Promised legislation? What’s your case for that? The Democrats and Obama did not come to power on health care reform, much less the kind of health care reform that relies on shamelessly buying the votes of senators who know the bill is crap. If you want to argue that the Democrats are getting hosed for simply trying to do what they were elected to do, you need to justify the belief that they were elected for this.

A growing deficit, cap and trade, a terrible health care bill loved by neither side of the aisle, a stimulus bill which stimulated nothing but the debt, secretive back-room government, and the status quo on foreign policy from the Bush years. Is this the platform people voted for? Because it is what they have gotten.

Great, incisive assessment of the Massachusetts election.

Re: “I don’t think there is any way to understand this response by voters in a heavily Democratic state except as an expression of pure anti-incumbency sentiment and a desire simply to shake things up.”

Mainstream Republicans are doing all kinds of idealistic transference onto a guy who’s just a regular party schlub. The irony is that Scott Brown is a prototypical “incumbent”. If he wins and goes to Washington, he’ll be quickly absorbed into the “get along – go along” crowd on the Republican side.

I don’t want Obamacare either. But no matter who wins, the results will still net out as business as usual.

Might one enquire as to why? I’ve heard a lot of reasons from conservatives as to why the bill should be killed, but thus far none of them seem even particularly coherent, let alone persuasive enough to be worth the lives of 20 to 40 thousand people each year. Is it that you doubt that particular statistic? That you believe something else is at stake that is more important? Or that you have reason to believe the bill as it currently exists won’t actually save those people, or even some fraction of them?

The above are not meant as snarky rhetorical questions. I would be genuinely interested to understand your thinking, or to learn that there is another option that I have failed to identify. This site has always been an oasis of intelligent calm amid a storm of Republican insanity (apologies for the mixed metaphor), so it would be welcome to hear a considered critique.