Now that all of the theories about why Dems lost Kennedy’s senate seat have been vented, we turn to the more challenging ‘where do we go from here? question.’ It’s really a two-parter, with long range and short-term responses needed. Breaking the short term down, the most immediate question at hand is ‘what do we do about health care reform?’
I’m against the suggestion that HCR be back-burnered to bring jobs and financial system reform to the fore. That may have been the best approach months ago, but it’s too late for that now. It would reek of defeatism, rally the GOP and make Democrats look ineffectual. We have to finish this battle, lest we be branded by swing voters as dithering blowhards.
One of the more interesting proposals in the wake of losing our 60th vote is to repackage health care reform into smaller units. Two approaches have thus far been proposed. Here’s William Greider’s suggestion, from his post at The Nation:

If comprehensive healthcare reform is out of the question, Obama Democrats can break it down into smaller pieces and try to pass worthy measures one by one. A bill to prohibit insurance companies from banning people with pre-existing ailments? Pass it the House and try to pass it in the Senate. If Republicans want to filibuster, make them filibuster. A measure to allow cheaper drug imports from Canada? Let Republicans vote against that. Repealing the antitrust exemption for insurance companies — Democrats support it. Democrats need to start a fight on taxes too. Do Republicans want to tax Wall Street banks or not? Obama has proposed it, let’s have a roll call. The attack strategy will focus on all the reforms people want and need and create a new political dynamic.

Robert Creamer, writing at The HuffPo, argues that HCR could be repackaged into two bills, but via a different route:

One option under consideration involves the House passing the Senate version of the bill as well as a second bill that includes the agreements negotiated in the conference between the Senate and House. The second bill would then be considered under the “budget reconciliation” rules that would not be subject to a Senate filibuster and could therefore become law with the support of a majority vote.
…In the short term, unless a Republican agrees to join with Democrats to cut off debate and bring the health care compromise to a vote in the Senate, the bill negotiated between the House and Senate leadership should be passed using the budget reconciliation rules.
The use of this procedure is not at all unprecedented. The States’ Children’s Health Insurance program (SCHIP) was originally passed using reconciliation rules. The Bush tax cuts were all passed with a simple majority vote using budget reconciliation rules. Nobody argued these measures were being “jammed through” because they did not require 60 votes.

Creamer also offers a response to the Republican whinefest that would follow this strategy:

…To hear some the Republicans, a few conservative Democrats, and portions of the media, you’d think that the idea of passing something with a majority in the Senate is a grave perversion of the Rule of Law — and would involve “jamming” the legislation through Congress. That formulation could well have come from the Mad Hatter. In democracies, the majorities get to make laws. In a democracy, the Minority tail should not be allowed to wag the Majority dog.
What is undemocratic is the idea that a minority — that also happens to represent the insurance industry and other wealthy, vested interests — can block the will of the majority.
During the last few years we’ve gotten so used to the idea that all major legislation requires 60 votes to pass the Senate that it now sounds “natural.” Some people even believe it is in the Constitution. But of course that’s not true. The Constitution assumes that both the House and Senate require a majority to conduct business and pass laws.
…And as we consider major legislation over the next year, we need to remember history. Voters don’t remember the the procedures used to pass major pieces of legislation. How many everyday Americans know — or care — that the Bush tax cuts, or SCHIP were passed using reconciliation procedures? Does anyone remember the procedure used to pass Social Security or Medicare? How many remember that the House Republicans kept the roll call open for an unprecedented three hours to round up the votes necessary to pass their prescription drug plan, Medicare Part D? Talk about jamming something through!
A month after something is passed, no one remembers or cares about the procedure used to pass major legislation. Major programs are judged by the voters based on their actual effect — not the procedure that was used to pass them…Scott Brown was not elected to be the 51st Republican in the Senate. He was elected to be the 41st Republican. That should not entitle Republicans to block every significant piece of legislation — to block fundamental change.
If we allow them to, shame on us.

