Hope and Change for Conservatives

You may or may not have heard about a truly remarkable event going on in Massachusetts. Remember that Massachusetts is the state that Ted Kennedy represented in the Senate for far too many years. When Ted died last year, the state's attorney general, Martha Coakley was named as an interim replacement until a special election could be held. That special election will be held next Tuesday, January 19th. Coakley is running against a state Senator named Scott Brown.

Massachusetts is an extremely liberal and Democratic state. John Kerry is their other Senator. Nobody in the world would ever consider it remotely possible that a Republican could even have a chance of getting elected to any federal government position, much less the seat formerly held by Kennedy.

Kennedy was the primary Senate champion for government health care legislation. Brown is openly running as the person who will give the Republicans the 41st vote needed to stop the current health care obamanation now in Congress.

And not only is it a close race, Brown has been shown ahead in at least one recent poll of likely voters. A month ago, he was 30 points behind his Democratic opponent. This is truly amazing. If Brown wins, it would be analogous to David Duke being invited to serve as president of the NAACP, Rush Limbaugh appointed head of the ACLU, or Rick Pitino elected as Mayor of Lexington, Kentucky. Hell would indeed freeze over. What would it mean? Several things:

• Martha Coakley is not a good candidate. In fact she is excruciatingly boring. She says extremely dumb things, like Catholics should not work in emergency rooms (so they would not be called on to perform services that violate their religious views)
• Scott Brown is a very charismatic and articulate candidate. He hit a home run in their last debate. It doesn't get much better than this.

But most importantly:

• Without a doubt the Obama tide is turning, even in the most liberal areas of the country

At this point it really doesn't matter whether Brown wins next Tuesday. His strong showing is a bell weather which will be seen by the Obama administration and national Democrats as a repudiation of Obama's brand of liberalism. We conservatives can only hope that Brown wins so that Obama's government takeover can be stopped now instead of waiting for the November elections.