The Fall of the House of Kennedy: Rage Against "The Machine"

Daniel Henninger says Scott Brown is the MA voters' first real revolt against the public sector's takeover of the state's economy:

What an irony it is that in the same week the Kennedy labor legacy hit the wall in Massachusetts, the NEA approved a $1 million donation from the union's contingency fund to the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate. It is this Kennedy legacy, the public union tax and spend machine, that drove blue Massachusetts into revolt Tuesday.

Yes, health care was ground zero, but Massachusetts—like New Jersey, like California, like New York—has been building toward this explosion for years.

According to a study done for the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth, spending in specific public categories there skyrocketed the past 20 years (1987 to 2007).

Public safety: up 139%; social services, 130%; education, 44%. And of course Medicaid Madness, up 163%, before MassCare kicked in more Medicaid obligations.

But here's the party's self-destroying kicker: Feeding the public unions' wage demands starved other government responsibilities. It ruined our ability to have a useful debate about any other public functions.

Massachusetts' spending fell for mental health, the environment, housing and higher education. The physical infrastructure in blue states is literally falling apart. But look at those public wage and pension-related outlays. Ever upward.

To a surprising degree, the voters perceived the Republicans as doing very much the same thing for their own constituencies in 2006 and kicked them out of power in the House and Senate and in 2008 from the White House. But the people didn't get what they were promised by Obama, who very soon took Republican fiscal hypocrisy and let the Dem majorities turn it into warp speed Weimar-type hyper-spending with a dollar losing all international credibility:

Enter the Obama administration, the first one born and raised inside this public bubble, with zero private-sector Cabinet members. Act one: a $787 billion stimulus bill, which they brag mainly saved state and local jobs. Then came the six-month odyssey for Obama's $1 trillion health-care bill, dripping with taxes. Independent voters felt like everything was being sucked into a public-sector vortex.

This is why New Jersey's Chris Christie won running on nothing. It's why in California Carly Fiorina is within three points of Sen. Barbara Boxer. It's why the party JFK enabled, "the machine," is hitting the wall.

The Democrats are being strangled like Laocoan in the famous statue by the enormous python called the public sector unions who along with their AFL-CIO & UAW & NEA & AFTA counterparts are beginning to strangle the US economy. Indeed, it was the sleazy corrupt deal that the Dems made with the unions over tax breaks on their Cadillac health care programs that sent Scott Brown's numbers soaring from 20 points BEHIND on Dec. 28th to 5 points AHEAD on January 19th. After the Louisiana Purchase and the Cornhusker Kickback, the immense unprecedented kickback to the unions showed the total corruption of the Democrats and Scott Brown gained MORE THAN A POINT A DAY with completely disgusted Massachusetts voters sick and tired of being treated as tax serfs.

There's no way out for these Democrats. They made a Faustian bargain 40 years ago with the public unions. For the outlays alone, they'll get some version of the Obama health-care bill. They'll also go to the same old "populist anger" well.

Scott Brown's victory has given the GOP a rare, narrow chance to align itself with an electorate that understands its anger. Now the GOP has to find a way to disconnect from a political legacy that smothered governments at all levels and is now smothering the Democratic Party.

After watching an interview of Mitch McConnell by Greta van S. last night, I doubt that the old Minority Leader's nuanced laid-back logrolling will suffice to keep the Republicans rolling toward a takeover of the House and gaining seven seats in the Senate. Courtly and cunning is charming, but it takes the brilliant simple clarity of Scott Brown, who responded to Obama's airy dismissal of his pickup truck with characteristic intensity: "We should be in an economy where more people can afford to buy a flatbed."

As Larry Kudlow said of Scott elsewhere:

It is, in fact, an economic-growth message, the likes of which we haven't heard since Jack Kemp promoted it in the late 1970s. And the brilliance of Scott Brown was to use the JFK tax cuts -- an across-the-board reduction in marginal tax rates -- to attract Democrats and independents to his message.

An across-the-board tax cut is the fairest pro-growth message of them all. Lower tax rates for everybody. Get out of the box of rich people and class warfare. For the Ted Kennedy Democrats, that box has been a loser for decades. But for timid Republicans always on the defensive, now is the time to break out and adopt the Scott Brown theme.

This is what Reagan did. This is why the Gipper touted JFK's across-the-board tax cuts. Republicans must now be bold and fight for across-the-board tax relief, for families, individuals and businesses, along with smaller government, fewer services and across-the-board spending cuts.

While Team Obama is fighting for more government employment, with trillions of dollars of spending, it is time for Republicans to fight for private free-enterprise employment by letting folks keep more of what they earn and by providing new incentives for the extra hour worked and the extra investment dollar put at risk.

This is where the GOP must go. Republicans should not let another day pass without unleashing a fusillade of new tax-cutting proposals to get America moving again.