I don't know if this ad is effective -- I'm not good at judging how average voters react to these things, but it does make a point that needs to be made:
It says a lot of what Coakley apparently didn't say, but should have, in last night's debate when Brown said,
"Regarding your comments consistently about Bush-Cheney this, Bush-Cheney that, you can run against Bush-Cheney, but I'm Scott Brown, I live in Wrentham, I drive a truck, and it's over 200,000 miles right now, and you're not running against them, you're running against me."
It's thoroughly disingenuous of any Republican House or Senate candidate to claim that he or she is somehow separate from the party or the conservative movement. We know this because we saw the extraordinary unity of the Republicans in Congress throughout the entirety of the Bush presidency on every single major issue except immigration, and because now we're seeing even more of a death-before-deviation attitude among Republicans in the current Congress. So it doesn't matter what a Republican says during the campaign about "independence" -- any Republican who goes to Washington has to toe the line or face unshirted hell. Ask Arlen Specter.
And if Brown is really such a big "independent" -- if he's "running in the name of every independent-thinking voter," as he says in his insta-response to Coakley's ad, if he "doesn't take his orders from either of the political parties," as a recent campaign statement insisted -- then why, on his campaign Web site, do we find this?
"Red Invades Blue"? Is red no longer the color of the GOP? When I wasn't looking, did red become the new color for the Independent Unaffiliated Party?
(You can also go directly to redinvadesblue.com to donate to Brown.)
And am I the only one creeped out by "invades" in this context? Is this about "common sense" and good governance and finding solutions to the nation's problems? No -- it's about conquering turf.
And I'd say it's also about how wingnuts see the world. The world is divided into invaders and the invaded (see also the "humor" column at Tucker Carlson's new Daily Caller in which red-light cameras are deemed the equivalent of rape.) If that's your worldview -- and you want red to conquer -- then, yeah, vote Brown.
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(Wingnuts, by the way, are snickering at a typo in the Coakley ad, but it's corrected now, and the version embedded above is typo-free.)
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And I seem to have buried a near-simultaneous post by Aimai in which, among other things, she says that Republicans "implicitly and sometimes explicitly act as though as long as they don't hold supreme power there is simply no point acting politically at all." I agree with that, and I think it relates to my "invader" point. To Republicans -- forgive the language -- you're either "the man" or "the man's" bitch. The point of electing Scott Brown is to make Massachusetts the GOP's bitch, and, by killing health care reform, to do the same to congressional Democrats and Obama. Governance? Who cares about that? (The post is about the Jonathan Gruber/Firedoglake controversy, and FDL does not come off well.)
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