On the Senate race in Massachusetts:

The empirical evidence, all the polls, are pointing towards the Republican success here. Secondly, the anecdotal evidence, the lawn signs, the bumper stickers, enthusiasm of the crowds [suggest] that there is a huge difference in intensity.
However, it is Massachusetts. . . . Kennedy’s seat has been in the family since 1952. And also remember, in the one national race in November — NY-23 — there was a conservative who came out of nowhere who was ahead in the polls — up by five on Election Day — Doug Hoffman, and he lost by four in the actual election. . . .
It’s extremely hard to model with the computer the turnout in a special election, particularly an off-off-year election, and particularly one, as scrambled and crazy as this one in which a president arrives two days before and in which it is basically the president of the United States up against Curt Schilling — hope and change against the bloody sock. . . .
But no matter how bad a candidate she is, her Republican opponent never would have appeared — would not have surfaced — had he not nationalized this election and said: If you send me to Washington, I will stop health care.
He made it a referendum on the Obama agenda and also on single-party rule in Washington. And he said, this is a way that you can register opposition in the bluest of the blue states.
If Massachusetts, whether it elects him or whether it’s a close election, either way, sends a message of rejection of this [Obama] agenda and of unified Democratic rule, it will be devastating [to the Democrats].
Even a likeable guy [like Brown] is not going to engender enthusiasm of this remarkable sort unless he’s got an electric message, and his message was I’m going to stop this machine in Washington single-handedly in this January [special] election. And that is what caused this tsunami.

On what will happen to health-care reform if Scott Brown wins:

If Brown wins tomorrow, the bill as we see it is dead. The only hope is if the House swallows the Senate bill whole, which I think is not going to happen. The only alternative is to delay the swearing-in of the Republican in the Senate, and that would be catastrophic for the Democrats.
There is already a question of legitimacy hanging over the bill:
a) Because it would be the largest change in our social structure, a sixth of the economy, purely on a partisan vote.
Secondly, because you have huge resistance in public opinion, a spread of at least ten points against [Obamacare] repeatedly and consistently.
Lastly, because already people have watched all the corrupt swaps, bargains and deals behind the scenes.
You add on to that the illegitimacy of having it pass with a vote by the [current] Democrat from Massachusetts, whose term essentially has expired and whose mandate has been revoked and repudiated on Election Day — leave him in office a couple of extra days — [that] would be so illegitimate that I suspect even a few principled liberals, perhaps Joe Lieberman or some others, would object and object on the basis of the process even if they accept the substance of the bill.