Tonight history was made. In the words of the AP, there has been, in Massachusetts, an "Epic Upset." It deserves to be put in context.
In 1773, it was at Boston that the colonists warned the government of its overreach with the Tea Party.
In 1775, the people of Massachusetts ignited the Revolutionary War at Lexington and Concord.
In 1952, the Kennedy clan took hold of Massachusetts politics, gaining a Senate seat that the clan would not relinquish until the death of Ted Kennedy in 2009.
John F. Kennedy, who would later become President, was very much a moderate Democrat, strong on defense and conservative on fiscal matters. He instituted one of the first income tax reductions and he involved us in the Vietnam War. Teddy was not even a pale shadow of his brother, JFK. Yet so strong was the Kennedy hold on Massachusetts that Teddy, a man expelled from Harvard for cheating and a man responsible for homicide in the case of Mary Jo Kopechne, was still able to get elected to his older brother's Senate seat and retain it by wide margins in every election thereafter. Unlike JFK, Teddy made a name for himself as a far left ideologue and a true child of the anti-war 60's.
In 2004, Ted Kennedy was directly involved in getting Massachusetts law changed so that an interim election would have to be held to seat a new Senator if a seat became open. Ted expected John Kerry to win the Presidency and wanted to insure that the Republican Gov. Mitt Romney would not be able to appoint a Republican to serve out the term.
In 2008, with Democrats outnumbering Republicans three to one, Obama won Massachusetts by a 26 point margin and Democrats took full control of all branches of Congress, including a bare 60 vote supermajority in the Senate. By 40 seats in the House and 1 seat in the Senate, Republicans became utterly irrelevant to whatever the left wanted to do.
On 20 Jan. 2009, Obama was inaugurated, kicking off a period of far left governance for the first time in America's history. It was a year that saw Obama and the Democrats make a massive effort to move America far to the left.
On Aug. 25, 2009, Ted Kennedy died, leaving his Senate seat open and his "life's work" of instituting socialism and, more particularly, European style government controlled health care in America, near completion.
On 8 Dec. 2009, Scott Brown won the Republican primary for Teddy's seat. He ran explicitly on a plank opposing the socialist programs and profligate spending of Obama. On Dec. 19, Coakley polls gave her a 20 point lead over Brown. No one gave him a chance of winning and Coakley did not bother to campaign.
On 1 January 2010, the Democrat-controlled Congress was within weeks of passing a monstrosity under the rubric of health care reform.
On 18 Jan. 2010, with Coakley down in the polls, President Obama himself came to Massachusetts to remind the formerly faithful Democrats of the state that his plans for America where on the line in this election.
And now, on 19 January 2010, 237 years after the most famous act of rebellion in our history, 235 years after starting the Revolutionary War, 58 years after turning control of a Senate seat to the Kennedys, 4 years after Ted created the special election hoist for his own petard, one year after voting Obama into office by a landslide, and with Obama's entire plans for moving our country far to the left completely on the line:
MASS ELECTS REPUBLICAN BROWN TO THE SENATE BY 5 POINTS (OUTSIDE THE MARGIN OF FRAUD, ACORN, & SELECTIVE RECOUNTS)
That is a 31 point swing to the right in Mass. politics in the space of one year. The people of Massachusetts have given their verdict in a referendum on Obama. They have broken the far left's stranglehold on our federal government and ended their ability to ram through their far left agenda, working fundamental changes to America and its economy. The people of Massachusetts did so by breaking with their own tradition of being perhaps the Democrat's most reliable stronghold - a fact that will reverberate through our body politic long into the future.
This act of near rebellion by Massachusetts foreshadows and portends a backlash of massive proportions against the Democrats in 2010 unless they make a 180 degree change in their current trajectory. Massachusetts, in an incredible twist of irony - given a chance to have their say today thanks to the partisanship of Ted Kennedy himself - has once again rebelled against overreach of an arrogant, oppressive and overreaching national government. Let Freedom ring.
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