Reax on Brown and Coakley with an aside for Andy

Wizbang has an entertaining post-mortem on the Senate election in Massachusetts.

Andrew McCarthy says this was not just about health care reform.

Michelle Malkin, who seems to get by on less sleep than the rest of us, has had an analysis of her own up since way too early this morning.

Democrat Lanny Davis in the WSJ is interesting, but I'm partial to Instapundit's measured perspective on this race and its outcome, myself.

Andrew Sullivan deserves a mention that he rarely gets around here, not because I agree with him, but because people I know sometimes applaud his alleged clarity of thought.

Just yesterday, Sullivan was thinking in apocalyptic terms, and invoked even God while pleading with Massachusetts voters to support Coakley. Coakley lost, so today Sullivan is stomping his way through sour grapes (the relevant post heading is "Now: Call the GOP's Bluff").

That's a curious heading. There may be some bluffing from establishment Republicans, who as a rule are no more principled than establishment Democrats (pace Thomas Sowell, and a pox on both their houses!). But smart Republicans are not bluffing.

Brown, by all accounts, is smart. He's certainly quick on his feet. And he got more "Tea Party" help than RNC help.

Sullivan thinks Obama was conciliatory toward Republican critics of his health care initiative, which means he's forgotten that the president basically subcontracted that flagship legislation out to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, who belatedly realized that they had to throw a little bone to their own "Blue Dog" Democrats (sometimes through outright bribery, as was tried with Congresscritters from Louisiana and Nebraska). Radio host Neal Boortz and others continue to point out that more than a few Republican ideas were ignored. For example, have you heard much about allowing individuals to write off the cost of privately-purchased health insurance on their taxes, the way corporations already do? I didn't think so.

Moreover, Sullivan labors under the delusion that Obama and his team made their signature health care reform effort(s) "budget neutral." I guess it doesn't matter to Sullivan how many times the Office of Management and Budget and other analysts all say that postponing accounting does not magically make drunken-sailor-on-shore-leave spending "budget (or deficit) neutral."

Predictably, Sullivan thinks that most of the blame for yesterday's hit to Democratic party fortunes lies with a "dysfunctional Democratic party" rather than its titular head, the president who invariably introduces weasel wording by saying "Let me be clear..." while accepting bouquets in the first-person singular and posing challenges in the first-person plural (Ace over at Ace of Spades noticed this rhetorical trick first; now the Associated Press does the same thing in Obama stories).

Sullivan wants "new reformist ferocity," but only on Obama's terms. He suggests that President Obama "won the election with a new coalition" (a debatable point) but has "had to govern through the existing system, which is essentially broken beyond repair."

In previous blog posts and essays, Sullivan made clear that he thinks George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Rush Limbaugh are the people most responsible for breaking the existing system, although Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid made the mess worse.

Among other things, Sullivan doesn't get what Jon Stewart does, which is that GW Bush managed to pass legislation without ever having the "supermajority" in Congress that Obama and his acolytes depended on to an unseemly degree. As a result of unspecified but transparent and likely Bushian malfeasance, Sullivan sighs, President Obama is "as stranded as the country." Can you hear the violins?

What's funny to me is that despite the entirely uncharacteristic if glancing appeal to God in his election day post, Sullivan lapsed back into form hours later by declaring that President Obama is "all we have left."

When the president said today that "the same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office," Sullivan called his assessment "pitch perfect," though neither he nor the president entertained another plausible theory: that what swept Brown into office was a repudiation of the initiatives that President Obama wants to double-down on, rather than undifferentiated impatience with the status quo or the increasingly well-known horrors of legislative "sausage making."

No, Andy, Obama is not "all we have left." That's not even true for the progressives to whom you were writing. "Put not your trust in princes" is still good advice-- on both sides of the aisle.

(I updated the original post with additional hyperlinks to reinforce certain points)