David Brooks: If Brown wins and the Dems pass ObamaCare anyway, they don’t deserve to govern; Update: Bayh warns of “catastrophe”

The perfect complement to the DeMint post in showing how thoroughly Massachusetts has scrambled American politics. Not only do we have principled conservatives embracing moderates, we’ve got one of America’s chief apologists for the “educated class” warning Dems that they deserve to burn if they decide to ignore the will of the hoi polloi for their own good.

The country is now split on Obama, because he is temperate, thoughtful and pragmatic, but his policies are almost all unpopular. If you aggregate the last seven polls on health care reform, 41 percent support it and 51 percent oppose.

Many Democrats, as always, are caught in their insular liberal information loop. They think the polls are bad simply because the economy is bad. They tell each other health care is unpopular because the people aren’t sophisticated enough to understand it. Some believe they can still pass health care even if their candidate, Martha Coakley, loses the Senate race in Massachusetts on Tuesday.

That, of course, would be political suicide. It would be the act of a party so arrogant, elitist and contemptuous of popular wisdom that it would not deserve to govern. Marie Antoinette would applaud, but voters would rage.

Said one Democrat to the Daily Caller earlier today, “If Brown wins, we can’t yet see all of the ramifications — the party switches, the retirements. I lack sufficient creativity to envision how bad this is going to be for us.” Dude, if David Brooks is accusing you of elitism for continuing to pursue this, it should be abundantly clear how bad it’s going to be. Dick Durbin may be putting on a brave face, but Lieberman’s already started talking up what a devastating message about ObamaCare has been sent in Scott Brown being so close in Massachusetts. How are they going to use ping pong to ram the Senate bill through the House if senators like Lieberman, Nelson, et al. start making populist noise a la Brooks about the process being illegitimate or possibly even switching their votes if they had a chance? Especially when Pelosi’s starting with a margin that’s even thinner than it was last time?

Here’s audio of Barney Frank explaining what a constitutional nightmare it is that Democrats haven’t yet been able to pass this fantastically unpopular bill. Exit quotation, emphasis mine: “Despite talk about how the White House wants to ram the measure through, resolve among terrified Democrats will likely crack if not crumble, even if Coakley somehow manages to pull out a win.”

Update: Let the Blue Dog stampede begin.

“There’s going to be a tendency on the part of our people to be in denial about all this,” Bayh told ABC News, but “if you lose Massachusetts and that’s not a wake-up call, there’s no hope of waking up.”…

“The only we are able to govern successfully in this country is by liberals and progressives making common cause with independents and moderates,” Bayh said. “Whenever you have just the furthest left elements of the Dem party attempting to impose their will on the rest of the country — that’s not going to work too well.”

Someone needs to ask him and Lieberman point blank: If you were voting for ObamaCare for the first time tomorrow, what would your vote be?

• Quotes of the day
• About those “doctored” Benghazi e-mails…
• White House word of the day – Irrelevant

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