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The chattering class is fond of far-fetched theories that lead to lots of intrigue, and one fanciful idea that has been floating around lately is that Scott Brown is ready for a comeback.

The hypothesis is that if John Kerry is nominated to President Obama’s cabinet, then Brown would be a strong contender to fill Kerry’s seat. It has even been speculated that Senate Republicans went after U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice so harshly just to improve Brown’s chance at a comeback.

If you look at the facts, though, you’ll see that Brown is far from the sure bet to win another contest that Republicans hope he is. Consider the following:

Who lost by a bigger margin than almost any candidate in a competitive Senate race in the country?

Scott Brown. The 7.5-point loss he suffered at Elizabeth Warren’s hands was even worse than the 5.5-point loss for Brown’s fellow Republican Richard Mourdock in Indiana–that’s right, the guy who said pregnancy from rape is “something that God intended.” In short, as convenient as it is to refer to the Massachusetts contest between Brown and Warren as a close race, Brown took a beating.

Who was the only incumbent in the entire U.S. Senate to lose in 2012?

Scott Brown. Every one of Brown’s colleagues in the Senate who vied for reelection managed to win. That includes Bill Nelson in the swing state of Florida. That includes Democrat Jon Tester, who held onto his seat in Montana. That includes Bob Casey in the perennial battleground of Pennsylvania. It includes the other Senator Brown–Sherrod Brown of Ohio. Scott Brown proved himself uniquely inept in his failure to fend off his challenger – and to in fact lose by 7.5%. And remember, this wasn’t months or even years ago – this was last month.

Who lost to Elizabeth Warren by the same margin that William Weld lost to John Kerry?

Scott Brown. Weld and Brown both lost by approximately 7.48 points, but Weld was going up against a popular two-term incumbent, whereas Brown was the incumbent facing a first-time political candidate. For all the talk about his special campaign skills and positioning, nothing in the results was very special.

Who in the Massachusetts Senate election appeared to pick up no last-minute support or votes from undecided voters?

You guessed it: Scott Brown. Dozens of polls conducted in the seven months leading up to Election Day show that Brown hovered around the 46% mark the whole time. Of course, 46% is what Brown actually ended up with on Election Day. In other words, Brown made no progress during his campaign, despite an enormous war chest of almost $40 million to spend on it.

These facts tell only part of the story, though. What’s most damning to Brown’s future prospects isn’t the margin of his defeat. It’s the campaign he ran and the issues he stood for. (more…)

GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s reaction to high unemployment is creepy.

During an interview with CBS reporter Jan Crawford last week, Romney smirked as he mentioned that unemployment has remained above 8 percent for 39 months. Then, as the interview ended, he smirked again after saying President Obama had hoped the Recovery Act would reduce joblessness to 6 percent by now.

Romney is loving high unemployment. Just like the Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives that has repeatedly blocked President Obama’s proposals to increase hiring, Romney believes high joblessness is good for the GOP. It’s one thing for a politician to know in his heart of hearts that a calamity for the country may help him achieve his ambitions. It’s another to be so callous as to beam about it on TV.

The nation’s sustained high unemployment disheartens any normal human being. Friday’s report that only 69,000 jobs were created in May was troubling — that is to anyone who has ever been laid off or had a friend or relative or neighbor who lost a job. They know the feelings of fear, depression and guilt that accompany job loss. They’ve experienced the suffering as job applications are rejected, bills pile up and foreclosure is threatened. Normal people don’t smile about high unemployment; they cringe.

Romney contends he’s the fella to fix those unemployment numbers. But his record as CEO of Bain Capital and governor of Massachusetts provides little evidence of that. The focus of Bain was never job creation. It was money making. And if making money meant destroying jobs, that’s what Bain did. (more…)

I’ve just purchased tickets to see the new movie “Contagion,” about a mysterious virus that spreads with deadly havoc around the globe. But after reading this article by the Los Angeles Times, I’m realizing that the real health horror story is not coming from Hollywood but from Texas.

That is where we’re getting a real-world example of what conservative health care looks like, and what the entire country is likely to experience if conservatives succeed in dismantling health care reform.

The L.A. Times reports on what has happened to the state’s health care system under Gov. Rick Perry:

… [I]n the 11 years the Republican presidential hopeful has been in office, working Texans increasingly have been priced out of private healthcare while the state’s safety net has withered, leaving millions of state residents without medical care.

