No Time For Symbols
Some want to claim the Coakley-Brown Senate race is a proxy vote for the health care bill. This temptation should be avoided. Sure, the trouble the Dems are in, partly due to health care, may be reflected in the surprisingly close polls, but the last place you'll get a decent referendum on the issue is Massachusetts.
If Coakley wins, will the Republicans then say that means health care reform is popular?
PS Some say the race is tied, and others even say Brown is up. I'm still skeptical.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:14 AM
3 Comments:
Massachusetts already has statewide health care. Much like the current bill in Congress, it requires all residents to buy private insurance; although unlike the current bill in Congress the fines are high enough to entice people to actually do it. Mitt Romney signed it into law.
Brown has actually made the argument that "we here in Massachusetts already pay for our own government health care program, so why should we pay additional taxes to subsidize health care in Texas?" A good argument, which is hard to categorize as simply "liberal" or "conservative".
Like a lot of Republicans in the northeast, Brown would be characterized as a liberal elsewhere. Look at Mayor Bloomberg. (Or Arnold Schwarzenegger, for that matter.) This is the way it should be. After all, you've got conservative Democrats down south.
Coakley, on the other hand, was a tough prosecutor who helped ensure people wrongly convicted of child abuse stayed in jail. She also recently suggested Catholics who oppose abortion not work in hospitals.
By far the worst thing she did was call Curt Schilling a Yankee fan.
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