Taking Back the People's Seats from Monopoly Rule
by Fr. Roger Landry - January 29, 2010
Scott Brown's victory over Martha Coakley in the special election for U.S. Senate has not only massive national ramifications but perhaps even more pronounced statewide implications. January 19 was a bold declaration of independence by Massachusetts voters against a one-party system, both in Boston and in Washington, that has acted as if it prefers to ignore rather than heed their opinions and to presume rather than earn their electoral support.
Scott Brown's victory — or perhaps more precisely, Martha Coakley's defeat — was particularly welcomed by those Massachusetts citizens who support authentically Catholic values on marriage, abortion, conscience protection, and various other cultural and moral issues. In recent years, especially after the members of the Massachusetts legislature repeatedly thwarted their attempts to give voters a chance to overturn the Supreme Judicial Court's redefinition of marriage, values voters have felt increasingly disenfranchised and politically depressed. A victory by Coakley — who as Attorney General sued the federal government to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act in order to open the way to same-sex "marriages" nationally, who used to do free legal work to help girls get abortions without parental knowledge and consent, and who far exceeded Senator Kennedy's "personally opposed" support for abortion by making the most radical positions in favor of abortion a centerpiece of her campaign — would likely have been the equivalent, at least psychologically, of nailing shut their political coffin. For that reason, Brown's election has been received by them as a sort of resurrection, filling them with hope that the attempts of the radical left to force their immorality on everyone else may not be as politically inevitable as members of the radical left wanted everyone else to believe.
The Boston Globe, in a refreshingly balanced and blunt January 24 editorial, said that Brown's victory "told a broader story about Massachusetts politics and of voters' hunger for options in a state that has often offered only one meaningful choice." It welcomed the fact that his triumph "created the potential for improvement in the state's political culture." It "will almost surely be more competition for seats in the U.S. House as well as the Massachusetts House and Senate" and enable "forces of reform" within the Democratic party to "gain traction."
A couple of days after Cardinal Sean O'Malley of Boston wrote on his blog, "It is refreshing that the people of Massachusetts have voted independent of their party affiliation [and looked] at issues rather than just vote party-line," the Globe basically concurred, giving strong reasons for why voting the party-line for so long has harmed the commonwealth. "Single-party dominance leads to stagnation," the editorial continued, in words that can be applied not just to Beacon Hill but to a Capitol Hill, where the Democratic majority has cut Republicans totally out of health-care discussion and has awarded not just pork but whole pigsties to buy votes in Louisiana and Nebraska. "Supermajorities in state legislatures often breed political bosses and corruption. In Congress, representatives who are too confident of their re-election can become politically tone-deaf and complacent, even if they otherwise work hard on legislation. When times get tough, and voters look skeptically at all incumbents, those signs of arrogance loom large."
Among the "signs of arrogance" the editorial writers specified was the "high-handed and foolish move" that Democratic leaders on Beacon Hill took to "upend the traditional system of filling a vacancy in the US Senate." Beacon Hill bosses changed the rules in 2004 away from a principle fair to all to a system that would give the best chance of retaining Democratic influence on Capitol Hill. Then they changed the rules again in 2009 for the very same reasons. It was a classic political example of "might makes right," and they could only get away with such corruption because their supermajority meant that no one could stop them. Another sign of the "arrogance of single-party rule" that the editorial describes is that the U.S. Attorney has indicted three straight Speakers of the House. "In a more competitive political environment," they write, "such a run of corruption would be devastating to Democrats. But the vast, overfed majority on Beacon Hill paid no visible price. The party chose DiMasi's handpicked replacement and kept on moving as if nothing had happened."
People do not like oligarchic rule, and especially resent corrupt oligarchic rule. That is basically the way, the editorial implies, Democratic leadership in the state has been behaving. These were among the factors, it concludes, in "last week's disaster for the Democratic party."
The Globe also suggested that Martha Coakley was a symbol and product of the arrogance of one-party rule. "Her career was marked by single-party dominance. She followed a greased path from Middlesex County district attorney to state [Attorney General], with little competition along the way." The lack of competition clearly hurt her in the election, the editorial continues. "Without electoral competition, even the best political skills begin to atrophy." It leads to politicians' spending "far more time crafting policies in back rooms than explaining them to constituents; even if the policies are sound, members can only benefit from having to confront their critics."
That point leads to what was perhaps the biggest contrast in the Senatorial campaign. It wasn't the stark policy differences over the present health care bill, the economy and jobs, Afghanistan and whether we should defeat or defend terrorists like the Christmas Day bomber. All of these policy divergences were important and clearly played some role in Brown's victory. The biggest gap of all between the candidates, however, seemed to be how they approached the ordinary hard-working men and women of the commonwealth.
Scott Brown seemed to be on a series of job interviews across the state, treating people as his future bosses and asking them for their vote. He seemed to enjoy meeting them and comported himself as if he aspired to be their servant and their voice in Washington. His driving his GMC truck, in great condition after over 200,000 miles, became a powerful symbol that seemed to reinforce that he was anything but elitist and had no aspiration to be chauffeured in a town-car or Cadillac Escalade.
In contrast, Martha Coakley, after an aggressive campaign in the Democratic primary in which she and the other candidates jockeyed to satisfy the demands of those on the far-left fringe, gave the impression of retreating from direct contact with all but her supporters. When asked by a reporter in a generally sympathetic piece about why she was choosing to hold most of her campaign events with officially sympathetic union members, she responded by asking, sarcastically and condescendingly, whether she should rather be shaking hands with Bruins' fans in the cold outside Fenway Park at the January 1 Winter Classic. That is hardly the way someone seeking to serve such people is expected to behave. Such a comment appeared to portray that she thought that she was above such fans, above shaking their hands, above the cold, and above appealing for and earning votes one at a time. This is the personification of what the Globe means by arrogant and out-of-touch.
It got worse. Many snickered, of course, when Martha Coakley demonstrated that she didn't even know that Curt Schilling was one of the greatest Red Sox heroes of all time, and certainly not a Yankees fan. Perhaps the greatest demonstration, however, of how out of touch she was with people at large was seen in the way she made radical support for abortion a centerpiece of her campaign. She attacked Scott Brown not because he was pro-life — unfortunately he isn't, although he does support a few restrictions — but because, while supporting the distribution of the morning after pill to rape victims in emergency rooms, he authored an amendment at the State House exempting medical personnel and institutions who opposed abortion from being forced to administer these potentially abortifacient pills. Coakley attacked Brown for even wanting to protect the jobs of those who in conscience could not administer such pills.
After she raised the subject on Ken Pittman's WBSM radio program in New Bedford, Pittman asked her whether Catholics and others who might oppose abortion still have religious freedom in emergency rooms. The Attorney General replied that they do, but then declared that they "probably shouldn't work in the emergency room." She said this in a state where nearly half the residents are baptized Catholics, many of the hospitals were founded by the Catholic Church, and a high percentage of the medical personnel is Catholic. Coakley somehow was convinced that trampling on the consciences of health care workers would be a winning issue in this state — perhaps because she seemed to consult and value the opinions of her radical pro-abortion donors on Emily's list more than than those typical nurses and pharmacists who populate our state and who would be going to the polls on January 19.
Brown made a lot out of his debate one-liner that he was campaigning for "the people's seat." Last Tuesday, the people of the Commonwealth demonstrated that they consider such a seat theirs to give and put other politicians, locally and nationally, on notice: unless they regard the people's seats they presently occupy with humility rather than as an entitlement, unless they begin to listen to the voice of the people and serve their legitimate interests, the people will rise up to fire them, take the seats back, and offer them to those who will.
Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.