“Texas just hasn’t proven it can run a health system,” said Dr. C. Bruce Malone III, an orthopedic surgeon and president of the historically conservative Texas Medical Assn. (more…)

By Dave Johnson
Fellow with Campaign for America’s Future

The blogs and airwaves are full of explanations for the MA Senate special election’s outcome, mostly involving people being upset at particulars of the health care bill. But I don’t really think that the people who voted were all that well-informed about differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill, the “public option,” or other intricacies of ongoing legislation.

Instead, I think we should take the winning candidate’s word for it. On his website he says his win was for the following reasons, and I agree:

At his September 12 announcement of candidacy for the U.S. Senate, Senator Brown articulated a core set of beliefs that guide his thinking:
• Government is too big and that the federal stimulus bill made government bigger instead of creating jobs
• Taxes are too high and are going higher if Congress continues with its out-of-control spending
• The historic amount of debt we are passing on to our children and grandchildren is immoral
• Power concentrated in the hands of one political party, as it is here in Massachusetts, leads to bad government and poor decisions
• A strong military and vigorous homeland defense will protect our interests and security around the world and at home
• All Americans deserve health care, but we shouldn’t have to create a new government insurance program to provide it
I think the voters agreed with these basic conservative talking points. But here’s the thing: most of the assumptions underlying these statements are simply wrong – factually incorrect. They have been pounded out by a corporate/conservative misinformation machine that just makes stuff out and puts it out there on TV, the radio, email forwarding and every other channel they can find. There is no one out there responding with truth and facts, and making the case for government and democracy.

When the public only hears from one side, and hears from them over and over, day after day, after a while many people are going to believe what they are hearing. When no one seems willing to make the case for the other side of the issue, it starts to look like maybe there is no case.

The Right has a message machine that has been repeating misinformation and getting away with it, because:
1) The leadership of the other side has let them get away with it.
2) There is no comparable megaphone with which to refute the misinformation.

So is there a case to be made for government and democracy? Will our elected leaders start going before the public and making that case? Will the big funders and foundations start providing the means for progressive organizations to reach the general public and counter corporate-owned media and FOX News and Rush Limbaugh and the rest of talk radio and a million email forwards, and make the case for government and democracy? If not, then we shouldn’t expect our government and democracy to continue. But if we just take the easy way out and let the tea party crowd take over things could get scary. The alternative to “big government” is government by big corporations.

 ***

 This post originally appeared at the Campaign for America’s Future (CAF).

Johnson also is a fellow at the Commonweal Institute and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for the Renewal of the California Dream.

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Follow Dave Johnson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/dcjohnson

By Richard Trumka
President, AFL-CIO

The news is out: The Wall Street bankers we bailed out are giving themselves 2009 cash bonuses of a half million dollars on average — not including stocks. Compare that with the $32,390 annual median wage for regular workers, and you find a formula for outrage.

The people who tanked our economy, took $700 billion in taxpayer money and refused to make job-creating loans are getting rewards that range into the millions.

Not bad for a year in which Main Street lost 4 million jobs.

No wonder people are mad.

When Wall Street needs help, elected leaders respond with bold and swift action. When Main Street cries for help, we get gridlock. No health care reform, no financial reform, no labor law reform, and a slow, timid effort on job creation.

The anger out there is well-deserved. Workers are hurting. We haven’t seen so much militant sentiment demanding job creation and basic fairness since hundreds of thousands of people came to Washington for the March for Jobs and Freedom in 1963.

The Massachusetts Senate election last week signaled a working class revolt — against business as usual and against politics as usual.

An AFL-CIO poll taken election night showed just how fed up people are — they want results, and aren’t seeing any.

Four out of five voters said their most important issue was strengthening the economy and creating more jobs. Controlling health care costs was next on their list, with 54 percent citing that as the main determinant of their vote.

And they said Democrats have not overreached on jobs, the economy and health care — they have under-reached.

Forty-seven percent said their concern about Democrats is that they haven’t succeeded in making needed change, while only 32 percent said they made too many changes too quickly. Even voters for Scott Brown were more concerned about a lack of change (50 percent) than about making too many changes too quickly (43 percent).

