Pundits on the Left are suggesting that the reason Massachusetts voters rejected Martha Coakley — aside from her personal failings as a candidate – is that Democrats in Washington failed to pursue a sufficiently liberal agenda.
As Sen. John Kerry and the other leaders of the Massachusetts Democratic Party were still standing on stage, jaws slack and eyes vacant, commentators Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow on MSNBC said that the vote was proof that President Obama and his team had to act urgently to jam his health care bill through Congress by any parliamentary means necessary. Maddow, astonishingly, said it had to be done in 30 days.
Over at the Boston Globe, which was the only organization to have a worse showing in the election than the Coakley campaign, editorial writers pretended that Republican Scott Brown’s election had been a certainty for some time. If they thought so, they certainly hadn’t shared it with their readers.
If you relied only on the Globe for your news, the last poll you read about before Election Day was the one from Jan. 6 from the paper and the University of New Hampshire that showed Coakley winning in a 17-point walk over Republican Scott Brown.
The Globe editorial, having dismissed Brown’s win as an event as common as the start of the maple syrup harvest, then picked up the argument that now was the moment for a kamikaze mission to pass the Democrats’ health plan.
“Both houses of Congress have already passed credible reform bills. At this point, President Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi should bring the legislative process to a close by pushing House members to pass the Senate version,” counseled the Globe. “Any necessary amendments can be addressed in the budget bill, which isn’t subject to the filibuster.”
Well, sure, except that the revolt many have been predicted for weeks in the Democratic caucus is alive. Having seen the roof cave in on Coakley, House and Senate Democrats are not eager to run into the same building.
Plus, as the Massachusetts vote showed, there is plenty for both liberals and conservatives to dislike in the legislation currently hanging in the limbo of a secret House-Senate conference.
The process was crummy and yielded a product that is a monument to the dangers of crafting legislation like a fire sale auction for unions and lobbyists.
New York’s colorful liberal loudmouth, Rep. Anthony Weiner, summed up the attitude about the murmurs from the White House and Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office that the health legislation was still viable and that the Globe’s preferred plan of House Democrats committing mass political suicide for an unlovable bill was still operant:
“They’re talking as if, [the bill is still viable]. Yeah, and then the last line is, ‘Pigs fly out of my ass.’ We’ve got to recognize we are in an entirely different scenario.”
It’s been shown in three elections in states that Obama won by healthy margins in 2008 — Virginia (7 points), New Jersey (15 points), and Massachusetts (26 points) – that the president cannot transfer his weakening personal political brand to struggling candidates.
The president’s promise that he can bail out Democrats who take political risks on behalf of his agenda is as void as his pledge to hold the health-care negotiations on C-SPAN – a relic of an earlier, very brief era in American politics.
In the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, the president had a 48 percent job approval rating and only 30 percent of voters gave Obama good marks for changing Washington. This explains why a scant 52 percent of voters still have favorable view of the president personally. A year ago it was 66 percent.
While the Boston Globe’s hilariously out-of-touch editorial and Chris Matthew’s dribbling about the need to “get results” may not be good arguments for Democrats blowing themselves up to pass a health bill, there is something of value in their positions.
Americans expect their leaders to have some core positions that are inviolate and then work around the edges on everything else. They want pragmatic idealists. What else would you expect from a nation that buys low-carb bread and low-fat ice cream?
By fighting for a win on health care instead of a good bill, Obama favored expedience, not pragmatism. Now that the win will not materialize, he looks cynical and ineffective at the same time.
If he wants to rehabilitate himself with voters this year, Obama will need to figure out what he stands for other than his own political victories.
