrymandering of the 4th District against Barney Frank.

Frank's base is in the close-in, high-income towns next to Boston--Brookline and Newton.  Some of MA's wealthiest and best educated people live here and they would never dare vote for any rebellious Republican. In the Brown-Coakley election these town cast about 55,000 votes with about a 22,000 vote edge for Coakley 

On the other end of the district is the less affluent "South Coast" region around Fall River and New Bedford. The towns adjoining those two cities cast about 63,000 votes and Coakley barely carried the region, based on a 3,000 edge out of New Bedford.   Brown ran well ahead of Mitt Romney is this region, suggesting this area is swinging against the Democrats this cycle. While this area was once America's center of whaling,  it doesn't seem Republican candidates are playing the role of Captain Ahab anymore.

The remainder of the district was strongly pro-Brown, as he broke even in Wellesley, lost narrowly in heavily Jewish Sharon, and crushed Coakley elsewhere in Norfolk, Bristol and Plymouth counties, with margins of 2,500 in Taunton, 3,000 in Mansfield, and 2,500 in Foxborough.    

So, we need to find a candidate who can play well on the South Coast.  This is a region that is unique. The largest ethnic group here are Portuguese Americans.  Providence TV covers these communities. And New Bedford and Fall River have their own daily newspapers and radio stations.

And this region and its major ethnic group are forgotten in MA politics. I can find no evidence of a Portuguese American ever winning a MA congressional election. And the last resident of Bristol County to hold a House seat was North Attleboro's Joe Martin who left office in the 1960's.    MA pols tried to address this in a failed 2002 remap to draw a new House district; but it would have caused an existing seat in the Merrimack Valley to disappear and the plan failed.

Back in 1982 a much younger Barney Frank campaigned hard when this region was added to the district and won their votes.  Can an entrenched incumbent explain that 28 years later this area is still economically troubled--and it's not his fault?  Can a an urban social liberal bring back ethnic blue collar voters to the Democratic line?

Can he do this if we run a young, appealing Portuguese American lawyer or businessman from the South Coast against him?

I know "what" the candidate here would look and sound like. I admit. I don't have a name.

That's where the MA GOP and the conservative activists need to step up. We need to find this person.  

I'm reasonably convinced that if we find my South Coast candidate Frank's numbers in the region will be held down sufficiently that we will have a reasonable shot of victory. (While Martha Coakley did many things wrong, leaving votes on the table in Brookline and Newton wasn't her problem; she pretty much topped out for a Democrat in a contested race there.) 

We will need to fund our target candidate  of course, and find a way to bypass Sholley and Messina. So inertia is not an option.   

And I'm not saying it's going to be easy. But Frank--due to his high profile, his atrophied campaign apparatus, and his acerbic persona--is going to be worth it.  

The question is: do we just want to kvetch about how Barney Frank burned down our financial house or do we want to do something productive to hold him accountable for his debacle.

I'm for getting to work. Anyone got a list of lawyers in Fall River for me to vet? 

Scott Brown was an obscure suburban lawyer/legislator.

Carly Fiorina was the former CEO of one of America's top corporations.

These ads--direct and authentic--are why Brown is getting sworn into the U.S. Senate tomorrow. Voters get a clear , unfiltered sense of what Brown's message is 

This art house web ad, is why Fiorina probably won't get to the Senate. To the extent it conveys useful information about her opponent, it's lost in bizarre metaphors.

This is part of the reason not to recruit self-funders; they seem enamored of expensive creativity that just doesn't work, like this nonsense from Ned Lamont in 2006.

We need a lot more Wrentham in our 2010 campaigns and a whole lot less Hollywood.

If Scott Brown runs for President in 2016, will Tim Tebow support him?

Next Sunday, Focus on the Family is scheduled to run an ad during Super Bowl XLIV, featuring the Heisman Trophy winner. The ad will also feature Tebow’s mother; as Townhall.com’s Brent Bozell III notes, the spot will focus on “the story of how doctors told her she should have an abortion, and she refused that exercise of ‘choice.’ Pam Tebow was a missionary in the Philippines and had contracted dysentery, and the medicine had a chance of causing birth defects.”

