THE MASSACHUSETTS ELECTION

That in the Peoples Republic of Massachusetts Ted Kennedy, that stalwart swain of Chappaquidick, should be replaced in the Senate by a former hunk and current red-neck follower of he fashionable Tea Party sort, might well cause consternation in many quarters, but his election is neither surprising nor undeserved. I cannot, however, bring myself to believe that Mr. Brown's election means that the Bay State has finally had enough -- if not too much -- of that family of bootleggers and bullies, a royalty that goes back to the jolly Boston rule of Honey Fitzgerald. Would that it were so, but I doubt it.

The unalterable fact is, however, that two things result from Tuesday's election: the first is that the voters of Massachusetts have repudiated the politically ultra-correct Special Interest party's sole spend-and-rule domination of their government; the second is that they will live to regret being represented in Washington for six long years by the senator from Fox News Glenn Beck Land. Add to this one further, and welcome fact: that at least they have been spared Martha Coakley. It was, I admit, good fun to see and hear Mr. Obama embracing yet another routine party hack and claiming for her a career of fearless struggle against Big Business and Special Interests. That is palpable nonsense. I was in Boston when she trampled on the civil rights of the Amirault family in pursuit of her divine right -- despite the courts and against all evidence -- to launch against them a Salem witch-hunt for the pleasure of the headlines it offered her. No, butter would not melt in her mouth; it would scald.

Some good, therefore, will come of this election: the Democratic juggernaut, which has long thought governance was a mere matter of taxing the public to spend on behalf (qv. Governor Duval Patrick) of every special interest that could maintain the status quo. It is surely notable that the only party bastions that held up against Senator-Elect Brown were the most radical and privileged segments of Massachusetts, places like Barney Frank's Fall River or the Peoples Republics of Cambridge and Brookline. Where ordinary folk live there were too few to shore up the Coakley business-as-usual campaign.

True, she was a miserable candidate; true, she ran a miserable campaign. But were the sovereign people of Masschusetts wrong to discern that Coakley was entirely absorbed in the belief that the senate seat held by Teddy Kennedy was hers by right, and vox populi was not and should not be heard?

There is, however, a down side to Populist rule -- preferable as it is to Machine rule: populists do not want this or that, they don't know what they really want, nor have they the means, intellectual or otherwise, to determine good legislation from ill, they do know what they do not want, and that is to be told how to live their lives. It is ignorant not to recognize that the American health system is among the poorest and most corrupt in the developed world, but there are also many ways in which populism can and does defeat its own ends. The voting public is all too easily swayed by specious arguments, rigged polls, lobbyists and Money.

After all, as I pointed out immediately after the election of Barack Obama, his populist appeal, his rhetorical skills and even his good intentions, could not and should not conceal the fact that he came out of the Machine and still lives within it. What once seems wondrous, as we all know, often crumbles like stale biscuits; its appeal is magical, bewitching; its results tend to be drab and routine. Politics is not a love affair, but a dirty hard trade, which men and women take up for the power and privilege it affords. Beware, then, the Golden Tongue, and beware any promise of Change. The interests are entrenched, as they are in marriage. Fine words will not dislodge either insurers or drug companies or banks. Or, for that matter, politicians.

A Small Earthquake in Chile used to be what was thought the least interesting headline a newspaper could banner: yet that was what we have just seen in Masschussets and will see in Washington. Words are the nosegay the bride throws the aspirant maidens outside the church. So Mr. Brown caught one. Bravo! And then?