Tuesday, January 19, 2010

The Race Is On; What a Brown Victory Would Mean


It's special election day in Mass., where voters will choose a Senate candidate to replace the Senate seat vacant as a result of the death of Ted Kennedy.

A victory by Republican ScottBrown (not a libertarian by any stretch) over Democrat Martha Coakley could possibly result in the death of Obamacare. It will also send a signal to the rest of the nation that the big government beast can be battled even in the home state of the late Ted Kennedy.

It will be good news for Paulian candidates such as Rand Paul in Kentucky, Ed Gonzalez in northern California and, especially for Peter Schiff in neighboring Connecticut.

It will make Barbara Boxer sweat even more and, curiously, such a Republican victory could actually lead to the collapse of the Republican party, to be replaced with a party to emerge out of Paulians, Tea Party followers and the like.

4 comments:

  1. The talk is that the turnout is heavy. If you live in Mass and want to kill Obamacare (before it kills you) vote for Brown.

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  2. I don't mean to be a party pooper, but I would caution everyone about getting real excited for Republicans to step up to the plate and defend our liberties. I still cringe when I remember staying up late election night 2000 because I was so so worried that that "socialist Al Gore" would wreck the US economy....

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  3. @Bob Murphy

    As I clearly state in my post, Brown is not a libertarian.

    He does two things:

    He throws sand in the gears of Obamacare passage and he energizes the anti-big government crowd, which I also state could result in the end of the Republican Party.

    A Brown victory in this sense, not because Brown himself will defend liberty, is BIG.

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  4. Great response, Bob.

    A Brown win would almost certainly kill Obamacare. It couldn't pass in the Senate. So the only way forward would be for the House to pass the Senate bill as is, i.e., without all the sweeteners that they have been negotiating for the unions, etc. This seems very unlikely to me, given the risk-averse nature of a lot of these incumbent Democrats.

    This kind of a defeat of a top big-government priority issue will have many good ramifications, as Bob suggests. Politically, this is THE battle right now.

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