The upcoming ad has stirred up an unusual controversy: as Bozell notes, “…’[F]eminist’ groups have exploded in fury, demanding CBS censor the ad. The Women's Media Center wrote a letter signed by an array of feminist organizations. They projected the ad would be ‘disastrous’ for CBS, and it throws women ‘under the bus’ and ‘endangers women's health.’ They even suggested pro-life ads resulted in ‘escalated violence’ against abortionists…Words like these might make a scintilla of sense if Focus on the Family were running some kind of hardcore, negative ad with inflammatory abortion images. But that's not the message, and they know it. The Tebow ad is not far removed from the positive pro-life ads run by the Arthur S. DeMoss Foundation during the Clinton years with the slogan ‘Life. What a beautiful choice.’”

The protests against the ad are a tempest in a teapot: Bozell has a point when he asks, “Isn't it a little strange to see people who present themselves as ‘pro-choice’ get so upset when someone suggests their choice was to keep the baby?” However, there could be a real political tempest within the Republican Party in just a few years.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that President Obama manages to secure a second term (we cannot forget that it’s still tremendously difficult to dislodge incumbent Presidents, despite the circumstances surrounding the 1976, 1980 and 1992 Presidential elections.) Let’s also assume that the Bay State’s vibrant young Senator wins a full term in 2012 (once he is sworn in later this month, Brown will fill out the remaining years of the late Sen. Edward Kennedy’s final term), and eventually emerges as the odds-on favorite to be the GOP nominee in 2016. Will there be any controversy over Brown’s moderately pro-choice stance—and will that controversy divide the GOP?

It would shock the conscience of many conservative Republicans to have a GOP Presidential nominee who was not explicitly pro-life. Even though Brown opposes late-term abortions and favors parental-consent laws, his overall support for Roe v. Wade may disturb some GOP primary voters.

However, it’s not clear that it would disturb all of them.  If Brown, as a Presidential contender, vowed to support reasonable restrictions on “abortion on demand” and appoint strict constructionists such as Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas to the US Supreme Court, would pro-life activists really abandon him for a less electable alternative?

The courageous Bay State group Massachusetts Citizens for Life supported Brown in the 2010 special election, recognizing that the perfect should not be the enemy of the good.  One hopes that if Brown emerges as a viable Presidential contender in 2016, national pro-life activists will demonstrate similar pragmatism.

Yes, the thought of supporting someone who does not completely disavow Roe might be a difficult pill for pro-life activists to swallow. However, if there is clear evidence that Brown can win the White House in 2016, and that a less charismatic pro-lifer cannot, these pro-life activists will have to think long and hard about the consequences of not supporting Brown—especially after eight years of Obama appointing judges who oppose any real restrictions on abortion to the federal bench.

This is highly speculative, of course. Yet time moves fast, and the 2016 elections will be here before we know it. Sure, Obama could lose in 2012 to an as-yet-unknown Republican contender, putting the Oval Office out of Brown’s reach for years. However, if Obama and Brown both win in 2012, the conservative from the Commonwealth will certainly be considered a championship contender four years down the line.

Barring a career-ending scandal, severe illness, or a loss of support from Massachusetts voters, Scott Brown will be a GOP superstar for years to come. He has the same qualities Ronald Reagan exhibited a generation ago. He’s already a household name, and clearly comes across as being of Presidential timbre. If, a half-decade from now, Brown generates real momentum as a White House aspirant, pro-life activists will have to decide if they are with him or against him.

Scott Brown's victory last Tuesday was probably the greatest political upset in recent memory.  A Republican Party that was pronounced all but dead and an ideological movement that was said to have no appeal outside of Souther white guys was able to win Ted Kennedy's Senate seat based on the explicit disavowal of his greatest policy wish, a day before the one year anniversary of Barack Obama's inauguration.  While the result of the race was based mostly on a rejection of the Obama administration's health care plan, it is worth considering how much can be attributed to the state itself.  It is more interesting than it would appear at first because, secretly, Massachusetts isn't quite as liberal as it used to be.

