THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF KENNEDY / THE WALL STREET JOURNAL OP EDITORIAL ( VERY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED READING )

OPINION: WONDER LAND

JANUARY 21, 2010.

The Fall of the House of Kennedy

By DANIEL HENNINGER.

Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts will not endure long unless Republicans clearly understand the meaning of "the machine" that he ran against and defeated.

Yes, it is about a general revulsion at government spending, what is sometimes called "the blob." But blobs are shapeless things, and in the days ahead we will see the Obama White House work hard to reshape the blob into a deficit hawk. Unless the curtain is ripped away, the machine will survive.

The revolt against the machine began with voters' 2006 ouster of the Republican majority in Congress for making a mockery of fiscal rectitude. Angry voters then swept Barack Obama into office, but eventually I think his election will be understood, in part, as moderate voters not yet bringing into focus the deepest causes of their disaffection with the government.

Let's be clear about one thing: This movement is not anti-government. Everyone loved the Constitutional Convention. The central battle in our time is over political primacy. It is a competition between the public sector and the private sector over who defines the work and the institutions that make a nation thrive and grow.

In 1962, President John F. Kennedy planted the seeds that grew the modern Democratic party. That year, JFK signed executive order 10988 permitting the unionization of the federal work force. This changed everything in the American political system. Kennedy's executive order led to the inexorable rise of a unionized public work force in many states and cities.

This in turn led to the fantastic growth in membership of the public employee unions—The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the teachers' National Education Association.

They broke the public's bank. More than that, they embedded a system of extracting money from members' dues and spending it on political campaigns. This transformed the Democratic party into a public-sector dependency.

This was different than the party of FDR, Truman, Meany and Reuther, which was allied with the fading industrial unions. Those unions were tethered to the reality of profit and loss.

The states in the north and on the coasts turned blue because blue is the color of the public-sector unions. This tax-and-spend milieu was the training ground for their politicians.

Until the Obama exception, the only Democrats electable into the presidency had to be centrist southerners little known to the country. Every post-Kennedy liberal who tried, failed, including Teddy.
What an irony it is that in the same week that the Kennedy legacy hit the wall in Massachusetts, the NEA approved a $1 million donation from the union's contingency fund to the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate. It is the Kennedy legacy, the public union tax and spend machine, that drove blue Massachusetts into revolt Tuesday.

Yes, health care was ground zero, but Massachusetts—like New Jersey, like California, like New York—has been building toward this explosion for years.

According to a study done for the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth, spending in specific public categories there skyrocketed the past 20 years (1987 to 2007).

Public safety: up 139%; social services, 130%; education, 44%. And of course Medicaid Madness, up 163%, before MassCare kicked in more Medicaid obligations.

But here's' the party's self-destroying kicker: Feeding the public unions' wage demands starved other government responsibilities. It ruined the ability to have a useful debate about any other public functions.

Massachusetts' spending on mental health fell 7%. Environment: -28%; housing -49%. Its higher education system has lost 23%. The physical infrastructure in blue states is literally falling apart. But look above at those public wage and pension-related outlays above. Booming.

Enter the Obama administration, the first one born and raised inside this public bubble, with zero private-sector Cabinet members. First act: a $787 billion stimulus bill, which they brag has mainly saved state and local jobs. Then came the six-month odyssey for Obama's $1 trillion health care bill, dripping with taxes. Independent voters felt like everything was being sucked into a public-sector vortex.

This is why New Jersey's Chris Christie won running on nothing. It's why in California Carly Fiorina is within three points of Sen. Barbara Boxer. It's why the party JFK wrought, "the machine," is hitting the wall.

There's no way out for these Democrats. They made a Faustian bargain 40 years ago with these unions. For the outlays along, they'll stay aboard the Obama health care bill, which is looking more and more like a political Death Star.

Scott Brown's victory has given the GOP a rare, narrow chance to align itself with an electorate that understands its anger. Scott Brown was a beginning, but for the GOP the harder work of finding a way forward has just started.

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