Scott Brown said yesterday in his acceptance speech:
“When I first started running, I asked for a lot of help, because I knew it was going to be me against the machine. I was wrong, it was all of us against the machine. And after tonight we have shown everyone that – now – you are the machine.”
What people are not talking about is that before the special election in Massachusetts there was a highly contested democratic primary and without exaggeration almost each of the 5-4 democrats who run against Martha Coakley could have beaten Scott Brown. So if you want to define a machine it’s not how it acts against the enemies, but how it functions internally. And one of the characteristics of a machine is the intricate mechanism that routinely promotes less deserving and less qualified leaders, whose qualification is their relationship to the other parts of the same machine, not to the world outside of the machine and not even to the stated function of the said mechanism. Over time this becomes the biggest threat to any machine, like all machines it breaks internally. You don’t have to search far for the examples, it’s Nancy Pelosi and even, gasp, George Bush. A religious clan is the most toxic illustration of this phenomenon.