The Avant-Garde of American Liberalism

As late as the 1950s, Massachusetts' Congressional delegation was majority Republican.  But what occurred over the past 100 years was a demographic transition where, over the course of decades, different areas of the state passed from a Yankee majority (and Republican) to an ethnic Catholic majority (and Democratic).  This transition happened at the turn of the last century in Boston, in the Merrimack Valley in the 1910s, Worcester, Springfield, and other industrial cities during the New Deal, the South Shore and university areas in the 50s, and the North Shore, immediate Boston suburbs, and rural Yankeedom in the 1970s.  The watershed year for the state overall was 1952, in which the Senate race pitted the top Yankee family, the Lodges, against the leading Irish Catholic family, the Kennedys.  Old Yankee Massachusetts died when JFK was elected Senator.

The twin pillars upon which Massachusetts liberalism was constructed were the massive, impressive higher education system and the Kennedy family.  Due to its strong commitment to education, Massachusetts had always been in the vanguard of promoting left-leaning change.  But when the middle-class began to flood the higher education system following World War II, a critical mass of liberal college graduates was reached.  These men and women transformed their old line Yankee communities towards embracing the culture of universities.

The Kennedys cast a longer shadow over Massachusetts than any other political dynasty in any other state ever.  There's no need to go into the whole Kennedy legend here, but its real political effect was to put the white, ethnic working-class behind liberalism in a way that didn't develop anywhere else in America.  While their long lost cousins were participating in Hard Hat riots and cheering on Archie Bunker, they lined up behind 60s liberalism.  The only difference between the Boston Brahmins and Joe from Worcester was the locution by which they expressed the common liberal faith.

Beginning in the 1970s, Massachusetts was the most left-wing state in the nation.  It was famous for being the only state to vote for the doomed George McGovern.  From 1960 to 2004, there were 12 presidential elections.  In those year Massachusetts ranked as the following in Democratic percentage of the vote: 3rd, 3rd, 2nd, 1st, 5th, 22nd (John Anderson won 15 percent, his best state; was Reagan's 3rd worst state), 2nd, 4th, 6th, 1st, 3rd, 1st.  In this time, three Bay Staters were the Democratic standard bearer.

The level of success Republicans had at the governor's level paradoxically was damaging because it wedded them to an outdated Rockefeller / small-town Yankee hybrid Republicanism instead of a Northeastern middle-class conservatism.  It seemed impressive that William Weld won election twice, until you consider that he ran to the left of his 1990 opponent.  Weld even won Cambridge, which gave Coakley over 84 percent of the vote.  The conservative-moderate coalition that would represent the most viable way for a center-right candidate to win did not form, leaving the party with a shallow base.

When revulsion with the Gingrich-era Republican Party hit in the mid-90s, Rockefeller Republicanism was finished, with no suburban / working-class conservative element waiting in the wings.  This led to a crippled party with no Congressional seats and a veto-proof Democratic majority in the state legislature.  Thus, the Republican governor wasn't that effective as a break on liberal policies.  This led to another decade of Massachusetts leading liberalism their way.  Republican registration dropped to between 10-15 percent of the voter population.

Signs of Change

However, Massachusetts is not as liberal as it used to be, at least in comparison to other states.  In an age when liberalism is identified with youth and minorities, Massachusetts is a relatively old and white state.  The Scott Brown triumph was presaged by the Jim Ogonowski campaign in 2007.  In a very bad politcal climate, Ogonowski came within six points of winning a Congressional seat.  It's easy to imagine he would've won in better times for Republicans.  In 2008, despite the Kennedy clan essentially appointing Obama as their heir, Hillary Clinton won the state's Democratic primary by 15 points.  Come general election time, Massachusetts fell to only the 8th best Obama state.  While Kerry was a native, it was very interesting to see no Democratic trend during four years of strong Democratic electoral success.

There are encouraging signs that slowly--very slowly, control of the party is being wrested from 'me-too' bluebloods to moderate conservatives.  Every statewide winner in the past twenty years has been a shade more to the right of their predecessor.  Paul Cellucci was more conservative than Weld, Romney was more conservative than Cellucci, and Brown ran as more conservative than the Massachusetts Mitt.  It is striking how conservative a platform Brown ran on.  His two main themes were explicit oppositon to Obamacare and taking strong measures against terrorism.  His success means that there is no reason for any Massachusetts Republican to shy away from taking conservative stands on these issues.

