For having the elephantine balls to try this spin today of all days, with Brown poised to take Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat by promising to obstruct ObamaCare, I raise a glass to our House Majority Leader. Madam Speaker herself couldn’t do it any lamer:
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) on Tuesday said that angst voters have expressed early this election year is the result of GOP obstructionism, not the Democrats agenda…
“I think what the public is angry about is they see, first of all, an opposition for opposition’s sake,” Hoyer told reporters…
The Maryland lawmaker did acknowledge that Democrats have been hit because they are the party in power and the economy continues to struggle.
“We’re all pretty unpopular..Why? Because people don’t feel good and we’re the leaders and we’re in office and they expected us to do something,” he said.
True, that’s part of it. Also part of it: Per NBC’s new poll, released just within the past few hours, public approval of their utopian boondoggle is still jammed deep in the toilet. If they can’t sell it to deep blue Massachusetts voters, who know that they hold the fate of the bill in their hands, how are they going to sell it to America before the midterms?
Incidentally, does this explain why Frank Luntz allegedly can’t find any Coakley voters for his focus group tonight? Because they’re all at home stewing over what obstructionists Republicans are?
“I just lost another one,” Luntz growled over his cell phone from a hotel ballroom at Logan Airport. In the last 24 hours, six Coakley voters have dropped out. By contrast, Luntz hasn’t lost a single supporter of her opponent, Scott Brown.
The problem isn’t money. “They’re getting paid well,” Luntz says, “probably more than they’re making at their jobs. And they still don’t want to do it.”
Instead, says Luntz, they’re ashamed. “They don’t want to be on television defending Martha Coakley. It’s passé. It’s socially unacceptable. I never dreamed I’d see Democrats in Massachusetts embarrassed to admit they’re Democrats.”
“This is the definition of collapse,” he says, remembering a similar phenomenon when Howard Dean flamed out of the 2004 primaries. Is that true, though? I mentioned this somewhere yesterday: What if the polls have been skewing towards Brown because Democrats simply don’t want to admit that they’re mindlessly voting the party line for an embarrassing candidate — even though, when they get into the booth, they are? AP pessimism meter check: Plugged in.
Update: That anger over obstructionism sure does manifest itself in strange ways.
All told, the new poll explains the climate that produced a close special Senate election in Massachusetts on Tuesday in which Democrats struggled to keep the seat of the late Sen. Edward Kennedy from falling to a conservative Republican in one of the nation’s bluest states.
Nationally, voters now are evenly split over which party they hope will run Capitol Hill after the November elections—the first time Democrats haven’t had the edge on that question since December 2003.
It’s 41/41 overall. Among voters with “high interest” in the election? 50/37.