PJTV: The Dem’s Super Majority is Gone and Michael Barone Says it’s Only the Beginning

H/T Sissy Willis of sisu

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit interviewed Michael Barone about the election of Scott Brown in MA:

Reynolds: One thing that struck me about the Scott Brown campaign was that he really didn’t seem to be getting a lot of support from the RNC, and there was a lot of some internet-based disintermediation going on. People who supported Scott Brown went directly to the campaign, he ran the Moneybomb that raised a million dollars a day for the whole week before the election, he brought in thousands of volunteers who came in from out of state, who came in on the internet, and this seems to me to be another step in sort of the replacement of political parties by internet enthusiasts … Am I overreading this, is this my notorious internet enthusiasm, or is there really something to this?

Barone: No. I think you’ve got an institutional position to defend as the proprietor of Instapundit.com, but I think you’re dead-on right about this. The fact is that Scott Brown was able to use the internet as a means of communication with voters across the country …There’s a larger point here than just campaign malpractice though. The only places that Martha Coakley, the Democrat, carried were a few old mill towns [and] what David Brooks called in a NYT column a couple of weeks ago the “educated class” … some of the affluent suburbs west of Boston. But the fact is there are more town folks than gown folks in Massachusetts…

Reynolds: …What advice would you give people in the Tea Party movement about what to do next?

Barone: Go around and search out candidates, and find some people locally. One of the fascinating things about this Massachusetts race is that I, the co-author of The Almanac of American Politics, never heard of Scott Brown two months ago … He was not high on my radar screen. Now he’s a major national figure, and that victory speech he gave last night, which was terrific, was almost in the nature of a State of the Union Address … I think Scott Brown set the parameters for where this country wants policy to be headed … We’ve got an awful lot of talented, bright, energetic people out there that people like me have never heard of. The Tea Partiers have got an opportunity, I think, to coalesce around some of these people … The Tea Party People can make their voices heard … Compare the Obama enthusiasts of 2008 with the Tea Partiers of 2009 and 2010. The Obama enthusiasts were entranced by style . . . the Tea Party People are concerned about substance…

The video of this conversation is available at PJTV.

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