Scott Brown's election may be nearly as important in ending the Kennedy mythology as in damaging health care reform.  The end of the Kennedy legend means that the electorate can finally adapt to modern left / right politics.  The amount of middle-class and lower middle-class whites who are Democrats is unnatural based on current party demographics.  Shifting these voters over to the right would finally secure the GOP on a firm base.  Massachusetts would remain a definite blue state, but it wouldn't be as overwhelmingly Democrat.  It would look more like Connecticut than Vermont.

Rebuilding

One useful measure of the results map is to figure out where Republicans can't win.  If Brown couldn't do reasonably well in an area, then no Republican has a shot.  Coakley ran not much behind 2008 levels in the Berkshires and the immediate Boston area.  These areas are dominated by ideologically committed white liberals.  They are unwinnable for a center-right party.

Brown's bases of support were in the center of the state, and the North and South Shores.  In MA-5, in which Ogonowski nearly won, Brown won every single city and town.  The district revolves around old industrial cities like Lowell and Lawrence and outer suburbs of Boston of the type that were strong Brown boosters.  Hopefully Republicans look into challenging Tsongas once again.

The Worcester area holds promise.  The second city is much more centrist than Boston.  Brown earned over 47 percent of the vote in the City of Worcester.  He then ran up huge percentages in the surrounding towns and countryside.  This is an area more engaged in industry and small business than high-prestige jobs.  The type of voters Republicans need to convert to full time Republicans are heavily concentrated here.

The South Shore was Brown's best area in the state.  It is the most Irish part of the most Irish of states.  It contains a large middle-class with blue-collar values even if most are not blue-collar themselves.  The receding legacy of the Kennedy family could free these voters up to become relatively Republican.   The 10th district, based on the South Shore, was likely Brown's best Congressional district.  The district has a PVI of D+5, the most favorable in the state.

i think there is some hope for conservatives in the state.  You can't over-interpret the results and declare Massachusetts competitive.  This really was a perfect storm of very favorable national conditions, a very good Republican candidate, and perhaps the worst major campaign in modern times for the Democrat.  But the victory nonetheless reveals a way forward for conservatives within a state that had been permanently written off by Republicans.  It is realistic to believe that a solid center-right candidate can win in some places.  The camapign showed that there is little penalty, and a lot more to gain, by running somewhat more to the right of previous Massachusetts Republicans (but not too far right).  The task now is to build on this potential breakthrough and expand the reach of the party. 

An instant explanation has been advanced by the Left to explain away the beat-down they received in Massachusetts Tuesday.

Well, what do you expect? Martha Coakley was simply a bad candidate

I'm not going to pretend Coakley did a stellar job. Indeed, the last week of her campaign was so full of bizarre gaffes as to wonder if this was Joe Biden after doing really, really bad peyote. But, we are talking about a 100,000 vote clock cleaning.  Prior to Martha deciding to turn her footwear into snack food something had gone wrong for the Democrats in Massachusetts.

The prominent polling firm, Public Opinion Strategies, offered this take on the Coakley collapse.

It’s not all her fault.  It’s the policies she supported that were more to blame.  She won the Democratic primary trouncing her opponents and was clearly the best candidate the party had to offer in the state.  She’d won statewide in convincing fashion.  She was a proven quantity.  And, yet this race wasn’t even close.

After watching Creigh Deeds, Jon Corzine and now Martha Coakley go down in flames, do you really think that the one thing they had in common was that they were below average candidates running sub-par campaigns?

The question I have is: when exactly did Creigh Deeds, Jon Corzine and Martha Coakley become "bad candidates"?

Certaintly not in the primaries. Deeds clobbered two better funded rivals (Terry McAulliffe and Brian Moran) in the VA primary.   Deeds had also faced Bob McDonnell before, and barely lost the 2005 AG race. He then lost to the same opponent for Governor in 2009 and the margin of defeat expanded by a factor of 1000.

 In New Jersey, Jon Corzine hardly broke a sweat dispatching his primary opponents. And while NJ Democrats may have considered swapping him out for Corey Booker, Richard Codey or Frank Pallone, in the end the completely venal NJ Democrats thought Corzine gave them their best chance of victory.

