Blue to Red?

To anyone with friends or family in Massachusetts: make sure they're voting on Tuesday (so long as they're Republicans). From The Boston Globe:

For the first time in two generations, the outcome of a US Senate campaign in Massachusetts is not a foregone conclusion. Whatever happens on Tuesday, this much is clear: Democrat Martha Coakley will not win in a cakewalk, and Republican Scott Brown will not be a sacrificial lamb. Heading into the final weekend, two of the country’s most respected political handicappers - Stu Rothenberg and Charlie Cook - pronounced the Bay State Senate contest a “toss-up.’’ A new Suffolk University poll showed Brown surging into the lead, with 50 percent of likely voters supporting him vs. 46 percent for Coakley.

How can this be happening? This is the bluest state of them all - a state without a single Republican in Congress or in statewide office, a state Barack Obama won in a landslide. How can the Senate race be too close to call?

...ultimately the Massachusetts Senate campaign is not about Brown’s personal appeal or Coakley’s shortcomings on the stump. It is about something bigger. This race is a referendum on Barack Obama and the Democratic ascendancy in Washington.

What Obama and his party delivered, however, was not uplifting and transparent bipartisanship.

It was trillion-dollar increases in government spending. It was party-line votes on 2,000-page bills. It was “cash-for-cloture’’ backroom deals. It was tone-deaf boasts about millions of jobs “created or saved,’’ even as unemployment soared into double digits and millions of American jobs disappeared.

Above all, it was the attempt to force through a radical health-care overhaul that would drive up the cost of medical insurance, slash Medicare by half a trillion dollars, and subject one-seventh of the US economy to government micromanagement.

The more insistently Democrats in Washington have pushed ObamaCare, the more unpopular it has become - and the more the president’s approval ratings have sunk.

Emphasis added