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United States President Barack Obama - Source: Reuters
President Barack Obama is about do something that even two weeks ago was considered unthinkable.
In the full awareness of how desperate it looks to have the US President campaigning for a mere senate candidate, Obama is going to Massachusetts in the hopes of stopping Republicans taking what used to be Teddy Kennedy's senate seat.
Why is it so important to Obama?
Failure to replace Ted Kennedy with another Democrat would destroy his super-majority in the upper house, and deliver to Republicans the numbers to filibuster (or stymie) legislation such as... the healthcare bill that the President has staked his political credibility on.
Democrats already had enough trouble getting legislative results with the super-majority; without it, Obama's legislative agenda will be diluted and traduced.
This is as the founding fathers intended, but that's by the by.
Two months ago Scott Brown was a no name Republican state senator who was 31 points behind his Democrat rival, Martha Croakley, the Massachusetts Attorney General.
For the politically ambitious, the position of AG is usually considered a bus stop on the way to either the Governor's mansion (and national political recognition) or the US Senate. She was a shoo in.
But local journalists say Croakley has not been vigourous in campaigning.
She lost the only televised debate. No one watches these, except the hacks, but the scores are widely reported.
By comparison, Brown has run a campaign attacking the health care legislation on the one thing that Americans really care about at present: cost.
He has also - in keeping with Republican dogma - presented himself as bellicose on the issue of national security card.
President Obama played into his hands (as has Croakley by flip flopping on Afghanistan) with his too-dilatory then too-stentorian response to the underwear bomber on Christmas Day
One poll has the race as a statistical dead heat, others are mixed.
It wasn't supposed to be like this.
Massachusetts hasn't sent a Republican to the Senate since 1972. It's Kennedy country; the state that raised JFK and RFK as well as Teddy.
A measure of how much control the Kennedys and Democrats once had in the area was that a family friend essentially 'minded' Teddy's Senate seat until he was old enough to - after the inconvenience of an election - ascend to it.
But even a last minute television appeal by Kennedy's widow Vicki (for a candidate she reputedly loathes personally) has failed to stem a resurgent Republican party in the cradle of the Democrats.
Ditto a promised appearance by Bill Clinton.
The Kennedy family, who once viewed Croakley as a carpetbagger (she was a little hasty, it's said, in making her political ambitions known; the phrase 'he was barely cold' springs to mind), is also deploying its own assortment of name brands to campaign for her.
Why?
Their uncle Teddy Kennedy's legacy will be vastly diminished if Massachusetts went Republican immediately after his death, and because of healthcare reform, an issue that the Lion of the Senate spent much of his legislative career pursuing.
All of this will be on Obama's mind as he trots out the old razzle-dazzle, while perhaps also thinking "If unemployment weren't so high, I'd be in Washington now."
The vote is on Wednesday New Zealand time.
How cruel history is; first you make it, then you suffer it.
Read more Tim Wilson blogs.
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