Massachusetts Kills

January 20, 2010

Scott Brown’s victory last night in Massachusetts was a lethal blow- but I don’t necessarily think that its clear yet what it was a lethal blow to. That part is up to President Obama.
The most obvious choice is that Brown will have killed healthcare reform. Despite all of the criticism befalling Martha Coakley, it takes a lot more than a crappy democratic candidate (which is exactly what Coakley proved to be) to lose a Senate runoff election to a Republican in Massachusetts. In order for that to happen, you have to have a force of momentum and anger. And in this case that is exactly what this whole healthcare mess has amounted too.
Who Brown beat was Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid (have fun in your own coming election Harry), public options, back-door deals, out-of-control spending, and two thousand page legislation. Any of those people/things could have served as perfect substitutes for Martha Coakley on yesterday’s ballot.
What happened last night does not at all portend well for Democrats into this coming November’s election cycle, and so moderates, and even many liberals, of the Democratic Party should rightfully be nervous. If ever there was a public referendum on a specific piece of legislation, this might very well have been it. Democrats can and should let their series of uncoordinated and un-reconciled bills crawl away and quietly die out.
Obama’s public opinion polls have suffered as a result of this whole ordeal, but they have not yet fallen down into unmanageable levels. The last president to have public opinion polls hovering at these levels early into his second year? Ronald Reagan- and that turned out just fine. Furthermore, in Obama’s case, while his public job approval ratings (According to the Rasmussen Daily Presidential tracking poll) have fallen below fifty percent, and his “strongly disapprove” numbers are on a sharp rise, those same polls indicate that he still enjoys a “Personal Favorability” rating of well over sixty percent, and favorability ratings of his family are just over seventy percent. All in all, he’s still a pretty likeable guy, which means that most Americans want this particular President to succeed.
If Obama puts healthcare aside and focuses on those areas of his agenda that are more favorable in the public eye, such as job creation, tougher sanctions against Iran and its nuclear program, and financial reform legislation, then he is likely to see his job approval ratings be pulled up by his favorability numbers.
The second option is the one that you have to believe Pelosi and Reid are advising him to follow, which is to ram healthcare down the shoot and get it passed in political-shotgun-wedding-style. Doing this is much more complicated now that Brown has won in Massachusetts, but it’s not impossible. In order to get this done, Democrats would likely have to speed through the process, prior to Brown being sworn-in, using one of the following frameworks:

1. The House approves the legislation as confirmed in the Senate (an unlikely choice, given that many house moderates already have had concerns about key points in the senate legislation; concerns that are no doubt only magnified with what has happened in Massachusetts)
2. The house could pass the Senate version of the bill, and then use “reconciliation” procedures to modify the bill. However, this would allow for only minute adjustments of the specific details, which may not provide enough change to bring moderates on board
3. Try to push the process back to the drawing board in the Senate, in order to pass a watered-down version of the currently proposed legislation prior to Brown being sworn-in (but there are real legal questions here)

Any of those options would be incredibly difficult to succeed in, and would require intensive support and leadership on the issue from the White House, which would give Obama even more ownership over healthcare than he already has.
If Obama goes down that road, Democrats will get slaughtered in November (a fact that may be inevitable regardless of how he handles the situation), and he will have angered enough independents with what will be viewed as an underhanded and ugly process that his own Presidential prospects for 2012 may be seriously crippled.
As we near the period in which opposition party candidates begin to materialize, a gaping hole in independent support (a base Obama overwhelmingly controlled in his first election) would alter the political landscape from one in which running against Obama would be extremely difficult and an uphill battle, to one in which the odds were a lot more even than originally thought they would be. Suddenly, the Republican nomination becomes a much more desirable job than it was even three or four months ago.
This White House now needs to do what it had done during the campaign when issues like race, Reverend Wright, and Chicago cronies bubbled to the surface- and that is damage control.
Scott Brown killed something last night. Whether that thing was healthcare, the Democratic momentum and majorities, or President Obama’s presidency is entirely up to the Commander in Chief himself.