“She wasn’t out there!” said an annoyed Laura White, a 78-year-old pilates instructor who supported Coakley in the Democratic primary. “That’s not how the Kennedys ran. I remember seeing JFK campaign in New York in 1960, shaking hands in the rain, not even wearing a raincoat!” She never considered voting for Brown — he reminded her of George W. Bush — but she was disappointed in Coakley.

Lyn Ackerly, who’d backed Coakley’s rival Alan Khazei in the primary (“it was his honesty”), wasn’t entirely happy about her vote. “We need the health care bill to pass,” she said, “but it’s been whittled down so much.” On Coakley’s campaign: “If she loses, it was her fault.”

George Watkins, a prep cook who hadn’t voted in the primary, came out because he was worried about President Obama’s agenda getting blocked if he lost “his help” in the Senate. He, too, was frustrated with Coakley, and decided to vote after polls showed the race closing.

When TWI visited the polling place, there was steady traffic but no line. Turnout was around 25 percent at lunchtime.

Reason No. 1: Democrats have fretted for a while now that Martha Coakley’s sleepy campaign hasn’t sold Democrats on the necessity of voting on Jan. 19 to preserve Ted Kennedy’s legacy. And here’s a viral video of the GOP candidate dismissing the idea that voters should preserve Kennedy’s legacy. A fist-pump moment to Kennedy-haters, but there are far fewer of them in Massachusetts than Kennedy-lovers.

Reason No. 2: Back on December 29, Brown launched his general election ad campaign with a commercial called “Different People, Same Message.” It began with President John F. Kennedy — who held this seat from 1953 to 1961 — talking about his 1962 tax cuts, and continued by fading into Brown finishing Kennedy’s speech, in his words. Not only did it give away the fact that the Kennedy name remains very, very popular in Massachusetts, it gave Democrats an opening to thwack Brown when he turned around and said, as he did in this debate, that it was unfair to compare him to George W. Bush (“I’m Scott Brown!”) and unfair to call this the Kennedy seat. Coakley, who’s missed a lot of opportunities, missed that one too.

Brown then:

Brown now:

The New York Times reports:

The vote was 60 to 40 — a tally that is expected to be repeated four times as further procedural hurdles are cleared in the days ahead, and then once more in a dramatic, if predictable, finale tentatively scheduled for 7 p.m. on Christmas Eve.

Both parties hailed the vote as seismic.

Democrats said it showed them poised to reshape the health system after decades of failed attempts. [...]

Republicans said that the bill was fatally flawed and that voters would retaliate against Democrats at the polls in November.

Notwithstanding Rep. Joe Wilson’s (R-S.C.) infamous outburst, President Obama’s big speech Wednesday before both houses of Congress appears to have been a success — at least for now. According to several recent polls, support for health care reform is enjoying a bit of a bounce, ranging from a one-point increase in the number of people who approve of Obama’s handling of health care in a Washington Post/ABC poll to a whopping 12-point bump in the newest CBS/New York Times survey. Perhaps most surprising, Rasmussen Reports — a public opinion firm favored by the Republican Party — found a healthy seven-point rise in support for health care reform following Obama’s address.

Over the weekend, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) — Sen. Ted Kennedy’s replacement as the chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee — boldly predicted that Congress would pass a health care bill by Christmas, and it would contain a public option — a government-run insurance plan to compete with private insurers. “Mark my word — I’m the chairman — it’s going to have a strong public option,” he said. But Susan Collins (R-Maine), a key swing senator who some expected to follow the lead of her colleague Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), backed further away from the public option yesterday when she rejected a trigger that would allow a delayed implementation of the public option if insurance companies don’t meet cost and coverage mandates. Meanwhile, Snowe reiterated her opposition to an immediate public option, although she remains open to a co-op solution.

For their part, according to a new study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation published in the New England Journal of Medicine, a sizable majority of the nation’s doctors favor the inclusion of a public option in a health care reform package.

This post has been updated for clarity.

