So, deep blue Massachusetts, a state which hasn’t had a Republican senator in office since Edward Brooke lost his re-election bid in 1978 and had an all Democratic congressional delegation since the 1996 elections, now has elected a Republican to succeed liberal icon Teddy Kennedy. So why did it happen and what does it means?
Why did it happen? A combination of factors.
- The wrong candidate. It is in no small measure because of Dem arrogance and complacency, that we lost a certain seat. All that I have heard about Martha Coakley's campaign has a snuff of this... she campaigned as if this seat was hers already and not the electorate's to give... she ran an arrogant, complacent and inept campaign. After winning the primary, she rested, whereas Brown worked. And as if this arrogance and complacency wasn't enough, she started adding gaffes to it... She wasn’t the most charismatic candidate either. Now, his trait isn’t lethal as long as you work hard and/or are entrenched (John Kerry for example), but she had neither... Whenever you run for something, whether it be school board or US Senate, you shouldn’t act as if it's a given. Compare this to the late Senator Kennedy: Teddy never took his voters for granted, no matter how big an icon he was.
- An inept campaign and the wrong candidate + the current anti-incumbent political climate lead to the following effect: Brown was able to peal of an unheard number of Democrats (about 22 percent in Blue Massachusetts!) and – far worse – the Coakley campaign didn’t generate enthusiasm with its base, so the base stayed home.
- Kudos to where they belong, but the Brown campaign and the GOP ran a smart race. Brown downplayed his GOP credentials and campaigned hard and the GOP strategy of sitting on positive polls lulled the Democrats to even more to sleep. The fact the Democratic Party and the Coakley campaign went to sleep, gave them the opportunity to define the GOP candidate in a positive way, when the Democrats finally awoke to reality, it was too little too late to change this view and the narrative
What does it mean?
- A game changer. Probably the end of the Obama presidency in its current form. With the 60th senate vote lost, Obama is politically speaking back to where he started in January 2009, but with lower approval ratings and with egg on his face. As a U.S. Senator, Scott P. Brown will most likely vote pretty much in lockstep with his Republican colleagues: the party of no is again ascendant.
- Bi-partisanship was never a viable option. Why does the Obama administration still want to cling to it? Even if it has been months since it became clear that the GOP has no interest in it at all and were merely negotiating in bad faith? The inclusion of (some of) them in negotiations was as if injecting pure poison in it. Exclude them! Lieberman and co are poison enough to deal with! If you have 258 seats in the U.S. House and 58-59-60 seats in the U.S. Senate, use them to your advantage! After all, "use them or lose them" is an old adagium. The Obama administration naively fell in the GOP trap. Barack Obama sure is no Lyndon Johnson... and it safe to say that given the congressional tools, he and the Democrats have underperformed. And the meek reaction of the White House against Tea Parties and so on, is partly to blame for this mess too... when you cede the ground and take the moral high ground; people didn’t hear any push back! And thus started to believe the claptrap.
- This means that Obama now has two options if he wants to achieve his political agenda:
3.1. in effect a continuation of the failed current policy of trying to wiggle a GOPer away in order to get his 60th senate vote (no sinecure as in the unlikely event a GOP senator defects on an issue, the Dem caucus isn’t united either, it also would mean moving even further to the centre) or
3.2. ignore them all together, and just find the necessary 51 votes and go through the budget reconciliation process if needed in order to achieve all things political. I’d much prefer the last route (which in my opinion should have been done from day one: they should never have tried to negotiate with GOP senators who clearly were negotiating in bad faith), but do Harry Reid, President Obama and Rahm Emanuel have the balls for it? As I said, Obama surely is no Lyndon Johnson! The danger in the first route is that you probably achieve little and might estrange your base even further so that come November, they’ll stay home too... The second option has its risks too, but if you couple it with an effective pushback and real achievements, it has high rewards too.
- In my opinion it also holds a dire warning to Obama and the Democrats: you’re fumbling health care reform so badly, you might be heading to a 1994 like electoral catastrophe if you don’t deliver or be careful. That’s the sad part, even more than in 1994, in 2009 the Democrats had all the aces to finally achieve real health care reform: the White House and large majority’s (the largest in fifteen years) in both Houses of Congress. The Democrats have less than 10 months to start governing as a people-powered party, or they will lose both the House and the Senate. In that there may be a blessing: as this defeat comes in January 2010 the warning signs are evident. So let us hope this is a wake up call and that it comes soon enough to get things done and turn it around. At least the Dem operatives will now not be taken by surprise as they were in 1994... I hope...
If the Democrats lose their large majority’s in Congress come November, as the 80th Congress was known as the "Do Nothing Congress", the 111th Congress should be known as the "Congress of Wasted Opportunities".