Mitt won, and he won big, and throughout the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts, Republicans have reason to cheer. It looks like the
GOP may be able to make a comeback in future elections. And the
reason is simple: Unlike William Weld, Mitt Romney actually owes
his election to Republicans. And hopes are high that Mitt will
devote himself to party-building, as Weld and his successors most
conspicuously did not.
There’s a kind of weird symmetry here between the gubernatorial
races of 2002 and 1990. The party alignments are completely
different. Boston University President John Silber ran as a
Democrat, but he was far more conservative than Bill Weld. You
thought Newt Gingrich had a mouth — you never heard Silber. Weld
won with the help of shocked Massachusetts liberals crossing party
lines; he never owed anything to the GOP. Silber got the
conservative and Republican votes, and then blew his lead in the
last week with a blatant insult to beloved local TV news anchor
Natalie Jacobsen.
I did not see or hear that broadcast (we got here a few months
later), and do not know exactly what was said. But the man who told
me the story, the former Boston housing commissioner and a trustee
of BU, was so shocked at what Silber had said he couldn’t repeat
the words.
In Massachusetts, politics is not only personal, it’s
in-your-face personal. In the election just past, everybody called
the candidates “Shannon” and “Mitt,” and acted as though they knew
them. And the candidates themselves, knowing the game, did
everything they could to come across personally to the
commonwealth’s voters.
So when you look for what happened, you have to dig beneath the
common answers about organization or get out the vote efforts or
ideological positioning. You have to look for something that either
resonates very positively for one candidate or very negatively for
another.
Shannon O’Brien rang up one of those defining negative moments
in her last debate with Mitt Romney, moderated by NBC’s Tim
Russert. With the discussion clearly headed toward a question about
parental consent for abortions, Russert brought up the fact that
teenagers could get tattoos without their parents’ consent at age
16.
“Do you want to see my tattoo?” O’Brien cracked, a levity that
appalled Russert — and the watching and listening audience.
Late-night talk radio, particularly irreverent in Boston, was full
of that exchange that night.
In one careless moment, Shannon made herself bitchily unlikable,
not to any of the doctrinaire voters who had already made up their
minds, but to the ordinary folk who pay only scant and personal
attention to politics. It cost her the election.
But that levity amounted to more than mere carelessness. It
betrayed the core of what being a Democrat had ultimately become,
in the aftermath of the Clinton era, the time when, to quote Gary
Aldrich, the Dem insiders all saw themselves as “so f***ing smart.”
The act has worn itself out. Too many Democrats have displayed that
attitude too many times.
For the doctrinaire types, once again, it didn’t make any
difference. But for the occasionals, the swing voters who decide
elections, it finally grated on the senses. And a significant
number of those people, all over the country, decided to knock the
self-satisfied smirk right off their local Democrat’s face.
P.S. Here in Massachusetts, as in the rest of the country, the
media just doesn’t get it at all. Bob Oakes, the perennial local
anchor on WBUR, the NPR news station, marveled that a Libertarian
had pulled 20 percent of the vote against Senator John Kerry. Oakes
(who pronounces his name “Ewks”) appeared not to know the personal
motives involved in the voting booth, which were simple: People
looked at the Senatorial race, Kerry’s name with no Republican
opponent, and said to themselves, “I’ll vote for anybody against
that bastard.” And they did. I did, and I don’t even remember the
Libertarian’s name.
