Thank you to mjazz, who provided this quote from his friend, along with the picture:
In, I think, North Andover. In the snowstorm. And yes, I’m pretty sure that’s The Truck Scott is standing on. You know, the one President Whatshisname said we should ignore, the GM – pre-bailout – truck. Yeah, that truck.
There is something almost Norman Rockwellesque about it, don’t you think?
Rodan Update: Below is a Post by Speranza about this election that compliments this post.
The Brown-Coakley Race, 1978 Version
Sometimes a little known election can be a harbinger of things to come. Back in 1978 a Republican won a Senate seat in ultra liberal Minnesota (Hubert Humphrey’s old seat to be exact), which foreshadowed the events of 1980. Let us hope that (assuming a Brown victory) the events in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Virginia will be the tolling of the bells for this odious administration. Let’s get some quality candidates out there (and sorry but that does not mean Jeb Bush or Kay Bailey Hutchinson – both of whom are past their prime and past their time), but candidates who have solid conservative principles, without being hardcore, rigid, ideologues. Low taxes, incentives for private industry to hire people, health care competition throughout the nation, small government, spending within our means, strong homeland security, strong national defense, these are winning formulas.
Some analysts are wondering about historical analogies to what seems to have happened in the Massachusetts special election.
My mind immediately went back to the first major race in which I served as a volunteer. In 1978, a Minnesota Republican who had been David who? on Labor Day won the special election for the remaining four years of the late Hubert Humphrey’s Senate term with 62% of the vote. Many of the elements helping Brown today also helped David Durenberger’s upset victory in 1978.First, in ’78, the nation was in the economic doldrums. The Democrats also controlled all three branches of government, with large minorities in the House and Senate, and President Carter was well on his way to alienating voters who had seem him as a refreshing new face in 1976.Second, the seat in question was open because of the death of someone who had dominated the political landscape in his state for decades. Walter Mondale was nominated as Jimmy Carter’s vice president in 1976 largely because he was seen as Humphrey’s protégé. But in 1978, Minnesota voters had grown tired of the Democrats’ attempts to stack the electoral landscape in their favor. In 1977, Democrat Governor Wendell “Wendy” Anderson appointed himself to the remaining two years in Vice President Mondale’s Senate term, elevating an idiosyncratic dentist-turned-politician from the Iron Range named Rudy Perpich to governor. Then, when Humphrey died in January 1978, Perpich appointed Humphrey’s widow Muriel to serve in the interim. Indeed, as soon as I heard about Massachusetts’ Democrats changing the rules for senatorial appointments when Romney was Governor in 2005, and then changing them again in 2009, I thought about the 1978 Minnesota voter revolt
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I recall very little being written about this upset in the national press at the time, but it turned out to be a precursor of the 1980 election. Not only was Carter repudiated by Reagan, but Republicans also took control of the Senate. This effort was no doubt assisted by the fact that Durenberger’s surprise win to take the Senate seats once held by Humphrey made it easier to recruit quality challengers for 1980.