This tribute from Ali Noorani, Executive Director of the National Immigration Forum, is a particularly moving one and seemed worth posting in full:

As the head of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition in Boston before coming to the Forum, I witnessed the deep personal commitment Senator Kennedy felt for immigrants and for fixing America’s immigration laws. After a devastating raid in New Bedford in 2007, Senator Kennedy and other leaders met with family members who gathered in the basement of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church as hundreds streamed in. The families huddled around Senator Kennedy asking him for help finding parents and loved ones who had been taken away by armed federal officers.

Senator Kennedy did not want to leave that church basement. These were his people, these were the people he wanted to help, and these were the people impacted most directly by our broken immigration system. I saw in his concern for these terrified and shattered families Senator Kennedy’s personal commitment to righting wrongs when he saw them.

That afternoon, and in the days and months ahead, Senator Kennedy led yet another push for comprehensive immigration reform on the floor of the United States Senate. Each time he spoke, he went back to that moment in New Bedford to remind our country why we need to fix our out-dated immigration system. Fighting for the dignity and safety of immigrants who give their work and their sweat to this country was not an abstract policy matter for Senator Kennedy.

The great-grandson of eight immigrants to America, the brother of two of America’s most visionary leaders on fighting for a fair and just immigration system, Senator Kennedy was in his own right the architect of the modern struggle to honor America’s legacy as nation built by, populated by, and defined by immigrants from around the world.

We will miss his humor, his strategic sensibility, and his ability to keep us moving forward whatever the obstacles. He taught us that the fate and possibilities of all of us are fully intertwined with the fate and possibilities of the least of us. Both political parties and every American, regardless of status or station, can honor Senator Kennedy’s life and legacy by recommitting ourselves to making the United States of America the most welcoming, free, egalitarian, and successful nation on earth.

I guess Thiessen didn’t read the same CIA inspector general report that so many of us have been scrutinizing in the last few days. That report repeatedly made the point that the CIA guidelines governing what was permissible or impermissible interrogation conduct were so unclear that, while “an improvement over the absence of such [Department of Central Intelligence] Guidelines in the past, they still leave substantial room for misinterpretation and do not cover all Agency detention and interrogation activities.”

Sure, lawyers and senior officials were involved in interrogations every step of the way, which is why their actions ought to be scrutinized in any criminal investigation. But unfortunately, that did not lead CIA interrogators to abide by the law.

Take, for example, the fact that the redacted information in the reports we now have been told included information about detainees who were brutally killed in custody. The supposedly “safe” techniques approved by CIA officials and Justice Department lawyers weren’t supposed to lead to that, but they did.

And then there’s the problem that of 100 supposedly high-level al-Qaeda suspects in CIA custody, a bunch of them — we don’t know how many — were simply “lost.” That’s right, this “well-run, highly disciplined” program that had custody of 100 people now can’t account for what happened to some untold number of them. Did they escape? Were they killed and buried to hide the evidence? We have no idea — and apparently the CIA Inspector General wasn’t able to find out, either.

There are all sorts of reports today about the “legal hurdles and complex political dynamics”, as Mark Mazzetti and David Johnston at The New York Times put it,  that will stand in the way of prosecuting these cases. Establishing criminal intent and digging up evidence in faraway places of crimes that occurred years ago is all very difficult, say the experts. In fact, those are the very reasons the Bush administration’s Justice Department gave Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) years ago when he pressed former attorneys general about why they hadn’t prosecuted the deaths of detainees in U.S. custody: “insufficient evidence of criminal conduct, insufficient evidence of the subject’s involvement, insufficient evidence of criminal intent, and low probability of conviction.”

That didn’t ring true to current Attorney General Eric Holder when he read the CIA report, though, and it didn’t sound ethical to the Office of Professional Responsibility inside the Justice Department that has recommended re-opening these cases for investigation. The OPR’s analysis, in fact, suggests that it was the Eastern District of Virginia, then under the direction U.S. Attorney Paul McNulty, who appeared to be playing politics with what should have been a straightforward prosecution.

McNulty,  you may recall, is the U.S. attorney who was elevated to deputy attorney general and went on to lie to Congress when he said the White House played almost no role in the controversial firing of nine U.S. attorneys on what appears to have been largely political grounds. That was later contradicted by subsequent testimony and documents.

Thiessen, in the Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, writes that it was “career prosecutors” who decided not to pursue the cases in the Virginia office. Or, it was the U.S. attorney whose career was elevated for making that politically astute decision and then resigned in disgrace a few years later.

