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Democrats hear an overdue message

By Michael Graham
Wednesday, January 20, 2010 - Updated 14h ago

Congratulations, you did it!

It wasn’t Scott Brown, or Martha Coakley or even Dick Cheney’s Vote-Stealing-And-Weather-Control Machine.

It was you. You won this election.

Not to take anything away from Sen.-elect Brown (the phrase just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?), or to lessen the value of those 200,000 miles he put on the Truck Heard ’Round The World. He has real political talent, and he’s going to need it to survive 2012 with Barack Obama at the top of the Democratic ticket.

But yesterday’s once-in-a-generation, never-saw-it-coming, dance-in-the-streets victory for democracy is all yours.

Don’t buy the spin that it was all Coakley’s fault. It’s true that Martha was her own “Massachusetts Miracle,” combining the down-home, populist charm of John Kerry with the political skills of the ’88 Dukakis campaign. But Bay State voters have proven they’ll elect just about any Democrat, no matter how lame.

Right, Gov. Patrick?

Brown wasn’t talented enough to win this election and Coakley wasn’t lame enough to lose it. It was you. The smartest campaign line was from one of Brown’s many positive ads: “I can’t do this alone. I need your help.”

He got it - big time.

The political excitement of the past two weeks has been breathtaking, but I actually believe this election was won long before then. It was won in a thousand moments over the past four years.

For some, that moment was another jump in your health insurance - of 15, 20, in some cases 30 percent - all after we spent hundreds of millions on Massachusetts “health reform.”

For others, it was standing in line at the RMV after having been sent to one office that was closed down, and another that you had to pay a toll just to get to.

Or maybe it was on your way to New Hampshire to save $50 in sales taxes; or standing in an unemployment line reading a newspaper story about benefits for illegal immigrants; or maybe it was just one too many eye rolls from our governor, who seems to find the job of actually governing so bothersome and beneath him.

The national press has focused on this election as a referendum on Obamacare, and that’s certainly part of the story. But this e-mail yesterday from a Brown supporter tells the real story:

“It’s about the 25 percent increase in sales tax, Deval’s promise to cut property taxes, Dianne Wilkerson padding her bra, Chuck Turner kickbacks, Galluccio’s DUI, Buonomo ripping off the copiers at the Registry of Deeds, Gerald Amirault, three indicted speakers and four criminal senators.”

Or as one independent voter in Littleton told The Wall Street Journal, “People are just so sick and tired of being treated like second-class citizens.”

More . . .

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