Timothy Noah, Slate: How a Scott Brown victory in Massachusetts will kill health reform

[highplainsdem]

But why he's more optimistic than many that Coakley will win.


http://www.slate.com/id/2241945/

Dream Killer
How a Scott Brown victory in Massachusetts will kill health reform.

By Timothy Noah

Posted Tuesday, Jan. 19, 2010, at 4:38 PM ET


The prospect that Massachusetts, of all places, might end up killing health care reform is so fraught with ironies too numerous to name that it's difficult for me to think clearly on the subject. But if state Sen. Scott Brown, an anti-reform Republican, beats out state Attorney General Martha Coakley, a pro-reform Democrat, in today's special election to replace the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, here's my prediction: The health reform bill will die.

Before we delve into the various rescue scenarios being bruited about, let me state that while I feel more pessimistic than most about health reform's prospects after a Brown victory, I feel more optimistic than most about a Brown defeat. I believe that Massachusetts voters will, in the sacred privacy of the voting booth, conclude Brown lacks the necessary equipment to represent them in the U.S. Senate. I stand with Thomas Schaller, a political scientist at the University of Maryland who was among the first to notice that the Democrats no longer needed the South to win the presidency. Schaller observed yesterday on FiveThirtyEight:

"Any chance Brown had of sneaking up on her is now gone. The closeness of the race is generating high passions—cautious excitement on the right, worry bordering on panic on the left. But in Massachusetts you don't want high passion and level of attention on both sides if you're a Republican; you want an asymmetrical level of passion favoring your side. You want to catch the Democrats napping all the way through to Election Day. That almost happened. But Coakley and state Dems—especially the unions—and the White House all awoke before it was over."

Granted, this logic will make a Democratic loss in Massachusetts that much more humiliating. And there's no denying the polls favor a Brown victory. This has led to a flurry of speculation about how health reform might pass without its 60th vote. My problem is that none of these scenarios seems plausible.

-snip-

He goes through all four scenarios in some detail, and I recommend reading the entire column.

The first two are House Surrender, and House Surrender With Asterisk. These refer to the House voting to pass the Senate bill, without or with a promise to change the bill during the reconciliation process.

Noah thinks both scenarios will be blocked by conservative Democrats in the House.

Scenario 3 is Lose Massachusetts, Gain Maine. Noah doesn't think there's any chance of getting a swing vote from Olympia Snowe.

Scenario 4 is Evelyn-Wood-Style Negotiation, speedy negotiations to finish a revised bill and get it passed by both the Senate and the House in the next week, since even if Brown wins it will take Massachusetts two weeks to certify that win. Noah thinks that "a Brown victory makes it more likely that Sens. Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson, who barely supported the bill as passed by the Senate, will seize on even the tiniest change negotiated with the House as justification for switching from yea to nay."

A common theme among pro-reform bloggers today is that Democrats mustn't panic over a Bay State loss to Republicans. A Brown victory could very well be about no more than the simple fact that Martha Coakley belongs to the same party as the president at a time when unemployment in Massachusetts stands at 8.8 percent. But let's get serious. Panicking is what politicians do when they lose elections. And the stark symbolism of losing a Senate seat in the only state that went for George McGovern in 1972 won't be easy to forget. The best contingency plan, sorry to say, is to believe Coakley will win. I'm hanging onto that one as long as I can.

I hope he's right, and that all the attention given to this race in recent days will mean a Coakley victory.

[WI_DEM]

1. the author points to the fact that McGovern won MA in '72 but forgets to mention

that Reagan won it in both '80 & '84.

[murielm99]

2. Nobody thought Obama would win the primaries either.