Tonight, Democrat Martha Coakley suffered a stunning defeat by Republican Scott Brown in a special election to fill the Senate seat vacated by the late Sen Edward Kennedy.
Stunning, of course, because Massachusetts is a heavily Democratic state that Obama won by 26 points over John McCain in the 2008 presidential election. And, despite the well-documented shortcomings of Coakley’s campaign, it was generally expected that she would win this “Democratic seat” that Kennedy held for 47 years almost by acclamation.
Brown’s victory will change the Democratic majority in the US Senate from 60-40 to 59-41. But listening to political pundits you’d think that he alone now holds the power not only to defeat Obama’s policy agenda (most notably healthcare reform), but also to render him a failed one-term president. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Not least because I doubt this wannabe a full-term senator will risk the wrath of Massachusetts’ liberal voters by siding will rabid, hoping-Obama-fails conservative Republicans on very many issues.
These pundits are propagating the notion that Obama needs 60 Democratic votes in the Senate to enact progressive legislation. Yet this is belied by the fact that President Clinton amassed a pretty impressive legislative record not only with a smaller Democratic majority of 56-44 during his first term, but even as an impeached president with a Democratic minority of 55-45 during his second term.
I appreciate, of course, that political strategy today is informed by such reflexive and visceral thinking that even Democratic leaders seem clueless about these instructive (and reassuring) precedents. But acting as if a minority of 41 Republicans could or should dictate the national agenda is as untenable as it is surreal.
More to the point, though, these pundits know full well that Obama has a number of options at his disposal to pass healthcare reform. The only question is deciding which one will be most politically palatable to Democratic members of Congress who face uncertain reelection prospects this fall. Especially since many of them are so spooked by Brown’s victory that they’re beginning to sound like Republicans – declaring healthcare reform dead while making patently disingenuous overtures to negotiate a more bipartisan bill.
Never mind the hypocrisy inherent in Brown and Republicans blaming Obama and Democrats for banding together to pass this seminal legislation while they’re all banding together to oppose it. Indeed, am I the only one who finds the hypocrisy of this Republican strategy surpassed only by its self-righteousness…?
And, does anybody really believe that Republican ideas for reforming healthcare are any better for America and have a better chance of becoming law than the Democratic ideas now being considered…? If so, then ask yourself why the Republicans never even attempted to enact any of their ideas when they controlled both the House and Senate during much of George W. Bush’s presidency….
But there they go again: because much of what these pundits are spouting off as insightful and reliable analysis about the state and fate of Obama’s presidency today is essentially the same analysis many of them were proffering about the state and fate of Reagan’s presidency after his first year in office.
It is also noteworthy that these are the same pundits who, just a year ago, were propagating the notion Obama’s historic election signaled the end of the Republican Party as a viable force in American politics. Now they would have you believe that the Brown’s upset election signals the end of the Democratic Party….
No doubt this is a humiliating defeat for the Democratic Party. And no doubt more than a few of its members will lose their seats in the fall – just as was the case when many members of the Republican Party lost their seats in midterm elections during Reagan’s first term.
But enough of this inside Washington stuff. Just rest assured that, in very short order, talk of Brown’s election and the perils it portends for Obama and the Democrats will be reduced to sound and fury signifying nothing. Especially after Obama signs healthcare reform legislation and begins promoting more populist items on his domestic agenda, like creating middle-class job and taxing the profits of rich bankers.
NOTE: Ironically, the only people who might be more disappointed than Democrats by Brown’s win are Republican wannabe presidents like Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin. Because fickleness and opportunism in politics today are such that it’s only a matter of time before Brown is being hyped for a meteoric rise from the Senate to the White House following the trail blazed by Obama himself. So, Brown is the new black, eh…?
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