NEW YORK — Three recent developments in a span of two days reminded me how dysfunctional and uncivil America's vaunted democracy has become.
First, there were images of Massachusetts voters wildly cheering Scott Brown. He had just won a special election for a U.S. Senate seat vacated by the death of Ted Kennedy. In an election there is a winner of course, but there were a couple of unsettling things about people cheering Brown's win.
Here was a state that kept sending the same Democrat, Ted Kennedy, back to Washington for five decades, knowing his one goal was to achieve universal health care. It was a state, too, that had become the first to enact a statewide universal health care system, just four years ago. And in December, the U.S. Senate had passed the first serious bill, however defective, toward realizing Kennedy's goal. Yet the residents of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had chosen a Republican who promised to nullify the whole thing.