Newsmax cheerfully interprets away Obama’s 1.9% winning edge, but, hey! Brown hasn’t even started campaigning yet.

A stunning new poll conducted by Newsmax/Zogby reveals that Massachusett’s new Republican Sen.-elect Scott Brown could defeat President Barack Obama in a presidential election.

The Newsmax/Zogby poll released Tuesday found that the pair would be statistically deadlocked if the presidential election took place today.

The poll indicates surprisingly weak support for the president among independent voters, who favor the tyro Brown by 48.6 percent to 36 percent in a hypothetical matchup against Obama. …

“The real problem for Obama is that he has lost the middle, and losing the middle means losing independents,” McKinnon said. “And it is independents that are responsible for swinging elections one way or the other in this country. So if you lose independents, you’re going to lose the presidency.”

The poll asked likely voters: “If the election for president of the United States were held today and the only candidates were Democrat Barack Obama and Republican Scott Brown, for whom would you vote?”

Based on the 4,163 responses, Obama leads Brown by 46.5 percent to 44.6 percent. That amounts to a statistical tie because the Zogby survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 1.5 percent.

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Even hard-core liberal snark queen Maureen Dowd evidently recognizes the rising star eclipsing the setting one.

He’s The One, all right.

The handsome, athletic pol with the comely wife and two lovely daughters who precipitously rose from the State Legislature to pull us all together.

The fresh face and disarming underdog America’s been waiting for, someone who suffered through his parents’ divorce, watched his mom go on welfare and survived some wayward youthful behavior to become disciplined and successful — a lawyer, a lawmaker and a devoted family guy who does dog duty.

Someone who’s always game for a game of pickup basketball, loves talking sports and even boasts beefcake photos. A pro-choice phenom propelled into higher office by conservatives, independents and Democrats, a surprise winner with a magical aura.

The New One is the shimmering vessel that we are pouring all our hopes and dreams into after the grave disappointment of the Last One, Barack Obama.

The only question left is: Why isn’t Scott Brown delivering the State of the Union?

Coakley appears destined to be buried in a landslide. Who could possibly have imagined that the public reaction in the People’s Republic of Taxachusetts would be so averse to Obamacare as to loosen the party of the left’s grip on the safest of all possible democrat senate seats?

Andrew Sullivan is in tears.

I suspect serious health insurance reform is over for yet another generation.

Even if Coakley wins – and my guess is she’ll lose by a double digit margin – the bill is dead. The most Obama can hope for is a minimalist alternative that simply mandates that insurance companies accept people with pre-existing conditions and are barred from ejecting patients when they feel like it. That’s all he can get now – and even that will be a stretch. The uninsured will even probably vote Republican next time in protest at Obama’s failure! That’s how blind the rage is.

Ditto any attempt to grapple with climate change. In fact, any legislative moves with this Democratic party and this Republican party are close to hopeless. The Democrats are a clapped out, gut-free lobbyist machine. The Republicans are insane. The system is therefore paralyzed beyond repair.

No man’s life, property, or liberty is safe when the legislature is in session, John Adams remarked, and at this point in history, paralysis is devoutly to be wished, followed by euthanasia at the polls in 2010 and 2012 for incumbents.

Martha Coakley’s increasingly desperate negative campaign ads are provoking satire. This example is from Boston radio 96.9 WTKK. 0:52 video.

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The Left is getting seriously worried about what will happen on Tuesday in Massachsetts.

Josh Marshall writes:

If Scott Brown wins on Tuesday, you can bet he’ll arrive in DC the next morning waiting to be sworn in. And there’s just not much precedent for any real delay of swearing in the winner of a special election, as long as the election result is not in dispute. (Oddly, there haven’t been that many Senate special elections — as opposed to appointments until the end of a given senate. So we’re actually trying to figure out now what precedent would apply.) At that point, Health Care Reform will be dead unless the House agrees to pass the Senate bill verbatim — which I really wonder about, given how dug in the progressives in the House are. Barney Frank doesn’t seem to think it’ll happen.

At that point, how incredibly stupid is the dawdling over the last few weeks going to look? The work of a year, arguably the work of a few generations, let go needlessly over a single special election?

It’s really almost beyond comprehension.

Late Update: TPM Reader VL responds …

Not only that, but how cruel – not only for us here in MA but for the whole country – for it to be Kennedy’s seat itself that kills health care, the cause of his life.

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IPPC 2007: Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate.

Himalayan Glaciers not vanishing. No science was ever behind IPCC report‘s assertion that they were. How embarrassing! London Times.

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Lucianne describes last minute democrat health care desperation: Like trying to put an oyster into a slot machine, Nelson tries to give back his bribe. Associated news agency story.