Matt Yglesias

MA Senate Race

It looks like Massachusetts Attorney-General Martha Coakley has a sizable lead in the race to replace Ted Kennedy in the Senate. Among other things, this no doubt reflects the fact that she has the advantage of statewide name recognition and having run a statewide campaign for AG. Of course the flipside of that is that she has relatively little record on issues of national significance—before she was the state’s Attorney-General, she was a District Attorney and obviously the job of a prosecutor bears relatively little resemblance to the job of a United States Senator.

By contrast, her main rival, MA-8 congressman Mike Capuano, has a ten year record on national issues. Basically it’s a record of being really, really liberal. He’s member 18.5 in the 111th House, he was 30.5 in the 110th House, 40.5 in the 109th, 10 in the 108th, and 8 in the 107th—firmly on the left side of the Democratic caucus. He’s the former mayor of Somerville, a dense walkable urban area, who likes to talk about mass transit, he’s pushing from the left on Afghanistan and Iraq, he favors single payer health care but says he won’t “let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

In other words, to those who care to look it up he’s a known quantity and very much a progressive. I hope Coakley’s greater name recognition and front-runner status won’t let her coast into the senate without being made to address these kinds of issues in some detail.

Kennedy Eying Succession

Back when Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts and John Kerry was running for Senate, the Massachusetts legislature passed a law ensuring that Romney wouldn’t be able to appoint a Republican to fill Kerry’s Senate seat if he won. Instead, the seat would stand vacant until a special election could be held. Now, though, Deval Patrick is governor of Massachusetts and Ted Kennedy is in poor health. So Kennedy, sensibly, is encouraging Massachusetts to change the rules again and let Patrick appoint a temporary replacement so the seat won’t stand vacant if he needs to abandon the seat.

Jason Zengerle says “there’s a good lesson here about legislative bodies being careful not to muck around with these sorts of rules for short-term political gain.” I sort of feel the opposite way. There’s a very minor problem here, and it’s been totally solvable for months. The only roadblock is that the MA legislature seems too hesitant to change the rules for short-term political gain. But when you have a state whose state legislature is firmly and forever in the hands of one political party, the smart thing is for the legislature to be constantly changing rules based on short-term considerations. Nothing’s stopping them from changing the rules back later.

Health Reform in Massachusetts Gets More Fierce

Massachusetts passed a major health care reform bill back when Mitt Romney was governor, that effectively created a universal health care system which was paired with some fairly hand-wavy promises of cost controls. The expanded coverage has worked great, but the cost controls haven’t. That said, with the state now explicitly on the hook for coverage, they’re not just responding to cost increases by letting things slowly unravel. Instead, an ambitious recommendation has been made to move away from fee-for-service medicine, which would be a truly revolutionary change if it happens.
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Check out analysis from Alex MacGuiness and Ezra Klein. This could be the future.