The Scott heard round the world

Mark Steyn at NRO

Well, as a wintry election day dawns in Massachusetts, I'll believe it when I see it. If all but one of those polls are right, Scott Brown now has a lead well beyond the margin of error. But, as that Boston Globe "Dead Heat!" headline suggests, it's not necessarily beyond the margin of Acorn, the margin of lawyer, and the margin of Franken-style recounts. On the other hand, if you're minded to (as MSNBC's electokleptomaniac Ed Schultz recommends) steal the vote, you don't really want to have to steal it big, on a Mugabe-esque scale.

However things turn out, the Dems have got a fright. I would be surprised if many candidates in November are quite the same spectacular combination of gaffe-prone stupidity and arrogance as Martha Coakley. But, granted that, I was surprised at how incompetent the Democrat machine was. On Sunday, the president veered between dull and really, really lousy. He did what he did with his Olympics pitch in Copenhagen — he took the extraordinary step of flying in to save the day, and then when he got there thought he could wing it. He, or at any rate his minders, should know by now that his rhetoric is seriously underperforming — "incoherent without his teleprompter and a bore with it." Yet his staff allow him to stagger around as the last believer in his own magic. What sort of functioning pol would be so careless as to say "Everybody can own a truck"? He should talk to any New England dealership about that. As it happens, I bought a new truck* last month and I've never seen the place so empty.

At the start of this campaign, the issues were health care and the economy. After "Ted Kennedy's seat" and "Curt Schilling the Yankees fan" and "only the little people campaign at Fenway," the genius Dems succeeded in making their own assumptions about one-party rule a very potent secondary issue. Very foolishly, Obama both underlined the regal hauteur of the Massachusetts machine — and simultaneously nationalized the election by portraying it as a referendum on the Hopeychange. If Martha now loses, he can't plead it's nothing to do with him.

(*purely for the purposes of running against John Kerry. I'm putting it on water skis and I'm going to ride alongside him when he's windsurfing off Nantucket scoffing, "Oh, everybody can buy buttock-hugging yellow spandex.")