Stand Pat

To be young, gifted and black . . .. It's apparently important to attract voters who are none of those things.

Recently, Pat Buchanan, playing the role of the "conservative conscience" of MSNBC, cited the less educated and older white voters who deserted the Democrats in last week's Massachusetts special Senate election and declared that they are the key to winning elections in 2010 and 2012 as the country keeps going through economic convulsions. Buchanan insisted that President Obama, who is young, gifted and black, ought to take the concerns of these voters, many of whom are opposed to larger government and a more public role in health care, into consideration if he wants to be an effective President. So, what the President ought to take away from the Massachusetts election is to just preserve the status quo? Because that's exactly what Senator Brown of Massachusetts (to avoid confusion with Senator Brown of Ohio, Sherrod Brown, the good Senator Brown) advocated in his campaign. Somehow, I don't remember the Obama slogan from 2008 as "Conventionality We Can Believe In."

Buchanan disparaged the black voters, younger voters, and better educated voters of any race as a fringe bloc, though he didn't use those words. Obama, alarmingly, may have learned the wrong lesson from the Massachusetts election results. He's ready to scale back health care reform and sidestep gingerly if not avoid altogether tough climate change legislation in an apparent effort to win back those older, whiter, and dumber voters. Scott Brown, born two years before the biracial Obama, is himself older, whiter and dumber than the President.

Meanwhile, I don't understand why the Democrats are ready to "stand pat" when, as one progressive group pointed out, they have a larger majority in the Senate under Obama than the Republicans did under George Walker Bush - who got just about everything he wanted from Congress. Also, you're telling me it takes a three-fifths majority of sixty senators to pass a law, but it takes only a simple majority of five Supreme Court justices to throw it out?

To give you an idea of Democrats have crippled themselves with their own timidity, it's worth referring the scene at Martha Coakley's concession speech last week. The astute observer will remember that John Kerry was present . . . he was standing to Coakley's right side on crutches. How fitting for a milquetoast presidential candidate whose election could have stopped John Roberts and Samuel Alito from getting on the Supreme Court.