The Dish

Grand Cayman, British West Indies, 11.30 am

"We are a movement of the plain people, very weak in the matter of culture, intellectual support, and trained leadership. We are demanding, and we expect to win, a return of power into the hands of the everyday, not highly cultured, not overly intellectualized, but entirely unspoiled and not de-Americanized, average citizen of the old stock … " – Dr. Hiram Wesley Evans, (1881 – 1966) in a statement issued by him in 1926 in his role as the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

I found the quote in a 1973 issue of Commentary, in a brutal excavation of the cultural roots of the Watergate scandal. The same magazine, now run by a dauphin of the neocon nepotism-tree, now celebrates the very things it once had the decency to oppose.

Could Ted Kennedy's Senate seat be critical to destroying the deal to extend health insurance to 30 million people? Could Martha Coakley be the last-minute nail in its coffin? That would surely be the real nightmare for Obama. Hence this presidential telephone pitch to Obama voters repelled by Coakley's mediocrity.

He couldn't blame it on GOP intransigence – because if the Dems can't hold Teddy's seat, what use are they? What you see here is the fathomless awfulness of the Democrats. Too fractured and listless to get a solid health insurance bill through both Houses in anything like the time they wanted, too disorganized to make a strong and coherent case for their proposal, led by charisma-free walking corpses like Harry "your dog is fat" Reid and Speaker Pelosi whose political skills do not extend to persuading anyone of anything, they really are the reason so many of us cannot apply that partisan label to ourselves, even when we believe Obama is the best thing this country has going for it politically right now.

But losing Kennedy's seat is a near-epic failure. If health reform fails, it will be because of a fatal combination of Democratic hubris and Democratic weakness. They just won the presidency and both Houses. And this is what they manage? Really, who wants to belong or support a party this goddamn useless?

Frum sees him as an antidote to the Tea Party madness:

Strong on defense and school choice, opposed to the Obama administration’s signature initiatives, Brown voted in favor of Mitt Romney’s health plan in Massachusetts. He describes himself as pro-choice (subject to reasonable limitations), accepts gay marriage in Massachusetts as a settled fact, and told the Boston Herald

editorial board he would have voted to confirm Sonia Sotomayor.

He calls himself “fiscally conservative and socially conscious.” He’s got an environmental record too: In the state senate he voted in favor of a regional initiative to curb greenhouse gas initiatives.

Most important: Unlike his arrogant, brittle opponent, Brown has shown himself an open and accessible candidate, optimistic and without rancor. In short – he’s running exactly the kind of campaign that we alleged RINOs have been urging on the GOP for months now.

It would be a travesty if Brown’s victory is seized upon as a victory for anger, paranoia, and ideological extremism. Some will try – but with a third New England Republican in the Senate, the time for a pushback may have come.

From HRC's blog:

[T]he Associated Press reported on a leaked legal opinion from lawyers at the Pentagon suggesting that any repeal of DADT be delayed until at least 2012.  The AP story did point out that Admiral Mullen has also received conflicting advice and that this opinion did not necessarily reflect his advice to the Secretary or White House.  We’ve always known that we would face at least some opposition from individuals at the Pentagon and this leaked memo reflects that reality.  Leaking information is not unheard of in Washington, but given the internal deliberations that are underway, it seems like Secretary Gates and Admiral Mullen would be running a tighter ship.

It will not happen in Obama's first term.

So I'm applying for my green card – yay! – and gave them my birth certificate. But it doesn't count. Why? Because they need the long-form certificate to verify that I was really born in Kenya, Britain, and has the names of my two biological parents. My saintly sister tracked it down. Should I post it on the Internet?

And demand the same for Trig?

I have to confess: I have always regarded Jay Leno as the dumbest, lamest, lowest common denominator “comedian” on television. It is so gratifying to see that almost every other late-night comedian feels the same way. Kimmel even took his pitch into Leno’s awful, dreadful, excruciating, no-good pathetic excuse for a show. That’s how much they hate him.

Some fascinating data from an unexpected source – the Washington Times:

President Obama notched substantial successes in spending cuts last year, winning 60 percent of his proposed cuts and managing to get Congress to ax several programs that had bedeviled President George W. Bush for years. The administration says Congress accepted at least $6.9 billion of the $11.3 billion in discretionary spending cuts Mr. Obama proposed for the current fiscal year. An analysis by The Washington Times found that Mr. Obama was victorious in getting Congress to slash 24 programs and achieved some level of success in reducing nine other programs… By comparison, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says Mr. Bush won 40 percent of his spending cuts in fiscal 2006 and won less than 15 percent of his proposed cuts for 2007 and 2008.

