| Submit your comments on this article |
| Home Front: Politix |
| Bay State to be the norm |
| 2008-10-16 |
| Consider yourselves warned... It’s January 2009. President Barack Obama has just been sworn in, beneath the beaming smiles of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Welcome to the United States of Massachusetts. Some of my friends here at the Herald used to grouse when Gov. Mitt Romney, out on the stump, would crack wise at the expense of Massachusetts. But Romney understood that for most of America, the Bay State - and Boston in particular - is viewed as alien territory. We’re the weirdo, hippie brother of America’s 50-state family. And yet, if the Democrats sweep in November as projected, that’s exactly the kind of government we’re going to get: Beacon Hill meets Capitol Hill. I don’t mean geographically. Obama only spent a few years in Cambridge, studying law and skipping out on parking tickets. But ideologically speaking, an Obama /Pelosi/Reid government reflects American political beliefs the same way the Rev. Jeremiah Wright represents the typical American churchgoer. For one thing, America isn’t big on one-party politics. In Massachusetts, Democrats running government is like gravity, or being stuck on I-93 - an inescapable part of life. But at the national level, we’ve only had six years of single-party control since Reagan was elected in 1980. Even then, the majorities were relatively small and ideologically divided. Southern “Blue Dog” Democrats kept their party from moving too far left, and New England Republicans slowed their party’s move right. An Obamafied Washington will look like the Bob’s Country Bunker brand of Massachusetts politics: “We’ve got both kind of Democrats: left, and far left!” Obama’s attitudes about big labor are also far more Massachusetts than Main Street, USA. It’s easy for us to forget how little popularity unions enjoy across the country. Right now, only 8 percent of the private sector is unionized, and 22 states have right-to-work laws. But ObamaPelosi would get Washington and Big Labor back in bed together and gettin’ busy too. One of the priorities for next year, for example, is big labor’s assault on the sanctity of the secret ballot, aka “card check.” Pro-union or not, everyone agrees that unionization raises business costs and slows the creation of jobs - dumb policy during a recession. But as Fred Barnes at the Weekly Standard writes: “With Washington controlled by Democrats, it would sail through Congress and President Obama would sign it.” Then there’s the issue of taxes. Here in Taxachusetts, proposals for across-the-board tax cuts are viewed in the same way as proposals to teach creationism in school. We can’t even get income tax rollbacks after voting them into law. Which is why we roll our eyes when we hear Obama promise tax cuts for 95 percent of Americans. Oh, you mean like Gov. Deval Patrick’s vow to cut property taxes? He pushed through a $500 million state tax increase. On economics, Obama, Reid and Pelosi almost make Beacon Hill look moderate. Then again, they do the same for Fidel Castro. Obama defenders say that his far-left past is no predictor of his presidential future. Massachusetts defenders point out we’re not nearly as liberal as marketed, evidenced by Hillary Clinton’s defeat of Obama in the Bay State primary. Regardless, a President Obama is going to govern America a lot more like we’re used to here in Massachusetts than they are in Montana or Mississippi. And like a Massachusetts liberal, he’s going to do it whether we taxpayers like it or not. |
| Posted by:tu3031 |
| #2 The same thing will happen to America that has happened to Mass: all the productive who can will flee, while the state becomes a sump of leftist losers dependent on government for everything. |
| Posted by: Jolutch Mussolini7800 2008-10-16 18:24 |
| #1 As a resident of Mass. I say: may God have mercy on all of us if this happens. |
| Posted by: xbalanke 2008-10-16 17:48 |