Creamer is making good sense here. The budget reconciliation route is a more palatable option now, especially since our available choices have narrowed. He is clearly right that the GOP’s ’60 percent is the only real majority’ argument is a loser that invites ridicule, and Dems should not hesitate to provide it.
Both of these approaches have merit, because they guarantee Dems at least one, and likely more major victories. Elimination of “prior condition” as a disqualifying criteria is as close to a sure thing as is possible. Other measures in the current package also have a good chance of passing. It could certainly be said Democrats, and Democrats alone, provided the leadership that got these urgently-needed reforms passed.

This item is crossposted from ProgressiveFix.
In the wake of Tuesday’s Republican victory in Massachusetts, Scott Winship wrote a post at ProgressiveFix that expressed hope that “liberal pundits” would finally get out of “denial” about the unpopularity of health care reform.
Now as Scott knows, there’s always peril involved in making generalizations about the views of large classes of people. I don’t know which “liberal pundits” he’s thinking about in making the suggestion that there’s a general unwillingness to accept public opinion data on health reform; the links he offers don’t really support the claim. But most of the “liberal pundits” I’ve read in recent months don’t dispute the fact that public support for the particular legislation being discussed in Congress at any given moment has been flagging (though given the very fluid nature of the legislative process, it’s difficult to identify which version the public is reacting to, which is why the variations in the wording of polling questions on health reform so often produce different results).
Scott goes on to mock particular arguments that he views as rationalizations for this alleged unwillingness to accept reality: voters are uninformed, Republicans have misled them, and in any event, a significant part of the opposition to health reform bills is “from the left.”
Are these really just rationalizations? I don’t think so. Poor public information on health reform and Republican lies about “ObamaCare” are germane for the simple reason that public opinion may well change if health reform is enacted, and lo and behold “death panels” aren’t convened, Medicare benefit cuts don’t happen, and “government” does not in fact “take over” health care. And the “opposition from the left” data point is relevant to nervous Democrats in Congress because voters unhappy with the absence of a public option, for example, are not terribly likely to vote for Republican candidates who favor voucherization of Medicare or oppose regulation of health insurers.
Scott also seems to assume that “liberals” who talk about the “will of the majority” being frustrated by the de facto 60-vote requirement in the Senate are talking about public opinion. But all the examples he cites are in fact discussing the “will of the majority” of senators, and the majority of the population they represent. The rules of the Senate, after all, cannot be adjusted daily based on tracking polls of the relative popularity of this or that piece of legislation.
Finally, there’s the apparent motivator of Scott’s post: the Massachusetts results. Should the strong opposition of Scott Brown voters to health care reform (at the federal level, at least) represent an “aha” moment for those with any doubts about public opinion on this issue? Again, I see no atmosphere of denial on the subject; yes, many observers, myself included, have noted that a lot of different things were going on in Massachusetts, and have argued that it was not all just one vast referendum on health reform in Congress. But more to the immediate point, the relevance of the Massachusetts results to public opinion nationally is significantly damaged by its unique status as a state that has already enacted reforms almost identical to those attempted by the pending legislation in Congress. And this, in fact, was Scott Brown’s number one talking point on health care reform: why should Bay State citizens pay taxes to give Nebraska the benefits Massachusetts already enjoys? That’s a pretty compelling argument, on the surface at least, but it’s not one that can be made elsewhere.
Ironically, Scott closes his piece by suggesting that perhaps congressional Democrats should put aside fears about public opinion and enact health reform legislation anyway. In doing so, he reflects the real debate I’ve been hearing among “liberal pundits” for many months now: when given a historic opportunity to achieve a long-held progressive goal which happens to represent an immediate national challenge, should Democrats defer action until public opinion is completely on their side? What’s the point of running for office as a progressive if you aren’t determined to achieve progressive policy goals when you can? Is there any other approach to health reform that might be more popular? Is there any time like the present for action?
These questions don’t automatically answer themselves, but I don’t think it’s fair to suggest that health reform advocates are in denial about the political risks involved in health care reform, particularly at a time when Republicans are absolutely refusing to cooperate, and when much of the beltway commentariat has been telling the president for months that he should abandon all goals other than agitating the air for more jobs and lower deficits.
Progressives need data-driven critics like Scott Winship who are willing to contribute to our debates with sometimes troubling information. But in this case, I suspect, to use an old southern expression, he’s just goosing a ghost.