What are the odds that this fact will be broadcast on Fox News? Yes, you're right: zero.

A reader writes:

You wrote:

If you want to find Ground Zero for this confluence of poverty, isolation, Christianism and meth, take a trip to Wasilla, Alaska, whence the new Esther has emerged.

As a 25-year resident of Anchorage, which is just 40 miles from Wasilla, I wouldn't characterize it as particularly a hotbed of poverty.  Per per the 2000 census, its poverty rate (9.6%) was only slightly higher than that of Anchorage (7.4%) — though its unemployment rate was significantly higher (11.2% in Wasilla vs. 6.8% in Anchorage).  Its median household income was $48,226.  Compare that with New York City (2007 figures): median household income $48,631 with 18.5% living in poverty.

It's not especially isolated either, at least not more so than other communities on the road system in southcentral Alaska. About 30% of its workforce commutes daily into Anchorage, and more come into town for shopping and entertainment.  If you want isolated, try Bush Alaska — the vast areas of the state, predominately Alaska Native in population, accessible only by air or water.

On the other hand, it is a hotbed of Christianism.

And everyone there has to deal with it even if they are not themselves Christianists. (Pretty much the case here in Anchorage too — we have a diverse religious community, but Christianist churches like Jerry Prevo's mega Anchorage Baptist Temple have a lot of loudmouth power hereabouts.)  Wasilla is also a very ugly town that seems more like a long stretch of strip malls and big box stores than an actual town.  It was like that even before Palin became its mayor; she only made it worse.  By comparison, its near neighbor in the Mat-Su Borough, Palmer, has a real sense (as expressed in architecture) of being a community, with a town center, probably due to its history as the center of the Matanuska-Susitna agricultural colony that began in FDR's time.

Given the choice, I do my best to avoid Wasilla because it feels so soul-less, all this suburban-wasteland type architecture in the midst of a spectacularly beautiful part of the world.  I think the spiritual and intellectual vacuity of Christianism in combination with soulless big-box-store-ism and consumer culture have much more to do with Wasilla's meth problems than actual poverty.

Photo of Wasilla's "Main Street" taken by Mudflats.

There is the general political environment that has made the Massachusetts Senate race so tight. There is the money-bomb from the GOP trying to turn this into the death-knell for health insurance reform. There is the effort made by Scott Brown. But then, as in every race, there’s the candidate, Martha Coakley: a classic, insider, Democratic party machine hack with little talent and every single irritating aspect of the presumptious Massachusetts liberal. Think John Kerry. And then lower your standards a few thousand feet. 

Barely campaigning, avoiding the press, courting out-of-state donors, and relying on activists and union organizers to get people to the polls, she responded to a reporter who challenged her strategy thus:

“As opposed to standing outside Fenway Park? In the cold? Shaking hands? This is a special election. And I know that I have the support of Kim Driscoll. And I now know the members of the [Salem] School Committee, who know far more people than I could ever meet.’

 Blue Mass Group sums up much of the sentiment on the bloggy left:

Yes it sucks. Yes you have to vote Coakley.

Even the Globe, which endorsed her, has called her out for refusing to debate Brown one-on-one.

Rather than make a strong case for her own policies, she called Brown’s surge in the polls frightening. Then she did what this kind of liberal does and lashed out at Brown with a series of negative ads that compared him to Bush and painted him as pro-life (his record is pro-choice).

Then there are the recent rhetorical blunders: Stating that al Qaeda is no longer in Afghanistan, airing an ad that misspelled “Massachusetts,” citing Republican “stalkers” in response to the assault of a Weekly Standard reporter by one of her staffers. And behind all this is a long history of questionable decisions that her opponents in both the primary and general elections have barely touched: her lax prosecution of a horrific rape case, her cutting a deal with a pedophile who molested again, her role in keeping an innocent man locked up, her incompetence in arguing a key Supreme Court case, her reluctance to pursue the Menino email scandal, her questionable use of campaign funds.

Brown hasn’t even directly exploited much of this. But Massachusetts voters know it. If the Dems lose next Tuesday, they will deserve to.

(Photo: Darren McCollester/Getty.)