News is just coming in that Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in Massachusetts has been lost by the Democrat, Martha Coakley, to the Republicans’ Scott Brown. FiveThirtyEight.Com has the margin at 52-47 and that blog will be well worth watching for analysis and breakdown of the result.
Writing for Crikey today, David Hirst observes:
Luckily for the Republicans, who doubted they had a chance at taking a seat Ted Kennedy had held for 47 years, they nominated a nobody called Scott Brown who drove a truck — a fact the Democrats somehow allowed to become an issue. Naturally Brown, equipped with political advisers as the Republicans smelled not blood but a bloodbath, drove at their behest to Wall Street, where he somehow managed to park.
It wasn’t a huge issue but it played well — the message presumably was that sophisticated people from places such as Boston were not represented by folks who drove trucks. Kennedy sure didn’t drive a truck.
The shell-shocked mainstream media better get used to it, for there are many shocks to come. That the Republicans had the sense to see “truck” and “Wall Street” and bring the two to one was clever indeed.
His analysis suggests that the result is born of the sentiment of a plague on the US political classes, bailing out banks with abandon, but doing nothing perceptible for ‘Main Street’, and the straightened economic circumstances many Americans face after the GFC. He also suggests the Republicans will be emboldened to escalate their anti-Obama rhetoric, but that they themselves have nothing effective to offer; short of pandering to anti-government sentiments deeply embedded in American political culture.
In truth, the US party system is incapable of doing anything other than slightly tacking in the direction of popular sentiment; something confounded by the hyperbolic checks and balances, whose frustration of a majority in the Senate is precisely what made this special election so important.
Previous discussion on LP: Here.
Update: Nate Silver on the swing.
I’m going to go out on a limb here. 
The Obama inauguration: some interesting links
There’s probably literally millions of reactions to Barack Obama’s inauguration on the intertubes today, so I wanted to try to highlight some more specific articles and posts which raise some interesting issues which might otherwise get lost in the crowd. [The text is here.]
Two of the more pressing questions since the election in November have been how Obama will respond to the global financial crisis and from what political position he will seek to govern. Both, in a way, have been answered, but hardly definitively. It’s worth observing in passing – and the point is a crucial one for us here in Australia – that the selective invocation of the mantra “there’s only one President at a time” means that we know very little about what the new administration’s stance on global financial regulatory issues and the governance architecture of the world economy will be. Such decisions as are taken – and paths not taken – will probably be of more lasting moment than how effectively and quickly his fiscal stimulus works to turn around America’s domestic economy. But, in that regard, the addition of tax cuts to the infrastructure investment proposed in his domestic package (to corral in some congressional Republican support, or so it’s being framed) reflects a debate about the composition of any stimulus which is important, and to some degree being played out, in our own context as well. Here, I was intrigued to see Andrew Leonard at Salon’s How The World Works blog suggest that a passage in the Inaugural address shows Obama has come down on the Keynesian side of the argument. (And to see Leonard compare Obama’s eloquence with Keynes’, to the former’s detriment.)
Continue reading ‘The Obama inauguration: some interesting links’