The concern about opening this investigation is the politics. Is it unseemly for one attorney general to re-visit the work of a previous one? And will it be politically embarrassing to the Department of Justice and the CIA if it turns out that prosecutors refused to prosecute violations of the federal anti-torture statute by CIA officials? And, as so many commentators are asking this week, won’t this all be a big unwelcome distraction for President Obama from passing national health care legislation?

The late Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), one of the great champions of universal health care who is being mourned today, surely would not have seen it that way. Two years ago, he stood up to say clearly that “waterboarding is torture” and opposed the nomination of Attorney General Michael Mukasey because Mukasey refused to admit that. Kennedy also urged the Senate to pass legislation explicitly stating that waterboarding is a war crime. Politics prevailed, and his colleagues rejected the idea.

But Kennedy would probably not suggest that we ought to sacrifice justice to achieve his dream of universal health care. One has nothing to do with the other, except in the sense that, as Kennedy believed, both ought to be basic rights in a civilized society.

The plans you are discussing embody my core belief that Americans should have better choices for health insurance, building on the principle that if they like the coverage they have now, they can keep it, while seeing their costs lowered as our reforms take hold. But for those who don’t have such options, I agree that we should create a health insurance exchange – a market where Americans can one-stop shop for a health care plan, compare benefits and prices, and choose the plan that’s best for them, in the same way that Members of Congress and their families can.  None of these plans should deny coverage on the basis of a preexisting condition, and all of these plans should include an affordable basic benefit package that includes prevention, and protection against catastrophic costs. I strongly believe that Americans should have the choice of a public health insurance option operating alongside private plans. (Emphasis mine). This will give them a better range of choices, make the health care market more competitive, and keep insurance companies honest.

Of note, there are no details here about what form Obama has in mind for his public plan. Strategies occupy a spectrum — everything from a single-payer Medicare-type system being pushed by the most liberal members of Congress to a fallback system that would trigger the option of a public plan only in regions where private plans didn’t meet certain requirements for coverage and cost.

Kennedy, who chairs the Senate health committee, has already indicated that he wants a public plan to be part of his proposal, but Baucus has been more cautious, touting the desire to craft something that Republicans would support. If nothing else, Obama’s letter is a signal to Baucus that the White House plans to put its full weight behind the public option, and perhaps he should, too.

But, when campaigning in Michigan, back when the Russians invaded Georgia, Sen. John McCain stood next to his wife, Cindy, Sens. Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, and insisted that he didn’t want to restart the Cold War.

Apparently, though, it’s game on.

Remember that in the actual Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union fought through proxy conflicts (Korea, Vietnam) and never came to full blows. Leaders on both sides understood where full blows would take them — the bomb.

Maybe it’s piling on to take Palin to task for such remarks. And in no way am I trying to defend the Russian government since Vladimir Putin came to power.

But from 1945 to 1991, the world lived under a cloud of fear — knowing that one word, one diplomatic slip-up, could cost millions of lives. Even the relatively inexperienced President John F. Kennedy understood the consequences of killing Soviet personnel, and so, working against the advice of his own military leaders, did his best to prevent escalation during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Yes, these are just words. And we are all Georgians. I get that. But Palin has a great deal to prove not only to the country, but to the world, that she’s ready for the job she is seeking.

A hypothetical war with our once adversary is not the best way to start.

“As Sen. Kennedy said two weeks ago in Denver, he intends to be on the floor of the United States Senate next January, when we begin to write the next great chapter of American progress,” said Kennedy spokesman Anthony Coley. “Sen. Kennedy’s doctors are pleased with his progress so far and have recommended that he continue to work from home through the fall.”

Because Democratic leaders have low expectations about what legislative accomplishments are possible for the rest of the year, Kennedy’s absence won’t likely be significant as it pertains to individual votes.

And if it were to become an issue, who knows how Kennedy would react?

The 76-year-old has already astounded observers with two surprise public appearances earlier this year: the first in Washington in July to cast the deciding vote on a tight Medicare bill; the second last month in Denver to deliver a fiery, if short, speech before the Democrat faithful gathered for the party’s convention.

The message is clear: Kennedy may be ill, but he’ll be there if the party needs him.