U.S. Senate

I have to ask.

David Brooks wrote this in the Times on Thursday comparing today's radicals in the Republican Party with the hippies from the 1960s.

Two days earlier, we published this in CG&G comparing today's congressional Republicans with...wait for it...the hippies from the 1960s.

Coincidence?

Freshman Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado takes his new institution to the woodshed:

He doesn't go far enough, but at least he's headed in the right direction.  Read more in this dialogue with Ezra Klein.

My Beautiful and Talented Wife (The BTW) and I went to see the new production of the Broadway musical "Hair" in New York City last Saturday.

                                   1969                             2010

Tuesday's special election in Massachusetts was but the first of a number of interesting contests in New England this year.  Likely to rise to prominence over the spring and summer is the contest to succeed Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire.  Current Representative Paul Hodes is unopposed on the Democratic side of the ballot, and former Attorney General Kelly Ayotte will likely emerge from the herd of Republicans.  Here is how my very local paper reported on it today:

Hodes currently trails Ayotte by 9 percentage points but beats both Binnie and Lamontagne in one-on-one match-ups, according to the poll.

Mark Bergman, communications director for the Hodes campaign, said the polling numbers do not change Hodes’ campaign strategy.

“This election is going to be about choice,” Bergman said in an interview with The Dartmouth. “The Republicans all support the same failed economic agenda of [former President] George W. Bush that would return us to the failed policies that got us into this [economic crisis].”

If you had told me in November 2008 that Massachusetts would be represented by a Republican in the Senate, I would have had you committed.  And yet that has what has occurred.  From my admittedly biased viewpoint on the periphery of the Boston media market, I thought Martha Coakley ran an arrogant and nasty media campaign.  For example, I'm not sure what she hoped to accomplish by interrupting my football playoffs with ads attacking a guy I had never heard of and blatantly overstating her own accomplishments.What she should have done was to simply say that she was a firm vote in the Democratic camp on the key issues of the day; principally, extending the benefits of more universal health care to the rest of the nation. 

What the nation got, instead, was something other than a firm vote in that camp.  But don't overstate what this means.  President Obama does not now find himself negotiating directly with Senator Brown over his health care agenda.