US President Barack Obama’s first anniversary in office, in which almost nothing has changed under Mr. Change, was celebrated with the news that his slumber of complacency was disturbed by the unsettling news that his Democratic party had lost the US Senate seat held in Massachusetts for 47 years by the late Edward “Ted” Kennedy, a philandering, boozing manslaughterer also known as the Lech of the Liberals but a darling too because he supported poor people, unlike baby-eating Republicans, who prefer to put them on ice floes or ask, “Are there no poor houses?”
Massachusetts Attorney-General Martha “The Ice Queen” Coakley decided not to campaign because she and her party thought it would be a cakewalk over her Republican opponent, little-known State Senator Scott Brown, the male version of Sarah Palin. She was ahead by 30 points and got trounced for the same reasons that Bulgaria’s nominee to be a European Commissioner, Rumiana Jeleva, was forced to give up the fight to have a seat in Brussels after a humiliating performance before the European Parliament, which had to ratify her. It was the arrogance of power.
Nobel War Prize winner Obama arrogantly dismissed Brown but, sensing at the last second that Coakley was going under, he came to Massachusetts to make a desperate appeal to save her, protect his filibuster-proof 60-seat hold on the Senate and his vaunted health care plan, which Brown opposes because Republicans have rich country club doctors and don’t care if the poor die in the streets. The Democrats believed they were entitled  to hold the seat because it was Ted’s, after all, and his brother Jack’s before him. So when a TV moderator referred to it as “Ted Kennedy’s seat,” Brown jumped in and said it wasn’t Kennedy’s seat or the Democrat’s seat, it was the people’s seat. That was enough to unseat Coakley, who said she didn’t want to shake voters hands in the cold outside Boston’s Fenway Park, home of the beloved Red Sox.  That’s the kind of thinking that went on in Brussels too, where the European People’s Party runs the show at the European Commission, European Parliament, European Council, and most of the countries of the EU, and led a party leader to describe other parties as irrelevant losers. Keep talking because that leads to what Bob Dylan sang: “The first ones now shall later be last.”
Jeleva, who discovered that as yesterday’s news she is of no use anymore, was put up even though the EPP and Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov knew she was under a cloud of lying about her financial interests. Even though she was absolved of wrongdoing, what brought her down was what brought down Coakley: the assumption that the ruling party can steamroller opposition, even if they are irrelevant losers or Republicans. That’s why competition is what makes any business better, the prospect of being hanged in the morning if you lose.
The EPP hasn’t abused its power, it just didn’t use it right, the same way that Democrats, who have held the US Congress for more than two years, haven’t ended the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as they promised. Once you get power, you forget what got you there. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, and when it comes to winning office, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between Republicans and Democrats, European Conservatives or Socialists, or the ruling and opposing parties in any country. So now Coakley will join Jeleva in the dustbin of political history while their parties will go back to doing what they do best. Find brand new ways to lose because they always do, even if takes 47 years.
 Andy@NEurope.eu