Contrary to what we’re hearing from the corporate media, the Massachusetts election wasn’t a referendum on health care reform (Brown actually lost among the 59 percent of voters who picked health care as one of their top two priorities). But it did send a clear message that voters rejected attacks on the middle class like the proposed excise tax on health care benefits. Voters who thought their health care would be taxed voted by 64 percent for Brown, while those who did not think so voted by 54 percent to 40 percent for Coakley.

The election was no endorsement of the Republican agenda either — in fact, 58 percent of voters disapprove of the job being done by congressional Republicans.

Here’s what one grassroots union leader learned from his experience in the Massachusetts race:

A year ago, the Democrats crowed that the Republicans were “irrelevant.” Today, the Republicans think the Democrats are mortally wounded. Both are wrong. In our non-ideological party landscape, in hard times whoever strikes the best pose of wounded underdog wins. The same anger that elected Obama was hijacked to elect Scott Brown: “We want change!”
There was no outpouring for a right-wing agenda in Massachusetts. Brown only received 50,000 votes more than McCain. But Coakley received 850,000 fewer votes than Obama. The Republican base remained energized. The Democratic base and independent supporters stayed home.

Unless elected leaders and candidates deliver on job creation and the economy — they’re going to join the growing numbers of jobless Americans.

Members of Congress from both parties need to heed the wake-up call from Massachusetts and start taxing Wall Street wealth to create millions of good jobs fast. To get elected in 2010, they’re going to have to PROVE they’ll create the jobs we need in an economy we need with the health care we need — and those who made the mess should pay the bill. Voters have heard too much talk already.

America’s union movement is leading a broad uprising of working people ready to make sure elected leaders and candidates get the message and don’t forget. Don’t just watch for us in the streets — join us.

***

Richard Trumka served three terms as president of the Mine Workers (UMWA)

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

Bill Clinton saw it clearly when he was running for President against Bush I. It became his mantra: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Clinton wanted to reform health insurance too. But he understood that during a recession, the first priority is jobs.

Politicians and commentators continue to blather obtusely about the meaning of Massachusetts Senate candidate Martha Coakley’s loss to a Republican in a heavily Democratic state. Like Coakley and her advisors, they’ve failed to see the obvious, failed to learn from Clinton’s victory:

It’s the economy, stupid.

Poll results show that Massachusetts voters punished Coakley – and Democrats — for neglecting the issue most vital to them: jobs. If politicians had studied earlier polls or attempted to actually get in touch with mainstream, Main Street Americans, or just listened to AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka’s Jan. 11 address at the Washington Press Club, they’d have known to focus on jobs. The message of Massachusetts should be clear: If Democrats want to save their own jobs in the mid-term elections this fall, they must create jobs now.

A poll taken as far back as the first week in December exposed voters’ anger over the economy. The bipartisan Battleground Poll showed this: A huge majority of those surveyed ranked improving the economy and jobs as the most important tasks for Congress. It was 40 percent, compared to healthcare reform, at just 15 percent.

Here’s what pollster Celinda Lake said about the results:

“The number one thing Democrats have to do is prove they really have a jobs program and an economic program that is going to sell on Main Street.”

That was a month before the Massachusetts vote. In the meantime, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics announced unemployment numbers for December – and they were worse in 43 states than they had been in November. Joblessness in Michigan, a high population heartland state, was the highest in the country at 14.6 percent. Only the rates in two other states, Rhode Island – 12.9 percent — and South Carolina — 12.6 percent, beat that in one of the dozen largest economies in the world – California. There it was 12.4, significantly higher than the U.S. average of 10 percent.

People are hurting. Pay attention, politicians. Pay attention.

They didn’t. In the Massachusetts race, they were talking about terrorism and baseball.

In a Research 2000 poll done for MoveOn.org, 95 percent of Massachusetts residents surveyed ranked the economy as either important or very important to their candidate choice. Research 2000 questioned 1,000 registered voters – half of whom voted for Republican Scott Brown and half of whom did not vote at all.

Among those who voted for Obama in 2008 but Brown in 2010, 51 percent said they believed Democratic policies helped Wall Street more than Main Street.

It’s the economy, stupid. The Main Street economy.

Similary, in a Hart Research Associates poll conducted on election night in Massachusetts, 79 percent of voters said electing a candidate who would strengthen the economy and create more good jobs was the single most important factor in their decision. The most crucial quality for a candidate, they said: Someone who would fix the economy.

