Last night, Tea Party affiliated Republican Scott Brown won the Massachusetts senate seat previously belonging to Ted Kennedy. One might ask, “How did a conservative Republican win a senate seat in Massachusetts?” Jon Stewart, as usual, illustrates the political absurdity of this situation beautifully. Many commentators, including myself, will spend the immediate aftermath of this defeat proclaiming which lessons need to be learned from this. The futures of both President Obama and the Democratic congress rests on which lessons they decide to realize.
I didn’t spend a large amount of time watching this race and was pretty disconnected from it. I didn’t volunteer or donate because even though a Coakley win would be “best”, it would be another vote for the insurance industry bailout bill that we’re currently calling “healthcare reform”. I expect that Coakley will spend this time blaming the White House while the White House will in turn blame Coakley. Conservatives of both parties will be shouting that this is a referendum on congress because it’s moved so far to the left. In Massachusetts? The state already has a more progressive healthcare system than the one being debated in congress now, if anything this reasoning suggests that it’s a referendum on how far to the right congress has moved. That is a conclusion with which I would defend. Polls on the public option have been very strongly in favor of it and now that the healthcare bill in congress has been watered down to little more than a mandated tribute payment to the very industry that caused the crisis in the first place – one really shouldn’t wonder why Democrats were less than enthusiastic about coming out to vote for a candidate that, from every indication, didn’t seem to really want the job to begin with.
Democrats, you need to to realize that voters are unenthusiastic about the candidates because after giving you a monumental victory you have proceeded to piss it all over it! To think that you have moved too far to the left is to completely misunderstand what the left even is. You made this very same mistake in 2002 and again in 2004. Evan Bayh, being faced with a conservative opponent this year, has already taken last night’s defeat to attack the left and is further tacking to the right saying, “Whenever you have just the furthest left elements of the Dem party attempting to impose their will on the rest of the country — that’s not going to work too well.” Excuse me, Senator Bayh? If the “furthest left elements” had been imposing their will we would have a single-payer healthcare system and the bank bailouts would not have occurred. Instead, conservatives like Lieberman held the senate bill hostage and mutilated it beyond recognition. That you can even say such a thing is infuriating when exit polling is showing that lack of progressive enthusiasm is what hurt Coakley.
In a way, I’m glad that Coakley lost. This is a great lesson to Democrats and a good way to see what progress means to them. They have a small window of opportunity to take action and pass progressive legislation that the public has begged them for, so will they use it? Will they finally use reconciliation to give us a public option and break the legislation into 2 or more separate bills? President Obama has said that the healthcare bill will not pass before Brown is sworn into the senate, which suggests that the senate bill probably reflects most correctly what the final bill will look like. This will allow for Senator Snowe and Lieberman to further dictate to the country what can or cannot be in the bill.
Look for several incumbents to tack to the right as this midterm election season gets under way. Watch for Democrats to attack the left and again miss the causes of their past failures. We are continually moving in the direction of a one-party system that simply goes by two names by always shifting to the right. The people want leftist ideas and a strengthened welfare state but the corporatists we continually reelect because they are “better than the alternative” will never deliver. When choices are delivered to voters in a choose-the-least-offensive fashion, party officials shouldn’t be surprised when so many choose “none of the above.”