It was not entirely unexpected, but is still dramatic and depressing news: in a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has overturned a century-old ban on direct corporate political spending, potentially opening a very large spigot of special-interest money into our airwaves just in time for the 2010 elections.
The decision did not immediately affect federal limitations on contributions to candidates, or “soft money” contributions to party committees. But it did strike down the ancient prohibition of direct corporate sponsorship of “issue ads.” The decision also kills state-level corporate political spending bans.
It will take awhile to fully digest the impact of this decision, which is the most tangible consequence yet of George W. Bush’s Court appointments (Roberts and Alito joined the majority). And it’s not an unambiguous victory for corporations, since labor unions and progressive non-profit corporations are also “liberated” by the ruling.
But this does represent one of the hard-core Right’s long-term agenda items, and obviously strengthens the Court’s “money equals speech” formulation of First Amendment rights, which has long frustrated campaign reform advocates and puzzled observers from other countries. It also may feed the trend among reformers to focus on public financing of campaigns as an alternative to private political money, instead of increasingly futile efforts to regulate private political money.
All in all, though, the Supremes made sure this will go down as an especially bad week in progressive politics.

There was a point yesterday when it sure looked like Scott Brown had managed to kill federal health care reform without setting foot in Washington. Senate Democrats were busily disclaiming any interest in further action on a potential House-Senate conference committee report before Brown could arrive to joyfully join a filibuster and impose the will of the minority. House Democrats were refusing to consider passage of the Senate bill (which could avoid the necessity of a conference committee report and another Senate vote) without iron-clad assurances of future action to change objectionable features (e.g., the “Cadillac tax” which unions hate, and language restricting abortion). Such assurances did not seem to be forthcoming from Senate Democrats. And no one knew where the White House was, though rumors abounded that the president had told a reporter it was time to go back to the drawing board and try to enact something less ambitious.
All this was happening as conservatives in effect snaked-danced through the streets hailing Brown’s victory as the largest political event since, maybe, World War II, and the effective end of the Obama presidency.
The general malaise among health-care-reform-minded progressives was probably best expressed by The New Republic‘s Jonathan Cohn, who has been an eternal optimist about prospects for eventually getting legislation done. He published a piece late yesterday bewailing the White House’s apparent drift, with the bitter title: “Where’s the Obama I voted for?”
As often happens, though, the panic subsided, and things look more hopeful today. Turns out the president’s comments were vague but resolute about pressing forward on health reform. Senate Democrats are not walking away from health reform, and House Democrats have stopped making angry comments about the impossibility of getting acceptable assurances from the Senate about future action in order to facilitate passage of the Senate bill. It still will be complicated to put together a “deal” that both progressives and moderates in both Houses can live with, but it seems to be sinking in that failure to enact anything, after so many Democrats have already cast votes for reform and made themselves targets for conservative attacks, is just not an acceptable outcome.
So the conservative exultation over “the death of ObamaCare” may be a bit premature. We’ll know soon enough.
UPDATE: Another big scare went though the progressive community today when Nancy Pelosi made remarks that were interepreted by some, most notably Josh Marshall, as “pulling the plug” on House action on health care reform. Josh later walked back this conclusion a bit, and there’s some sentiment behind the scenes in Washington that Pelosi is simply trying to convince Senate Democrats (and the White House) that they need to get serious about the “fix” part of the “pass-it-and-fix-it” formula for House passage of the Senate health reform bill. Meanwhile, the White House seems to be moving on to the more promising political ground of bank reform, perhaps hoping to eliminate the public glare on congressional health reform discussions.

