ECNN

Everything changes except President Obama. His agenda doesn’t change. He has had no second thoughts about the wisdom of his health-care policies, or any of his policies; resistance is always and only a reason for redoubling. Also unchanging is the condescension with which he articulates his agenda: He faulted himself for not explaining health care well enough to the easily confused American public. The same familiar strawmen dot the landscape of his rhetoric. (Republicans want to “maintain the status quo” on health care. This president is willing to listen to Republican ideas, just so long as he can then forget that he has ever done so.) Narcissism, too, is a constant companion. The opening of the speech, and the end, invited us to regard Obama as the embodiment of the nation. But it is not the country’s future that has suddenly come under doubt. It is his administration’s. It is not the country’s spirit that is in danger of breaking. It is contemporary liberalism’s. (more…)

Heckuva Job, Brownie.
Life doesn’t simply imitate art. There are important differences between the Scott Brown story and Jefferson Smith’s. And the differences make Brown’s actual achievement more impressive than Smith’s fictitious one. For example, Smith (Jimmy Stewart) was appointed to his seat in the Senate. Scott Brown won his in an upset electoral victory. And at the climactic moment in the film, Smith collapses in a faint, but his cause is saved by a fellow senator, Joseph Paine (Claude Rains), who has had sudden pangs of conscience. By contrast, at a key moment in Brown’s effort, the televised debate a week before Election Day, it was Brown all alone, relying on his own wits, who seized the moment. He responded to David Gergen’s patronizing question as to whether he was willing to “sit in Teddy Kennedy’s seat” and block liberal health care policies by saying, coolly and calmly, “Well, with all due respect, it’s not the Kennedys’ seat, and it’s not the Democrats’ seat, it’s the people’s seat.” (more…)

Obama must change course, or he’s sunk.
The burning question after the Massachusetts Senate election is whether the administration will respond by making a course correction to survive politically, by jettisoning its policy core and cleaning up its methods, or by “doubling down,” as President Obama has implied, and escalating the ideological and guerrilla war for direction of public policy. This was a referendum on the Obama administration, including health care, but not just health care. Even less was it just the rejection of an astonishingly unappealing candidate, predestined to glory as a trivia question. John F. Kennedy took that seat with lashings of his father’s money in an anti-Brahmin revolt against Henry Cabot Lodge in 1952, and was reelected by 864,000 votes in 1958. In the intervening years of Teddy Kennedy, the Democrats could have won with a candidate not confined to two legs and one head. This was less a wake-up call than a Te Deum for a dying and sweaty dream. (more…)

The Dems whistle past the graveyard.
You cannot lead solely by following election returns. But some members of the Democratic party are now testing the proposition that you can ignore them.

A year ago, they luxuriated in victory. On Jan. 23, 2009, newly minted president Barack Obama, in a meeting with congressional leaders at the White House, indicated that bipartisanship (campaign rhetoric notwithstanding) was not on the agenda. Sen. John Kyl (R., Ariz.) raised objections to the idea of “tax credits” for people who did not pay taxes. The president was dismissive. “On some of these issues we’re just going to have ideological differences,” he said. “I won. So I think on that one, I trump you.” (more…)

Scott Brown goes from long shot to leader.
Back on January 4, as Scott Brown was driving his beat-up truck through Massachusetts TV ads, I noted, “The bad news is that Brown needs almost a perfect storm — unbelievably fired-up Republicans, immensely depressed Democrats, and a heavy skew among independents — to make up the traditional 30-percentage-point deficit and win this race.”

A week ago, I followed up, “The good news for him and his campaign — and for every conservative and spending-weary independent pulling for him — is that the Bay State is seeing a lot of wind and some very choppy seas. But there’s need for more before it hits perfect-storm territory.” (more…)