When the majority of voters in the bluest of blue states elects a candidate opposed to Obamacare to fill the Senate seat previously held by the man who was that proposal’s most prominent supporter, there is a clear message: You lost because of what you’ve been doing for the past year, so stop doing it.
Incredibly, President Obama’s political brain trusts and his most powerful allies on Capitol Hill don’t understand this reality. Witness Obama adviser David Axelrod saying of Republican Scott Brown’s victory in Tuesday’s special election: “I think that it would a terrible mistake to walk away now. If we don’t pass the bill, all we have is the stigma of a caricature that was put on it. That would be the worst result for everybody who has supported this bill.”
Robert Gibbs, Obama’s White House press secretary, saw nothing in the Massachusetts results but reasons to keep on keeping on, “not that we somehow abandon our pursuit on things that are important to the middle class.” Similarly, even before all the votes in Massachusetts were counted, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was vowing to reporters she will plunge ahead to pass Obamacare: “We will get the job done. I am confident of that.”
The same refusal to see what everybody else sees was reflected in commentary by the president’s most vigorous supporters on the nation’s editorial pages. The Boston Globe, for example, saw nothing in Brown’s win to “negate the resounding mandate that President Obama and Democrats in Congress received in 2008 to address escalating health costs.” The Globe encouraged Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to “bring the legislative process to a close by pushing House members to pass the Senate version.”
Then there are Obama’s supporters in academe like Yale’s Jacob S. Hacker and Georgetown’s Daniel Hopkins, political scientists both, who even before they knew the outcome of Tuesday’s election confidently explained in The Washington Post that “running from reform” would be the wrong message for Democrats to glean from the Massachusetts contest. Hacker and Hopkins thus provide a sterling illustration of minds being made up before becoming confused by the facts.
Obama and Democratic leaders would do well to listen to these words of wisdom from one of their own, Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York: “If there isn’t any recognition that we got the message and we are trying to recalibrate and do things differently, we are not only going to risk looking ignorant but arrogant.” Translation: If voters are so angry that Republicans can get Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, there isn’t a safe Democratic incumbent anywhere in the country.