This item is crossposted from ProgressiveFix.
Progressives looking at yesterday’s results from Massachusetts would be wise to avoid over-interpretation. Republicans naturally are spinning Scott Brown’s victory as one of the most epochal events in political history, and as a “message” to President Obama that he needs to abandon pretty much everything he is trying to do. And just as naturally, Democrats with varying grievances about the way that the administration or the congressional leadership are comporting themselves will find vindication in so visible and startling a party defeat.
Scott Winship’s post notwithstanding, the reality remains that the segment of Massachusetts voters who went to the polls yesterday were not setting themselves up as a national focus group on the Obama administration generally or a specific issue like health care reform. They chose between two candidates. As Nate Silver reminded readers last night, the desire to find a single explanation for Brown’s victory is almost certainly misguided. Yes, the national political environment (itself heavily affected by the struggling economy as much as or more than anything the president or his party have or haven’t done) undoubtedly contributed to the outcome; but so, too, did the vast disparity between the quality of the two campaigns; and so, too, did factors unique to Massachusetts, most notably long-simmering resentment of a dominant but complacent state Democratic Party (reflected almost perfectly by Martha Coakley’s complacent campaign), and the existence of a health care system that enabled Scott Brown to promise to shoot down almost identical national reforms with impunity.
I’d add to Nate’s analysis the point that timing made a lot of difference to the outcome. Had the election been held a week later, it’s likely that the “wake-up call” to Democrats provided by radically worsening poll numbers would have bestirred the Coakley campaign to get moving earlier; a Rasmussen exit poll suggested that she actually gained ground in the last few days. And without question, the fact that this special election occurred at an especially late and sensitive moment in the national health reform debate made Brown’s campaign a source of intense excitement for Republicans nationally and in Massachusetts, which helped him raise vast sums of money quickly, and pre-energized GOP voters.
So this really was in many respects a “perfect storm” for the Republican candidate, and no one pointing that out should be accused of rationalizing a painful defeat for Democrats. Still, part of the outcome was attributable to the national political environment. But it’s not clear that Brown’s election added a whole lot to our understanding of that dynamic. As John Judis pointed out this morning, we already knew that Barack Obama has a persistent problem connecting with non-college-educated older white voters, who happen to turn out disproportionately in non-presidential elections. We also knew that the approval ratings of presidents tend to be affected in ways that are difficult to overcome by high levels of unemployment. We already knew that we were in an environment of toxic hostility to the political status quo. And we knew that a majority of Americans don’t much like the pending federal health care reform legislation, though nothing like a majority supports the Republican proposition that the status quo in health care is acceptable.
In other words, the Massachusetts results confirmed much of what we already knew about the tough but negotiable road ahead for the administration and its agenda. And even though the GOP has a bright new star in Scott Brown (who nonetheless probably won’t be reelected to a full term in 2012 given a normal presidential turnout in Massachusetts), it didn’t change the fact that the Republican Party itself is in greater disrepute than any other political institution in the country.
Brown’s election does, of course, create an immediate and difficult challenge to the final enactment of health care reform in Congress. But it’s surmountable if progressives keep their eyes on the prize and refuse to panic or point fingers at each other. I couldn’t agree more with Will Marshall’s point about the perversity of letting the Massachusetts results deny the country the same reforms that Massachusetts voters, not to mention their new senator, seem to like. And I hope congressional Democrats think about Jonathan Chait’s argument that they’ve already taken the risk of voting for health care reform, and would be monumentally foolish to abandon their efforts now.
Sure, yesterday’s results were significant and worth analyzing. But let’s wait a while before adjudging them as an event with huge consequences beyond Massachusetts.

After reading my favorite pundits’ unsurprising takes on Coakley’s MA meltdown, I thought I’d check out the Beantown rags, to see if they had any fresh angles. After all, these are the folks who saw the ad campaigns, heard the buzz in the watering holes and supermarkets and followed the story longer than those based elsewhere. Here’s the skinny from The Globe‘s Brian C. Mooney:

Brown, an obscure state senator with an unremarkable record when he entered the race four months ago, was a household name across the country by the end of the abbrevi ated campaign. Running a vigorous, smart, and error-free campaign, he became a vessel into which cranky and worried voters poured their frustrations and fears…To be sure, Brown was the beneficiary of the blundering campaign of his opponent, Coakley, who blew a 31-point lead in two months, according to one poll. But in electing Brown, a large segment of the electorate declared that there is little appetite for near-universal national health care, the chief domestic policy initiative of Obama, who carried the state by 26 percentage points only 14 months ago.
Brown skillfully made the election a referendum on the issue, nationalizing the race when he repeatedly said he would be the 41st vote in the Senate, enough for the GOP to block the Democrats’ bill. Money poured in from around the country. His campaign had an initial budget of $1.2 million but eventually spent $13 million, about $12 million of which came in via the Internet, a campaign official said last night.

