From Nancy Skinner's blog (printed in whole with permission):
I've been watching the autopsy reporting on the Massachusetts Senate race. It's simply mind boggling. I was on CNBC and Fox Business Network the day of the election trying to predict "what a Brown win means” like everyone else. The next day, we heard it all. The right says it’s a revolt against Obama's "big government" or “his "government takeover of healthcare." The left says that people were mad that the healthcare bill did not go far enough and should have included a public option or that Martha Coakley blew it by sunbathing in the Bahamas instead of shaking hands in Beantown.
Let's fly above the whole situation at 40,000 feet and see what we learn.
1) It was the death of a Senator, whose career was devoted to passing healthcare, which may have killed off any chance of passing reform on the very eve of its successful passage.
2) The people of Massachusetts voted for a candidate who vowed to kill the healthcare bill even though they are the only state that had already passed one for themselves.
3) The consensus chatter is that the administration has to tack rightward now because the voters of Massachusetts sent a message by electing one Republican Senator. Why didn't the same talking heads say that the administration should tack left (with a single payer, say) because a liberal Al Franken defeated a conservative Republican in Minnesota?
Do the voters in Massachusetts have more of a say than those in Minnesota? What about the voters in Michigan, which has 28.8 % of its residents uninsured or Texas, who ranked worst with 45.7% of their residents 65 and younger without insurance at some point in 2007-2008, according to a 2008 Families USA Survey.
No, none of this makes any sense. What I see from 40,000 feet is that bitter partisan politics is the pre-existing condition in our body politic that has weakened our national immunity. Paralysis in a time of peril is the result.
Yes, people are angry. They are angry because the economy hasn't rebounded quickly enough for the average American, and they are angry because they have loud angry voices on radio, TV and in DC telling them they should be angry. Selling anger on the radio is a very lucrative business, you see. Fearful and angry people will do just about anything--including voting against their own self-interest, and of course the nation's. The fiscal toll of skyrocketing healthcare costs is enormous--putting our nation's financial future in jeopardy.
The human toll is more vivid. Harvard University (in Boston, Massachusetts ironically) reported that 40,000 people die each year due to lack of health insurance. Imagine, that's almost half a Haiti every single year, not in a third world island, but right here in America. Not caused by an earthquake, but by a Category 5 storm of anger.
Now it appears that the anger that arose in Massachusetts will seal the coffin for many more thousands if pure partisan politics are enforced. Senator Kennedy's dream appears at the moment to have died with him, not for some righteous cause, but from the same well of anger that took two of his brother’s lives.
As a nation, we've become so addicted to our anger and to being right, that like a pre-existing condition, we are vulnerable; vulnerable in a time when our windows of opportunity to deal with looming catastrophic threats to our nation's survival are closing. Anger is contagious, just as surely as a virus is. Just as economic fears in a vicious cycle perpetuate a bad economic climate.
Lucky for us the universe works both ways. When we let go of this grip of anger and our economic fears, our situations will improve. New solutions will arrive and better times with them--that is, if we partisans let them.
Nancy Skinner ran against President Barack Obama in the U.S. Senate Democratic Primary in Illinois and is a frequent political commentator on a number of cable networks.http://www.nancyskinnerlive.com
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