The shocking, if not surprising, victory of Republican Scott Brown in yesterday's Senate race in ultra-Democratic Massachusetts will engender some serious rethinking in the White House and among Democrats in Congress regarding much of Obama's agenda, but first, they must address revamping their political strategy. Democratic losses in mid-term elections were inevitable anyway, but the Massachusetts result seems likely to magnify them.
It's not the end of the world. Some Democrats are still saying they can pass a health care bill; but in some ways, health care becomes almost irrelevant at this point. The voters of Massachusetts have delivered a message, but the dilemma is to assess accurately how to read it.
Health care might conceivably be passed already, if it weren't for the terrible state of the economy. Thus the real issue for Obama's agenda is whether or not enough can be done to improve the economy - particularly on grassroots factors like jobs and mortgages - to improve people's sense of well-being before November. And that's a tossup, since I've never seen evidence that anybody, Republican or Democrat, truly understands what measures effectively wreak economic turnaround; every case is different.
Alex Vogel, a "Republican strategist" quoted in the article linked above, is partly right in saying that "the electorate did not leave the Bush years liberalized; they left angry with bad and ineffective government." It's not rational, but voters are willing to blame Democrats for not solving in one year the mess that Republicans took eight years to create. The Republican Party has been surprisingly successful in insulating itself from the political fallout of anti-Bush sentiment.
That brings us the the ongoing evidence of singular political ineptitude in the Obama White House and in the Democratic leadership over the past year. It's not that the party's agenda is untenable, unnecessary, or inherently unpalatable - but that the Republican "big lie" strategy has gone almost completely unchallenged, and now it has legs.
Brown ran a good, smart race and may not have been stoppable under any circumstances. It's pointless now for the Dems to worry about who "lost" Massachusetts - everybody had a hand in it, including White House staff, the state Democratic Party, Coakley herself, and, lest we forget, the party's national committee chair, Tim Kaine, who probably wasn't paying full attention to that job while still wrestling with Virginia's problems until his term ended last week. Politically, the only course at this juncture is to find someone who doesn't currently exist - someone with a firm grasp of the political message.
Only then will it be possible to consider how to salvage the substantive agenda.
Comments