Overjoyed Republicans understandably will trumpet Scott Brown’s election victoryTuesday as a repudiation of the Obama administration’s agenda, if not the policies championed for 46 years by Massachusetts’ liberal lion, Ted Kennedy, whose death last August left vacant the seat won by Mr. Brown.
They have reason to gloat: the Brown victory restores the 41-vote margin that Senate Republicans will surely use to thwart Democratic initiatives by filibuster. That’s huge. It will fundamentally change the dynamics of power by giving Republicans the ability to deny Democrats’ legislative successes.
Worried Democrats, just as predictably, will find equal reason for gloom in the defeat of Martha Coakley, the state attorney general who a month ago assumed she would coast to an easy victory over Mr. Brown.
Yet the election may signify much less than either party anticipates. Were Ms. Coakley, a lackluster candidate, as adept a campaigner as Mr. Kennedy was, she would have won the seat easily. Certainly were he alive, Ted Kennedy would not have lost his seat in an open election.
Moreover, the election was not especially about the Democrats’ health-care reform bill. Massachusetts adopted a universal health care program with mandatory purchase of insurance in 2006 under former Republican governor Mitt Romney. And though that plan has problems — particularly those of unrestrained insurers and excessively expensive premiums — it would be fixed by the reform bill now pending a House-Senate reconciliation agreement.
If anything, the election in Massachusetts turned on a spreading anti-establishment fervor fueled by stubbornly high unemployment, economic unease and a sense that those in power in Washington can’t act fast enough to right the situation for ordinary Americans brought on by an unpunished, gilded, Wall Street cabal of bonus-bedecked bankers.
That’s not to say that the election doesn’t spotlight flaws in Washington’s Democratic agenda. It is should be clear that if independent voters would help turn the tide for Mr. Brown’s five-point victory spread in Massachusetts, a traditional Democratic heartland, they certainly may do the same in swing state elections in November. That could happen if Democrats don’t focus more keenly on job creation and fiscal discipline — the issues pushed most heavily by Tea Party activists.
Certainly the Obama administration has work to do. Despite substantial successes — stabilizing the economy, stanching disastrous job layoffs, charting withdrawal from Iraq, passing a stimulus bill that kept state governments from cratering, and organizing a health care initiative — Mr. Obama has lost ground in key ways. He let the health care debate drift by being too deferential to Congress, he wavered too long on finalizing the military plan for Afghanistan, and he lagged in focus on job creation.
It is true, to be sure, that the current budget deficit — which soared under George W. Bush from $5.7 trillion in 2001 to $12 trillion by end of his last budget year in October 2009 — is mainly Republicans’ doing. They enacted the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 that expanded the deficit by $4 trillion. They persistently failed to pay for the wars, which put another $2 trillion in debt in the pipeline. And their negligent oversight and lax regulatory policies permitted the market bubble and banking breakdown that plunged the nation into the deepest and longest recession since the Great Depression –a recession from which it will take years to recover.
But a year into the Obama administration’s tenure, these truths now matter less that the political slant voiced by Republican supporters and embraced by voters who helped drive the Massachusetts election.
Republicans hope the Brown victory builds on the recent Republican victories in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races. But it’s questionable whether there’s a pattern. New Jersey’s Democratic incumbent Jon Corzine was deeply unpopular for personal reasons, and the state’s Democrats were tainted by the biggest scandal in decades. In Virginia, Republican victor Bob McDonnell simply far outshined his weaker Democratic opponent.
But if Democrats want to secure their footing, they will have to develop keener focus on jobs and budgets, and find a way to build success over the Republican obstacles they are now certain to face. The would best start by adopting the Senate health-care reform bill to avoid a filibuster, and then by putting Republicans on the spot for bipartisan progress on jobs.