The Bush II Great Recession is more than two years old now. Workers are frightened and angry. They see bailouts for Wall Street, big bonuses for bankers and unemployment continuing to rise.

They will vent their frustration on politicians. Massachusetts showed it. Trumka warned about it earlier this month in his talk at the Press Club:

“At this moment, the voices of America’s working women and men must be heard in Washington – not the voices of bankers and speculators for whom it always seems to be the best of times, but the voices of those for whom the New Year brings pink slips and givebacks, hollowed-out health care, foreclosures and pension freezes – the roll call of an economy that long ago stopped working for most of us.”

He went on: “Working people want an American economy that works for them – that creates good jobs, where wealth is fairly shared. . .”

He recommended immediate implementation of the AFL-CIO’s five-point jobs creation program – a plan that would produce 4 million jobs and includes dramatically increasing federal infrastructure and green jobs investments and direct lending of the refunded bank bailout money to small and medium sized businesses that can’t get credit because of the financial crisis.

Just as important is implementation of the recommendations in the Framework for Revitalizing American Manufacturing report issued by the White House manufacturing task force in December. That report contains concrete measures to revive manufacturing in the U.S. to generate real wealth, not the illusory paper assets counterfeited on Wall Street.

Trumka called for immediate action, not going slow, not taking half steps. Those who seek delay are “harming millions of unemployed Americans and their families,” he said, and jeopardizing economic recovery.

He ended with this warning:

“the reality is that when unemployment is 10 percent and rising, working people will not stand for tokenism. We will not vote for politicians who think they can push a few crumbs our way and then continue the failed economic policies of the last 30 years.”

Workers executed that warning in Massachusetts.

What Americans want is jobs.

 By David Sirota
Newspaper columnist, radio host, bestselling author

Let me interject something in the midst of all the finger-pointing about the unfortunate results of the Massachusetts senate race tonight – something that I think has been missed in all the media punditry, activist Twittering and netroots blogging.

Various polls (here and here, as examples) have shown that a good chunk of the opposition to and/or frustration with the health care bill that played such a central role in the Massachusetts race comes from a progressive perspective – namely, a perspective that says the bill doesn’t go far enough. How much that precise kind of opposition/frustration played a role in the Massachusetts race is anyone’s guess – but among those that it did, my guess is that the feelings of demoralization are particularly intense, because those feelings are rooted in the most powerful emotion of all: humiliation.

After a 2008 campaign that saw Democrats promise to genuinely take on the health care and financial industries, we’ve seen a 2009 that has asked Democratic voters to fight for extremely small, extremely modest scraps. We’ve been relegated to having to mount fierce campaigns to keep things like the public option in the debate and not to stop trillion-dollar bailouts – but just make sure they have one or two flimsy strings attached to them.

We’ve loyally mounted these campaigns. They haven’t been fun, and worse, they haven’t been legislatively successful (at least not yet). But beyond the substantive failure is the embarrassment that comes with even having to mount such campaigns in the first place.

There is something deeply embarrassing about Democratic voters/groups having to fight with Democratic leaders to get those leaders to even seriously try (much less pass) even the smallest, most modest shreds of their promises. Having to do that evokes feelings of genuine shame – shame in front of the other voters we told to vote for Democrats because it supposedly “mattered,” and shame when we look in the mirror at a self that may have allowed itself to be unnecessarily duped.

I feel this sense of humiliation every day I am talking to regular folks here in Colorado on the radio. As a single-payer guy, I feel embarrassed that I’ve been relegated to fighting for the fulfillment of as modest a campaign promise as the public option. Likewise, as a person who opposed the bailouts from the get-go, I feel embarrassed to be relegated to simply asking for a bit of transparency and regulation from a party that promised tough New Deal-like measures against Wall Street. And my guess is that – whether consciously or not – many people who voted for Democrats in 2008 feel that same sense of shame as well.

Again, I don’t know if this deep sense of humiliation is what drove down Democratic performance in Massachusetts tonight, or is driving down President Obama’s numbers as a whole. But my bet is it has at least something to do with it, especially because the 2008 campaign had so much to do with raising people’s expectations.

That wasn’t a normal election – many of us who had stopped believing in the possibilities of American democracy said we’d be willing to believe one last time. And now, seeing that perhaps we shouldn’t have relented in our (rightful) cynicism, we are completely mortified.

