Brown's Victory Validates Everything I've Been Saying

My name is Joshua, and I'm an addict. If I don't get my news fix, I start sweating and get all twitchy and freaked out.

This is a terrible problem for me, because I would like nothing more in the world than to simply boycott the mainstream media for the next couple of weeks.

Now, there are a lot of reasons the Senate seat held by Ted Kennedy is now in GOP hands, and plenty of blame to go around. But I have no doubt that, despite everything else, Coakley would have won by 20 points if unemployment were at 8-9 percent (and the trend were moving downward), and I can't imagine that she would have had a serious Republican challenger if it were at 6-7 percent.

People always blame the party in power, they always believe that the White House has a magic lever that controls the economy, and for me that reality trumps all the rest. Yes, Coakley ran a shitty campaign, yes, the Dems nationalized the race too late, and, yes, they haven't achieved any big legislative victories about which to brag. But if all that were true and the economy were recovering, Coakley'd be measuring the drapes right now anyway.

That seems pretty straightforward to me. And I'm pretty depressed about the prospect of being subjected to weeks and weeks of shoddy "analysis" whereby everyone and their cousin claims that this race validates all their long-held ideological beliefs. I guess I can count myself fortunate in that I'll only have to absorb the written crap -- I won't be forced to watch the cable news.

Now, it's clear to me that Brown's win is really bad for America -- the Repubs will now filibuster everything (without having to bother reading passages from the Senate rules or actually inconveniencing themselves in any way), unless the Dems suddenly figure out how to exact a price for obstructionism as the Republicans did so effectively, which is doubtful if recent history is any guide. And it's now pretty clear that either the House will pass the far crappier Senate bill, or we won't have another shot at any kind of health-care reform for at least another 10 years.

And while it's really terrible for Democrats -- who are now dedicating furious energy to blaming one another -- I'm not sure how bad this is for liberals and progressives.

I woke up this morning in a country where Big Pharma has a veto over health-care legislation, the corporate media promotes some perverse vision of "centrism" above all other virtues, lobbyists are the true governing party and Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman were votes 59 and 60 in the Senate. I'm going to wake up tomorrow in a country where Big Pharma has a veto over bills, the corporate media promotes their centrism above all other virtues, lobbyists are the true governing party and Joe Lieberman and Olympia Snowe are votes 59 and 60 in the Senate. Our political system's still broken, and a Coakley win wasn't going to fix it.

OK, that sucks, but I still have to get up in the morning and try to do what little I can to fight the good fight. And, I hate to say it, but I think you do too.

Let's keep in mind that this was always a lose-lose race for the progressive movement (maybe I should start putting that in quotes). I don't agree with Steve M.'s suggestion -- it was just that, to be fair to him -- that a Brown win might not be a bad thing because the American public might lay more blame on the GOP if they have the numbers to filibuster. The way I see it, the impact this has on our discourse is the big thing. And I think a Coakley victory would have been dismissed as just a deep-blue Massachusetts thing that doesn't reflect the mood of the nation, and a narrow Coakley win would have produced the exact same conventional wisdom that we'll see tomorrow morning: the Dems veered too far to the left, they were too bold for our "center-right nation" and blah, blah blah.