So how bad was Coakley’s campaign? Mooney adds,

…Brown withstood the most blistering assault of late attack ads the state has ever seen. As Coakley began to collapse, her campaign, Democratic Party committees, outside organized labor, and environmental and abortion rights groups bankrolled a desperate multimillion-dollar carpet bombing ad campaign in an effort to halt Brown’s surge. It backfired. The ads, some of which distorted Brown’s record, created a blowback that scorched the Democrat. Coakley entered the campaign as a well-liked politician and ended with high negative poll ratings. She will probably face withering recriminations in Democratic circles, and her weakened status could produce a challenger to her reelection in the fall.

And perhaps most tellingly:

…The unflinching Brown had much more experience in tough partisan elections than Coakley, and it showed in this campaign. In 2004, the Republican won a close special election and November rematch to capture and then hold his state Senate seat. Coakley, by contrast, won the offices of attorney general and Middlesex district attorney over token Republican opponents.
Brown’s chief consultants were battle-tested not only in bruising state elections but also at the national level. Eric Fehrnstrom, Beth Myers, and Peter Flaherty, all principals of The Shawmut Group, were veterans of Mitt Romney’s 2002 gubernatorial and 2008 presidential campaigns. They provided strategic advice, developed the communications plan, and created Brown’s distinctive and highly effective television advertisements..

Mooney goes on to describe a controversial Brown ad, which got lots of attention, featuring JFK morphing into Brown, running 5 days, with no Coakley response, apparently because of “her run-out-the-clock strategy.”
In his article “How Brown Won,” David S. Bernstein of the Boston Phoenix adds to Mooney’s point about Brown’s campaign advisors:

Give credit to the brain trust behind Brown’s campaign: Mitt Romney’s top people, bred in Massachusetts politics and trained at the top levels of presidential combat. They were assembled on the stage at Park Plaza last night: Beth Myers, Beth Lindstrom, Peter Flaherty, Eric Fehrnstrom (texting away even as Brown delivered his victory speech), and of course the former governor himself, taking a victory lap in front of a national audience of cable-watching conservatives (and potential 2012 primary voters).
Watching them, it occurred to me that the same group spent most of 2007 traipsing across Iowa, having built the Romney strategy around winning that state’s caucuses; and that during that time they may have picked up a lesson or two from watching another campaign that bet heavily on Iowa: Barack Obama’s.
As that campaign’s manager David Plouffe describes in The Audacity To Win, Obama’s strategists knew from the start that they could not beat Hillary Clinton among the people who normally participate in caucuses. Thus, they had to expand the playing field — greatly increase the number (and type) of participants, so that the people who don’t normally vote would overwhelm the regulars.
Brown faced the same dilemma. It was widely accepted that turnout for the special election would be no more than 30 percent, or 1.2 million people — and that number would include more than 600,000 who had already voted in the Democratic primary. The math isn’t difficult.
If you like poker analogies, Coakley had a winning five-card hand, so Brown decided to make it a seven-card game.
…They did their job with Brown brilliantly, turning the well-to-do political hack suburbanite into a pickup-driving man of the people. And Brown, like Romney, is an outstanding candidate: disciplined, hard-working, and malleable.

The coverage in the Boston Herald was less revealing, other than relating U.S. Rep. Barney Frank’s assessment: “Martha Coakley was a lousy candidate. She let herself get involved in a personality debate.”
Mooney also notes that “Brown worked the talk radio circuit relentlessly…” All in all, the local accounts make it sound more like Coakley was outmaneuvered and outworked, and less like a pivotal majority was all that bent out of shape about the Democrats’ health care reforms. Absent any exit poll data, however, it’s impossible to say how much voter discontent about unemployment and the bailout influenced the vote. But it appears that Dems have been bested in candidate recruitment and campaign management in MA, as we were in the VA governor’s race.