Now Martha Coakley. She was elected Attorney General in 2006 with 73% of the vote. In the Senate race ,she defeated a field of Democratic opponents --including a popular House member and a free spending businessman--convincingly.  

She entered 2010 with a million dollars cash-on-hand and an apparent wide lead in the polls.  So what happened to suddenly make her a "bad candidate"?

Seems the common denominator here is contact with the general electorate, now doesn't it?.

Once the calendar turned to 2010 and Martha Coakley couldn't fall back on the standard liberal bromides, well, she fell apart.  Perhaps she never expected  to be pressed in dark blue MA. But what part of the political environment this year won't inflict this damage on any Democrat whom the Republicans press hard?  

David Plouffe better have the "bad candidate" excuse on his favorites list this cycle. He'll need it. 

One final note. In all three epic losses the Democrats have pursued a strategy of victory by disqualification.  In Virginia, an ancient thesis was supposed to make McDonnell unpalatable; in New Jersey, the Corzine camp sought tp turn the election into a referendum on mammograms, and last week Coakley's thin straw was to allege Scott Brown hated rape victims.

I think even Ray Charles could see a pattern here.

Sure I know the argument about " well, we had to try and win ugly".  Message to Democrats: voters have noticed who's getting ugly. Perhaps that's why the results for your party have been...hmmmm, ugly.

This week has been a great one for conservatives across the nation. Scott Brown’s victory proved that, in the words of the increasingly vulnerable Barbara Boxer, “Every state is now in play.” His victory also demonstrated that Republicans can achieve many of the successes that led to Barack Obama becoming the 44th President of the United States — dominating the Internet; raising unbelievable sums of money, especially online; building a massive base of small donors; and having a victory driven by a massive coalition of grassroots activists. With Brown’s victory came the ever-increasing likelihood that the Democrat’s health care bill would be stalled indefinitely. Then came the demise of Air America. All of these events have inspired a new-found confidence among those to the right of center, while liberals and Democrats have pushed the panic button. One of my favorite political minds, Jay Cost, asks, “What Does Obama Do Now?” For those of us on the right, I think conservatives must ask themselves an equally critical question: What do Republicans do now?

I admit that I believe that the GOP is on the verge of a 2010 blowout. As for the magnitude of said blowout, I think it’s too early to say, but in my mind there’s a real chance that Republicans could retake one of the chambers of Congress. However, as I’ve previously cautioned, I don’t believe that a blowout this year will mean things are better for the Republican Party. Winning back seats is great, but as Mindy Finn writes, those on the right must “stop gloating” — and start thinking about building a sustainable majority. A major victory this year will not be the product of a new-found love for the Republican Party; instead, it will be the product of voter disgust and discontent with the status quo, namely with President Obama and Democrats in Congress. The Republican Party is still enormously unpopular itself, and a midterm election blowout due to the aforementioned reasons is not exactly how a sustainable majority is built.

On the other hand, converting what are traditionally considered to be safe blue seats in places like Massachusetts and California (I’m looking at you, Barbara Boxer) to red ones — and finding ways to hold onto those seats — is certainly a step toward a sustainable majority. The same is true of fielding candidates in all 435 Congressional districts every cycle. Embracing transparency and continuing to authentically fight to limit government is another building block in a sustainable majority. Effectively using technology while embracing today’s Age of Participation through peer production is another step. Offering substantial and real policy options that differ from those of the White House and the Democrats is similarly critical.

To the contrary, getting sucked back into the ways of Washington by growing government and increasing spending is a sure way to cede momentum right back to the Democrats. Failing to broaden the base with different demographics, like young voters, Hispanics, or African Americans is another way to likely guarantee that 2010 will be a one-and-done year for Republicans. And of course, growing content with success at any point will inevitably lead right back to defeat.

Like your favorite sports game, momentum is critical in politics. Republicans clearly have the momentum, and barring a dramatic change in the political wind, this momentum will significantly change the composition of the Congress this November. When that happens, the ball will be in the GOP’s court. The crucial question will then be: What will they do with it?