Scott Brown effect - What Does Brown Mean?

Here is what Charles Krauthammer, MD, who was chief resident in psychiatry at Massachusetts General, and briefly a practicing psychiatrist before turning a national syndicated columnist at the Washington Post, had to say about Senator Scott Brown’s Massachusetts special election victory.

Democrats are delusional: Scott Brown won by running against Obama not Bush. He won by brilliantly nationalizing the race, running hard against the Obama agenda, most notably Obamacare. Killing it was his No. 1 campaign promise.

Bull's-eye. An astonishing 56 percent of Massachusetts voters, according to Rasmussen, called health care their top issue. In a Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates poll, 78 percent of Brown voters said their vote was intended to stop Obamacare. Only a quarter of all voters in the Rasmussen poll cited the economy as their top issue, nicely refuting the Democratic view that Massachusetts was just the usual anti-incumbent resentment you expect in bad economic times.

Brown ran on a very specific, very clear agenda. Stop health care. Don't Mirandize terrorists. Don't raise taxes; cut them. And no more secret backroom deals with special interests.

These deals -- the Louisiana purchase, the Cornhusker kickback -- had engendered a national disgust with the corruption and arrogance of one-party rule. The final straw was the union payoff -- in which labor bosses smugly walked out of the White House with a five-year exemption from a ("Cadillac") health insurance tax Democrats were imposing on the 92 percent of private-sector workers who are not unionized.

The reason both wings of American liberalism -- congressional and mainstream media -- were so surprised at the force of anti-Democratic sentiment is that they'd spent Obama's first year either ignoring or disdaining the clear early signs of resistance: the tea-party movement of the spring and the town-hall meetings of the summer.

With characteristic condescension, they contemptuously dismissed the protests as the mere excrescences of a redneck, retrograde, probably racist rabble.

You would think lefties could discern a proletarian vanguard when they see one. Yet they kept denying the reality of the rising opposition to Obama's social democratic agenda when summer turned to fall and Virginia and New Jersey turned Republican in the year's two gubernatorial elections.

Krauthammer went to medical school at Harvard and did his psychiatry residency at Massachusetts General. Having spent all those years in Boston, the cocoon of Democratic liberalism, you might think he would staunchly support Obamacare.

But no. He says the Democrats “must take democracy seriously.”

If, as the latest polls indicate, 68% of Americans oppose Obamacare, as it is currently understood, there must be something to the opposition. As Krauthammer puts it, “If people really don’t want it, could they possibly have a point?”