Yesterday I asked the question, “Where’s Mitt?”, noting the absence of the former Massachusetts governor and supposed 2012 presidential front-runner from any recent involvement in Scott Brown’s campaign.
Then last night, right after the polls closed, Mitt was very visible, doing serial interviews and joining Brown on the victory platform. Accounts of the Brown campaign also began to emphasize the involvement of former Romney staff.
At that point, Mitt’s low standing in Massachusetts couldn’t hurt Brown, and given the great excitement of Republicans around the country about the victory, Romney probably stopped worrying about complicity in Brown’s defense of the Massachusetts health plan. Besides, there’s probably not a GOP pol in the country who didn’t wish he or she was in Boston last night, rubbing shoulders with the party’s new star.
It will be interesting to see if Brown helps rehabilitate Romney from his near-fatal association with health care “socialism”–or indeed, begins to displace him as the country’s favorite Bay State GOPer.

The only thing that made Scott Brown’s victory in the Massachusetts Senate race a matter of great suspense was the high turnout today. It appears he will win by somewhere between 3 and 6 percent, riding a very good showing in the Boston suburbs.
There’s no suspense at all, of course, about the apocalyptic spin that Republicans will give this special election, because they’ve already been at it for the last week. Aside from the rather premature implications they are drawing for the elections this November, there’s massive talk about the need for President Obama to, well, surrender on his entire policy agenda, and focus, I suppose, on doing a lot of nothing, since that is the preferred conservative path at present.
On one issue, health care reform, the Brown victory will obviously create an immediate problem in the Senate. But the idea that the Massachusetts results represent some sort of nationally-significant referendum on the pending bill in Congress is ludicrous, given Scott Brown’s own argument that federal reform is unnecessary because the state has already enacted pretty much the same reforms.
In any event, Democrats should make a real effort not to exploit the results to grind intra-party axes. Yes, it’s obvious that both the Democratic message and the party’s voter mobilization efforts need to be ramped up significantly. The same is true of efforts to explain to voters exactly what sort of craziness they are asking for if Republicans actually win back either branch of Congress in November. But those Democrats who are tempted to demand that the Obama administration make a dramatic turn to the Left or Center in response to tonight’s results would be better advised to turn to their intra-party adversaries and express some solidarity. We are going to need it going forward, and the alternative could prove to be a national turn to the Right that the public shows no real signs, in Massachusetts or elsewhere, of wanting. We lost a single special election under very difficult circumstances. It’s only a harbinger of very bad things to come if we let it become one.
UPDATE: Jonathan Chait uses a very apt metaphor in urging Democrats not to over-react to electoral setbacks like the one tonight:

Remember the classic scene in It’s a Wonderful Life? Facing a run on his building and loan, George Bailey tries to explain to his frantic customers how to look after their self-interest. “Don’t you see what’s happening?” he pleads, “Potter isn’t selling. Potter’s buying! And why? Because we’re panicking and he’s not.” President Obama’s great challenge right now is to be his party’s George Bailey.

And the President could use some help, beginning with Democrats who understand this is absolutely the worst time to give up on health care reform.

This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
As Jonathan Chait has noted, the deadly serious politics of abortion intruded into the playful world of college football when a conservative Catholic magazine recently attacked the University of Notre Dame for hiring a coach who is friendly with pro-choice Democratic politicians. (A similar incident occurred in 2008 when St. Louis University basketball coach Rick Majerus made a pro-choice comment at a Hillary Clinton campaign event).
But we are about to witness a major escalation of right-to-life opinion-mongering in the sporting world, via an ad by football idol Tim Tebow for James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. It will air during the Super Bowl.
According to an AP sports article:

The former Florida quarterback and his mother will appear in a 30-second commercial during the Super Bowl next month. The Christian group Focus on the Family says the Tebows will share a personal story centering on the theme “Celebrate Family, Celebrate Life.”
The group isn’t releasing details, but the commercial is likely to be an anti-abortion message chronicling Pam Tebow’s 1987 pregnancy. After getting sick during a mission trip to the Philippines, she ignored a recommendation by doctors to abort her fifth child and gave birth to Tim.

