Like most people, including Democratic candidate Martha Coakley, I paid little attention to the Massachusetts Senate race until last week. So I can’t speak to all the reasons why the upset of this young century just occurred, with Republican Scott Brown taking down the mighty Democratic machine. But it is greatly encouraging for reasons of democratic hygiene.
Leave aside the issues — all of them. It is a good thing when free citizens rise up against those who assume that they are entitled to rule them. The Democrats in Massachusetts reeked of entitlement in this election. Soon after Ted Kennedy died last summer, they changed the law so that an interim senator could be appointed. It was considered unthinkable that Ted Kennedy’s seat would be vacant during the push for universal health care, which he described as the cause of his life. In Massachusetts, this meant that his vote should continue to count even after he was dead.
As for the seat itself, Ted was too young to inherit it directly from JFK in 1960, so a placeholder was installed until the younger brother was constitutionally eligible. Upon his death 46 years later, it was thought outre for Democratic candidates to express interest until the seat was first declined by the widow and then the lesser princelings of the Kennedy clan. Eventually the family took a pass and Coakley, the state attorney general, won the Democratic nomination, heretofore considered equivalent to winning Ted Kennedy’s seat.
“It’s not Ted Kennedy’s seat, it’s not the Democrats’ seat, it’s the people’s seat,” Brown said repeatedly about the overreaching sense of entitlement that led his opponent to skip campaigning almost entirely. On Tuesday, the people agreed.
There is something marvelous about voters, long taken for granted, rising up to upset the plans laid out for them by their supposed betters. That cleansing outbreak of rebellious spirit is not alien to Canada.
I remember as a teenager in Calgary when the sainted Peter Lougheed retired in 1985. His successor, Don Getty, a former senior cabinet minister who was waiting his rightful turn in various corporate sinecures, was duly summoned. In a one-party state, Getty won but took a beating, eventually losing his own seat and being hounded out the door.
The Alberta Tories should have known better, as the federal Liberals had tried the same trick the year previous. Pierre Trudeau went strolling in the snow, and John Turner, a former senior cabinet minister waiting his rightful turn while getting rich in the corporate world, was duly summoned. The voters weren’t having it.
Ontario’s Conservatives thought they could work the prearranged hand-off better. When Mike Harris retired in 2002, Ernie Eves, a former senior cabinet minister waiting his rightful turn as a bank executive, was duly summoned. The faintly absurd Eves was defeated at the next election.
Undaunted, Paul Martin got frustrated waiting his rightful turn. The federal Liberals, entrusted with governing the country, instead devoted themselves entirely to deciding who they should put in the Prime Minister’s Office, assuming that it was simply theirs to give. Martin finally wrenched the prize out of Jean Chretien’s grasp, and within six months voters reduced him to a minority government, and soon thereafter to opposition.
An even more arrogant scheme was worked out in the United Kingdom, where Tony Blair and Gordon Brown agreed that Blair would go first, enjoy a good innings as prime minister and then turn it over to Brown. Tension mounted between the two as Brown accused Blair of going back on the deal. Brown now has his turn and is postponing a humiliating defeat as long as is constitutionally possible. The voters decline to ratify arrangements which treat the premiership as an inheritance to be apportioned.
The Massachusetts election followed hard upon a period of political negotiations in Washington that can only be described as gross, with congressmen and senators offering their votes for outright sale and powerful lobbies brazenly trumpeting their special deals. It was all the more disgusting for being brazenly done in the open, the victors delighting over the spoils.
The voters in Massachusetts were ashamed of the shamelessness of it all. Poor Martha Coakley, who thought that she was entitled to coast to victory, disdaining an opponent whom she derided as stooping to shake hands in the cold outside Fenway Park.
Now it is Coakley and the Kennedys out in the cold, stung by the bracing fresh air of popular sovereignty. Massachusetts voters have cleared the fetid air of entitlement that has too long hung over their state.