Lawmaker: If GOP wins Mass. Senate seat, health care dead

WASHINGTON (AP) — A senior Massachusetts lawmaker says if Republicans win a special Senate election there next week, President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul is dead.

Democrat Barney Frank told reporters Friday: “If Scott Brown wins, it’ll kill the health bill.”

The Massachusetts congressman said Democratic candidate Martha Coakley should have campaigned harder for the seat held for decades by Edward Kennedy. Nonetheless, Frank said he thinks Coakley will win Tuesday’s contest. Latest polls show a close race between Brown and Coakley. Kennedy died last summer of brain cancer and Democrat Paul Kirk was appointed to fill the seat on an interim basis. Brown has said he would be the 41st vote against the health bill.

The White House has shown increasing alarm about Coakley’s chances over Brown, and presidential advisers were weighing whether to send Obama to the state before Tuesday’s special election.

Playing a role from a distance, the president taped an automated phone call asking Massachusetts to vote for Coakley, and promising “She’ll be your voice and my ally.” It was the same message he made in a Web video e-mailed to his supporters on Thursday.

The Suffolk University survey released late Thursday showed Brown, a Republican state senator, with 50 percent of the vote in the race to succeed the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy in this overwhelmingly Democratic state.

Coakley had 46 percent. That was a statistical tie since it was within the poll’s 4.4 percentage point margin of error, but far different from a 15-point lead Coakley, the Massachusetts attorney general, enjoyed in a Boston Globe survey released over the weekend.

The Suffolk poll also confirmed a fundamental shift in voter attitudes telegraphed in recent automated polls that Democrats had dismissed as unscientific and the product of GOP-leaning organizations.