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WSJ.com's Political Diary - How Scott Brown Changed Massachusetts

Two Party State

Massachusetts Democrats who thought the victory of Scott Brown in January was a fluke and represented no sign of a revived Republican Party in their state might want to think again.

This week saw a special election for the state senate seat that Mr. Brown gave up when he became a U.S. Senator. The suburban Boston district has been competitive, with Mr. Brown first winning it in a 2003 special election with only 51%.

This time it wasn't even close. GOP State Representative Richard Ross defeated Democrat Peter Smulowitz, an emergency-room physician, with 62% of the vote. Mr. Ross even won Needham, a liberal bastion in the district, by over 200 votes. "The Democratic machine is striking out in Massachusetts," claimed Jennifer Nassour, the state's GOP chairwoman.

Not quite. The highly competitive race for governor has seen Democratic Governor Deval Patrick rebound somewhat from his recent dismal poll numbers. He now leads Republican Charlie Baker, a protégé of former GOP Governor Bill Weld, and state Treasurer Tim Cahill, who left the Democratic Party to run as an independent last year. In a new Rasmussen poll, Mr. Patrick scores 45% support against 31% for his GOP opponent Mr. Baker.

But Mr. Patrick's improvement appears to be based largely on the faltering of Mr. Cahill, who has lately been the subject of GOP attack ads. Mr. Baker, a former health-care executive, is still having trouble putting together the coalition of economic and social conservatives that Mr. Brown assembled. Much of Mr. Cahill's 15% support in polls represents social conservatives who remain put off by Mr. Baker's failure to make overtures to them.

-- John Fund

WSJ.com's Political Diary - FAIR Tax vs OBAMACare

Show of Horrors

In the two special elections for the House being held next week, Democrats appear to have thrown in the towel in a Hawaii race where the presence of two Democrats on the ballot looks like it may hand the seat to a Republican.

But in the Pennsylvania coal-mining district once held by the late Jack Murtha, former Murtha aide Mark Critz appears to have made a comeback with a flurry of TV commercials accusing GOP businessman Tim Burns of wanting to raise taxes. A Democratic campaign committee ad accuses Mr. Burns of supporting "a 23% national sales tax" and "corporate tax loopholes for companies that ship jobs overseas." The latest public poll shows Mr. Critz with a 45% to 40% lead.

Mr. Burns says his record has been distorted. He denies he wants to outsource jobs overseas. He also claims any quotes supporting a so-called FAIR tax reform were "taken out of context" and notes that Mr. Critz hasn't pointed out that advocates of a national sales tax want to completely replace the current federal income tax.

That may be, but Mr. Burns's plight shows just how tricky tax reform can be to raise in a hardscrabble blue-collar district where voters are deeply suspicious of change. Republicans have made progress in the race by calling for repeal of ObamaCare, which is viewed with hostility by many of the district's seniors. But the ads blasting Mr. Burns on a national sales tax have erased many of those gains.

Next week we will find out which set of attacks had the most resonance with voters and just how much the Obama health care bill will be a drag on Democratic prospects this fall.

-- John Fund

WSJ.com's Political Diary - Our Men in Baghdad

Our Men in Baghdad

When Barack Obama named Christopher Hill to be his ambassador to Iraq, he praised the diplomat for having "the pragmatism and skill that we need right now." Republican Sen. Sam Brownback strongly disagreed.

In a March 2009 letter to the President, the Kansas Republican slammed Mr. Hill for engaging in "evasive and unprofessional activities" as the U.S. representative to the Six Party Talks over North Korea. Mr. Brownback also noted that Mr. Hill spoke no Arabic and had never served in a diplomatic post in the Middle East. This was not, he wrote, "the time to appoint an ambassador who may need the equivalent of a crash course in Iraqi affairs."

Now the administration seems to have come around to Sen. Brownback's view. Word is that Mr. Hill will be leaving Baghdad after barely a year to become dean of the University of Denver's foreign service school. Supposedly, Mr. Hill took the job intent on spending only a year in Baghdad, but several sources tell me he had a particularly strained relationship with U.S. military commanders, including Gen. Ray Odierno. His lack of Arabic would also have made him poorly suited to play the role his predecessor Ryan Crocker did in easing tensions between Iraq's dueling political factions.

