Gloves Come Off At Massachusetts Debate -- With Health Care Bill Clearly On The Line

The Massachusetts Senate candidates met Friday night for a very hard-hitting debate, with Republican candidate Scott Brown sending a very clear message: If he is elected to the Senate from this Democratic state, he will stop the health care bill by enabling the GOP to hold up cloture.

"As the 41st Senator, I can stop it," said Brown. "Not as an obstructionist, but to look at it in a different way, to make sure that we do it better."

Recent polling has given a mixed picture for the January 19 special election, a situation that is inherently difficult to poll. This weekend, Public Policy Polling (D) gave Brown a one-point edge, while the Boston Globe/University of New Hampshire gave Coakley a 15-point lead.

Coakley defended the health care bill, as an imperfect improvement to current conditions. "We cannot afford the status quo in health care. The costs are rising eight percent every year, it's unsustainable at the government level, at the private sector level, at the not-for-profit level," said Coakley. "And so I think we need more transparency, and competition, I've said that throughout this race. I don't think the bill gets there yet, but I do think it raises a good platform to say let's move forward in a way that's consistent with what Massachusetts needs and where we go to bring costs down in the country."

Brown, meanwhile, said that Bay Staters should oppose the bill because they already have health care reform at the state level. "Why in fact would we go and subsidize the other states for their failure to do what we've already done? It makes no sense to me," said Brown. "So not only will we be paying for our plan, we're gonna then be paying for a national plan for four years, not get any benefits. With the back-room deal with Nebraska and Louisiana, it's broken, it's really to the point now where there's no faith throughout anybody in the country on this particular bill."

Also during the debate, Brown took a hard-line conservative position on taxes, saying that taxes had to be decreased in order to fix the budget deficit, by spurring job growth. "You said in order to get out of this deficit we need taxes to go up," Brown said to Coakley. "I disagree, I think we need taxes to go down."

"That's inaccurate and you know that's taken out of context," Coakley replied. "In that time, what I talked about was the need to get people back to work so tax revenues would go up. I misspoke, but it's clear in the context what I meant."

Coakley went on the attack against Brown. "He pulls numbers out of nowhere that he can't support," said Coakley. "And what scott is saying is that he supports the status quo, let's maintain what we have, let's pretend that we don't have an economic recession, that we don't need health care reform, that we don't have a climate change issue, and that everything will right itself, and he ignores completely how we got where we are."

Coakley also attacked Brown for favoring the roll-back of mandates requiring insurance companies to cover certain procedures, including mammograms and cervical cancer screenings. (New Jersey's Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine got some traction in the polls with this attack against Republican Chris Christie -- but Corzine ultimately lost the race, anyway.)

Brown shot back: "It's preposterous to think that I would want to cut cancer screenings and cervical cancer. I live in a house full of women, first of all, and to think that you would even infer and bring in the gender card to think I would do that is, I think, unfair."

Coakley also attacked Brown for wanting to allow the Bush-Cheney tax cuts on the top two percent of income earners to not expire. Brown shot back by talking about the full range of Bush tax cuts. "When you're talking about Bush-Cheney, you're talking about the marriage penalties coming back. And you've benefited by that, even though you've said you didn't," said Brown. "You're talking about federal taxes that we pay to the federal govt. Bush-Cheney expiring will increases those tax obligations to the IRS. You're talking about the child care tax credit being cut in half, you're looking at capital gains taxes increasing. You're talking an across the board tax increase for every business and citizen in this entire, not only the state, entire country."

Brown also topped off his tax discussion by separating himself entirely from the Bush years, despite his staunch conservatism and advocacy of keeping all those tax cuts. "And I'm not Bush-Cheney, you're not running against them," said Brown. "I'm Scott Brown from Wrentham, and you're running against me, so the whole Bush-Cheney referrals all the time, that's old, that joke's old."

However, Brown was not the hardest-line candidate against the health care bill -- that honor belongs to the independent libertarian candidate Joseph L. Kennedy (who is not related to the famous Kennedy family). "Essentially we need to repeal ObamaCare. I think we need to repeal Mass Health Care," said Kennedy. "We should make insurance companies compete against each other and drive the costs down. Then when the costs are driven down, we can take a look at the individuals who aren't covered, the 8-10 percent, and we can let the government deal and put a plan together for the 8 or 10 percent. Why do we need to put a plan together that covers everybody, and eliminated everyone's choice, when we really only need to cover 8 or 10 percent of the population that's sitting on the side and needs to be covered?"