Undoubtedly, Democrats and progressive media will attempt to make us ignore these feelings of humiliation by simply vilifying the extremism of Republicans (predictably, we are already seeing this rather pathetic tactic from various Democratic voices – save the always honest Howard Dean – on television tonight). And it is all but guaranteed that in typical blame-the-victim fashion, some lockstep Democratic activists and Obama supporters will find a way to blame progressives – rather than the politicians who broke their progressive promises – for the Massachusetts loss and the Democratic Party’s flagging poll numbers. Those are the tried and true formulas to stir up the base and manufacture a supposed “united front.”

But I don’t know if it will work this time, unless it is coupled with – finally – a serious effort by Democratic lawmakers to legislate their promises. And even then, I still don’t know if it will work. I don’t know because maybe it’s too little, too late – maybe the humiliation has already transformed cynicism into total and complete alienation.

***

David Sirota is the author of the best-selling books “Hostile Takeover” and “The Uprising.” He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado and blogs at OpenLeft.com. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com or follow him on Twitter @davidsirota.

By Holly Hart
USW Legislative Director

Presumptive Republican Presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, on his 72^nd birthday, announced a selection that revealed the depths of his cynicism and the shallowness of his judgment – and his disregard for women’s intelligence.

After looking into a pool of vice president candidates deep with qualification, he plucked out the least experienced person.

This follows four months in which he and his surrogates continually blathered that Democratic nominee Barack Obama was unqualified. Former New York City mayor Rudy Guiliani just got done giving that GOP talking point to TV commentators during the Democratic Convention, contending repeatedly that Sen. Obama’s credentials made him unfit to be commander-in-chief – an accusation Sen. Obama effectively refuted in his nomination acceptance speech Thursday night.

That speech was so effective, the McCain campaign had to do something – anything – to steal the spotlight away from a defining moment in American history.

The very next day the McCain campaign played their trump card – McCain announced that he’d selected Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his running mate.

Although a dedicated public servant, wife and mother, here’s the sum total of Palin’s experience: not quite two years as governor; two terms as mayor of the Alaskan town of Wasilla, population, 8,000; two terms on Wasilla city council; chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission; TV sports reporter; small business owner for three years; mother of five; bachelor of arts degree in journalism from the University of Idaho, and Miss Alaska runner-up.

If McCain, who has suffered melanoma, were elected, Palin would be a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Palin’s competition for the VP slot included Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Sen. Joe Lieberman, former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Every one of them has at least one advanced degree; Romney has two, both from Harvard. Every one has substantially more years of experience in governing than Palin.

The least experienced might be Pawlenty. But even he has, in addition to that city council experience, a dozen years in the state legislature. And he’s serving his second term as governor, not his second year.

With Palin at his side, McCain now is open for the same ridicule he’s heaped on Obama. And the reason he opened himself up for that mock-fest is clear: He believes women are stupid.

Put a woman on the ticket, he cynically figured, and he’d garner disgruntled supporters of unsuccessful Democratic candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton.

The strategy of selecting Palin shows he believes women, who supported Sen. Clinton, an abortion rights advocate, are so Stepfordesque that they’ll just follow the Republican ticket now that there’s a woman attached to it.

Palin, unlike Sen. Clinton, is anti-choice. She is a member of an anti-abortion group called Feminists for Life. In 2002, when she ran for lieutenant governor in Alaska, she sent an e-mail to the anti-abortion Alaska Right to Life Board saying she has “adamantly supported our cause since I first understood, as a child, the atrocity of abortion.”

She’s a member of the National Rifle Association and backs drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. (McCain picked her, though he does not support drilling there.)

But McCain doesn’t think Clinton’s supporters will notice any of that.  He figures they’ll blindly accept any female – whether she has a strong record on the issues that affect working families or not.  There is no doubt that Palin’s a successful woman.  But what we know of her record does not qualify her to be one heartbeat away from the Presidency.  McCain has so little respect for women’s intelligence that he thinks we will make a choice based solely on gender.

When Obama was in the process of vetting vice presidential candidates, he told reporters he couldn’t make a hasty decision. The reason, he said, was the selection of a running mate was “the most important decision that I will make before I am president.”

In choosing Palin, McCain has clearly shown he lacks the judgment to be president. In this most important decision, he made his choice based on cynicism and politics instead of choosing a leader qualified to govern this country should something dreadful befall the president.