Apparently it’s Universal Health Care for Me but not for Ye.

It’s been almost a half a century since the MA senate seat was not held by a Democrat and it seemed as iron-clad a seat as there is in the USA but won’t there be some major irony if the major health-care reform will not pass because of the seat which was once Teddy Kennedy’s.


With the ascension of Scott Brown to that seat the Dems lost their 60 vote super-majority there is a good chance that on the eve of major reform, there is a good chance that any progress they had hoped to make on Health-Care reform this year is now on the ropes. Teddy is probably rolling over in his grave (although Mary Jo Kopechne’s family probably hopes it’s nowhere near a small lake) knowing that if he had been alive the legislation which he trumpeted as his greatest cause will go down because of some hick driving a pickup truck.

What always gets me about certain states when they are put on a political map is that the CNN’s, Politco’s, NY Times etc. make these broad-stroke brushes about the type of voter in a particular area but having spoken with many people who have roots in Massachusetts, especially Western Mass, you can easily see they weren’t going to with a status-quo candidate. I know people assume that a conservative in the Northeast is as extinct as the Wooly Mammoth but travel to New York State, Western Massachusetts or large parts of Connecticut and try to find the liberals. Obviously they still outnumber the conservatives but it’s not as drastic as the maps will make you believe.

I asked one person with roots in Western Mass today why the Kennedy seat was lost and by such a substantial margin. They thought it was definitely a message to the liberal spending of our government and as a state with almost universal health-care paid for by their state; they weren’t quite ready to make the same kind of federal financial sacrifice for the rest of the country. Apparently it’s Universal Health Care for Ma but not for Ya.

Of course the greater irony is that this Massachusetts Universal Health Care was brought to the fine New Englanders by then governor Mitt Romney who has proven to have the roots of a plastic plants and the backbone of a jelly-fish.