First, too few Democrats ran for this plum seat. This is a change from 2009, when lots of Dems ran for the seat that the Republican Scott Brown ultimately won. Most of them looked like hacks--very typical lock-step liberals. Michael Capuano seemed different. He proudly supported some of the compromises he made--and I love a good pragmatist. However, it seems that Capuano didn't even want to run this time, and cleared the way for his fellow (though lesser) House colleague, Markey.
Markey, as I said above, is a liberal hack, but a reliable one. I wanted to like his opponent, Steven Lynch, but the guy, also a House member, doesn't know what he's doing. During one debate, Lynch accused Markey of "knowing policy, but not people" [paraphrase, exact quote not located]. Horrors-- Markey voted against some verbal declaration on yada yada, but that's terrible. In Lynch's mind, it's worse than voting against the bank bailout that salvaged the economy, as Lynch had done.
I generally want to vote for the more moderate candidate, but that doesn't extend to stupid.
It's a bit harder for me to vote for a Republican right now. We need them to prevent the Dems from going whole hog, but they'd do a lot of damage if they achieved the major share of power in federal government. They might send shocks into the fragile recovery with large budget cuts, they'd do away with the best chance for the uninsured to get medical coverage, they'd enact all kinds of harmful social measures about marriage and abortion...
I'll only vote for a Republican who'll vote against these bad GOP ideas. Gomez claims to be "a new kind of Republican" but he's not for healthcare for everyone. He wants states to figure it out on their own. What a fucking lame excuse. He'll flush away the only decent health plan to pass in the past 30 years on that basis, not offering an alternative, and seemingly not caring about the problem enough to dig into it. There's no way I'll support another Senate vote to repeal Obamacare without a decent replacement in the works.
So I'm stuck with the hack Markey.
Markey, barely changed from 1976
Image: wikipedia.org + Paint
