Massachusetts Democrats have been traumatized by Martha Coakley’s “campaign” for the United States Senate.
Every day brings another gaffe, and Friday night’s pratfall in which Coakley described Red Sox hero Curt Schilling as just “another Yankees fan” will rank up among the most memorable gaffes of recent years.
If the campaign had another week to go, she might end up accusing Tom Brady of fealty to the Jets, and Larry Bird of Laker love.
The Schilling stumble came a day after Coakley instructed another talk show host on how Catholics should simply not work in emergency rooms if they couldn’t support abortion on demand and in the same week in which she declared that the terrorists had left Afghanistan.
Who would have suspected that after one week of active campaigning Massachusetts lefties would be pining for the return of Coakley’s much criticized “Rose Garden” campaign of the last two months?
Republican Scott Brown by contrast has run a near-perfect campaign, and as a result he is in a position to pull off one of the great upsets of American political history.
Even President Obama chipped in to help Brown, by cutting an outrageous deal with organized labor last week to make the already bad Obamacare bill far worse in the eyes of anyone with a sense of fairness.
As a result of this deal, union members and the companies which employ them will not have to pay the enormous excise tax on so-called “Cadillac plans,” a 40% burden on the value of the benefit above a prescribed level.
Thus an auto worker toiling away for GM but with his UAW card will see his health benefits taxed significantly less than an auto worker working for any car company that doesn’t have the UAW negotiating for its workers.
Same job. Same pay. But different tax burdens. The deal is so lopsided that no effort is being made to disguise it as other than a payoff to Big Labor.
Few have focused yet on just how great a payoff it is. Consider the vast new incentive that companies and workers will have to unionize if Obamacare survives the next four weeks and becomes law with this provision.
Even long-time opponents of unionization on shop floors across the country will have to rethink their stance given the size of this plum. Even management will have to recalculate their position vis-a-vis unions when the financial advantage to having a union represent the workforce is so significant.
Of course the cost the unions are avoiding will be absorbed by non-union wage earners and the companies that employ them. But the downstream consequences of so greatly favoring unions are enormous and of course destructive.
So called “moderate” Democrats like senators Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas are already in deep political trouble in their home states because of their support for Obamacare, as are the Blue Dogs in the House.
Imagine the reaction among their voters when word gets out that Big Labor got a sweetheart deal biggger than those bestowed on Louisiana and Nebraska combined.
Voters in Massachusetts have a lot of reasons to vote against Martha Coakley, and many fine reasons to vote for Scott Brown, including his nearly three decades of military service.
But if they are still on the fence at this late date, they should pull the lever for Brown to stop the Big Labor carve-out, the worst example yet of the Chicago-style politics that have driven the federal government towards insolvency, pushed Medicare to the brink of massive cuts and the health care system a long way towards explicit rationing of care.
Even Bay State Democrats know their party is out-of-control and led by ideologues with little concept of fundamental economic reality or any attachment to common sense.
Martha Coakley would be an embarrassment as a U.S. senator, but her support for the thoroughly corrupt package of deals and steals that is Obamacare would be a disaster for the country as a whole.
Examiner columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com.