The good news is that Mr. Hill is to be replaced with Jim Jeffrey, currently the U.S. ambassador to Turkey. Mr. Jeffrey, a Vietnam vet, has already done one tour of duty in the Baghdad embassy as former ambassador John Negroponte's deputy. He was also George W. Bush's deputy national security adviser. The ambassador gets good reviews from his erstwhile White House colleagues, who think the New Englander's easy manner, Middle East expertise and military background will serve him well. His nomination is another reminder that, when it comes to Iraq policy, Barack Obama's presidency is little more than an extension of his predecessor's.

-- Bret Stephens

Shaken to my core... Getting back to my center...

Music does it for me everytime. Of all the things that happened last year, so much of it seemed a dream, (or a nightmare), but getting back to my base, it took the Saints in the SuperBowl to remind me that recovery, while painful, is possible.

Geaux Saints...

Participation, Transparency, & Accountablity - SaveOurDemocracy.org

Thomas Paine once wrote:

"There is too much common sense and independence in America to be long the dupe of any fiction, foreign or domestic. "

Democracy means literally rule by the people - and is grounded in the values of participation, transparency and accountability. It means that decisions are made from the bottom up.

What are you doing to educate your self on the issues of today?

How are you staying informed?

How are you holding your elected officials accountable?

You can start by joining http://www.saveourdemocracy.org/.

Nancy-Ann DeParle, She Knows Medicare Fraud - From WSJ.com's Political Diary

Obama's Expert on Medicare Fraud

It turns out that President Obama's Health Care czarina, Nancy-Ann DeParle, knows a lot about all that Medicare waste, fraud and abuse that Mr. Obama wants to weed out.
Mr. Obama says he can free up $500 billion to pay for an expanded middle-class health care entitlement by eliminating waste and fraud in Medicare. Many are skeptical, but at least he has an underling who knows all about the subject.

Ms. DeParle ran the Medicare program under Bill Clinton, then left to serve on the boards of several medical care companies that later were charged with Medicare fraud. Five of the companies subsequently paid out $566 million in fraud or product liability settlements, with Medicare often being the victim of the alleged fraud. Meanwhile, she earned millions of dollars in board fees.

We can thank Investigative Reporting Workshop of the American University School of Communication for this information. It conducted a multi-month investigation. In one case, Ms. DeParle joined the board of Specialty Laboratories Inc., a California medical testing company, just two months before "federal investigators suspended Medicare payments and threatened to revoke Specialty's license to operate. The company agreed to pay a $700,000 fine. . . . Specialty was also sued this year by the state of California which seeks to recover hundreds of millions of dollars for the state's Medicaid program for what [California Attorney General Jerry] Brown termed 'massive . . . fraud and kickbacks' over the past 15 years."

One should be careful in jumping to conclusions about true culpability for alleged Medicare fraud. It's not infrequent that regulators bully firms into paying penalties to avoid legal costs or remain in good standing as government contractors. In some cases, the DeParle-connected firms did not admit to fraud or the cases are still unsettled.

But the bottom line, according of the AU Reporting Workshop, is still hard to jibe with the Obama administration's verbal war on the evils of lobbying: "In touting DeParle's accomplishments when he appointed her in March, Obama didn't mention the lucrative private-sector career she built since September 2000, when she left her government job running Medicare for the Clinton administration. Records show she earned more than $6.6 million since early 2001 . . . And the public wasn't told that much of that corporate career was built at companies that have frequently had to defend themselves against federal investigations. Critics see DeParle's re-emergence as a classic case of Washington 'revolving door' syndrome, despite Obama's suggestions that he would shut that door."

By the end of the Clinton administration, Medicare fraud was estimated by the U.S. General Accounting Office to costs taxpayers tens of billions of dollars a year. This happened on Ms. DeParle's watch. It makes one wonder how this czarina is going to root out waste when so much of it piled up the last time she was in charge.

-- Stephen Moore