Super Bowl ads, as you probably know, are a very, very big deal, generally costing a couple of mil even for a 30-second item. But Tebow’s appearance could get more attention than the usual soft drink ads.
You have to wonder if James Dobson is aware of the strong possibility of a backlash. Tebow received fawning media attention during his four-year college career at the University of Florida–not just because of his gridiron skills, but also because of his “character” and especially his piety, underscored last year when he etched citations of Bible verses in the “eyeblack” strips players wear in games. Unsurprisingly, fans of other teams and people uncomfortable with public religious displays by celebrities got rather annoyed by it all. When Tebow’s Florida Gators lost a conference championship and a shot at a second straight national championship in December, cameras showed him on the bench weeping copiously, and a large national demonstration of schadenfreude ensued. (The video of the moment instantly shot to the top of the charts on YouTube).
Now Tebow will come crashing into football’s Holy Night with a partisan pronouncement on one of the most controversial issues in American life. I somehow doubt it will persuade too many watchers to change their views on abortion, but it may change some views about Tim Tebow, which could undermine his value to The Cause.
You do have to give Tebow credit for self-sacrifice. The Super Bowl will precede the NFL draft, and the former Heisman Trophy winner is already facing skepticism that he can succeed as a pro quarterback. Undercutting the game’s image as a matter of pure, clean, violent but nonpartisan fun will not endear him to team owners or fan bases. If furor does break out, Tebow may try to protest that he is just expressing his religious faith as he’s always done. If so, he didn’t do himself any favors by choosing as his sponsor Focus on the Family (naively referred to simply as a “Christian group” in the AP story above), with its mile-wide partisan political agenda and the America-as-Nazi-Germany undertones of many of Dobson’s jeremiads against abortion, feminism, and gay rights.
All in all, maybe Tim Tebow should have followed the apocryphal advice Yogi Berra is said to have given baseball players who crossed themselves before each at-bat: “Leave God alone and let Him enjoy the game.”

As the entire political world looks to Massachusetts today to see what its voters (or at least those willing to vote in a special election) do about an open Senate seat, Republicans, of course, are excited by the possibility that they can kill health care reform by denying Democrats the 60th vote they need for final passage of the reform plan in the upper chamber. But it kinda makes you wonder why in all the obsessive coverage of the MA race, we aren’t seeing the last Republican to win a major statewide office in the Bay State: you know, Mitt Romney, supposedly the front-runner for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination.
Politico‘s Alex Isenstadt raises that question today, and the bottom line is that, well, Romney’s just not that popular in Massachusetts:

Romney’s White House run, said Jeffrey Berry, a Tufts University political scientist, left a sour taste in the mouths of state voters.
“Mitt Romney is an unpopular former governor. He left the state to run for president and people feel he was insincere when he ran for governor in the first place,” said Berry. “He hasn’t really been a part of Massachusetts political culture since he left office. I think people thought he ran for office merely to run for president.”
Andrew Smith, director of the University of New Hampshire Survey Center, explained that voters in Massachusetts had recoiled after Romney took a sharp right turn on social issues during the presidential campaign — and the former Massachusetts governor went so far as to criticize his home state over its legalization of gay marriage.
“He sort of lost credibility among voters in the state,” said Smith.

This certainly helps explain why Republican candidate Scott Brown hasn’t been anxious to recruit Romney to run around the state with him, but there may be something else going on that is keeping Romney out of the picture: Brown’s support for the Massachusetts health system, which is by all accounts a major albatross for Mitt in his future presidential aspirations.
After all, Brown’s number one talking point in recent days has been that his state doesn’t need federal health care reform because it’s already enacted a strikingly similar set of reforms on its own. National action, he argues, will just mean Massachusetts taxpayers will have to help other states get up to speed in covering the uninsured.
This may be an effective argument in Massachusetts, but it’s not terribly appealing to Republicans elsewhere, who typically view the kind of reforms enacted under Romney’s leadership in the Bay State as rampant socialism. The last thing Romney needs is to put himself in the middle of that particular debate.
And so, irony of ironies, the most famous Massachusetts Republican is out of public sight on the day when Massachusetts could give the GOP a very famous victory. That doesn’t bode well for Mitt’s 2012 prospects, and for that matter, for Republican claims that a Brown victory can be exported elswewhere–say, to the 49 states who haven’t enacted a health care reform initiative much like the one they are trying to kill in Congress.