What Happened in Massachusetts, and What it Means Moving Forward

Republican State Senator Scott Brown beat Democrat Martha Coakley last Tuesday for the Senate seat in Massachusetts.  The Democratic loss in Massachusetts, which is generally considered a very reliable state for Democrats, has understandably left many wondering how to interpret the election, and what it means for the future of Barack Obama's agenda, including health care.

First, the fact that Brown may mean a much more difficult path to health care reform, taking the Senate seat of the late Senator Ted Kennedy, who championed the cause of health reform for nearly half a century, is tragic.  In his final days, Kennedy called health care reform "the great unfinished business of our society," and it is heartbreaking to see his death diminish the chances of health care reform passing. 

More profoundly tragic, however, is the fact that conservatives are using the election results to say it is proof Obama has gone too far, too fast.

The Democrats won two back-to-back elections in 2006 and 2008, precisely because George W. Bush and the rest of the Republican Party had run the country into the ground by handing the keys of our country over to Wall Street, deregulating everything that wasn't nailed down, and trusting corporate executives to just do the right thing.  Back-to-back thumpings the size that Republicans took in both chambers of Congress simultaneously in the 2006 and 2008 represented the most thorough rejection of a political party in America since the Great Depression.  And then Barack Obama won by 9 million votes, the largest margin in a Presidential race in a quarter century.

And what do progressives have to show for it?  A stimulus bill too watered down with tax cuts for the rich to be as effective as we needed, an escalation of the war, and a health care reform bill that hasn't quite been tilted in favor of the insurance industry enough to pass.

Never in history has an electoral mandate so large been exchanged for so little.

Indeed, the lack of fundamental change has voters all around the country angry.

But it turns out, if you look at the exit polls coming from Massachusetts, voters are angry that the Democrats have not done enough to turn the country around (as they angrily demanded in 2006 and 2008) much more than than they are concerned that Obama and the Democrats have gone too far, or too fast.

Some people understand this.  From Drew Westen at the Huffington Post:

"What happens if you refuse to lay the blame for the destruction of our economy on anyone -- particularly the party, leaders, and ideology that were in power for the last 8 years and were responsible for it? What happens if you fail to "brand" what has happened as the Bush Depression or the Republican Depression or the natural result of the ideology of unregulated greed, the way FDR branded the Great Depression as Hoover's Depression and created a Democratic majority for 50 years and a new vision of what effective government can do? What happens when you fail to offer and continually reinforce a narrative about what has happened, who caused it, and how you're going to fix it that Americans understand, that makes them angry, that makes them hopeful, and that makes them committed to you and your policies during the tough times that will inevitably lie ahead?

The answer was obvious a year ago, and it is even more obvious today: Voters will come to blame you for not having solved a problem you didn't create, and you will allow the other side to create an alternative narrative for what's happened (government spending, deficits, big government, socialism) that will stick. And it will particularly stick if you make no efforts to prevent it from starting or sticking."

Now is not a time to act timidly for the Democrats, and exit polls from Massachusetts prove it.  It is not a time to tell the banks and insurance industry lobbyists that business will continue as usual. 

Despite calls to the contrary, now is the time to push ahead on real reform for Wall Street, to put Americans back to work, to show voters that the Democrats can be on the side of working men and women, and, yes, to finish health care reform in a meaningful way.

That is the lesson Democrats should take from the election in Massachusetts on Tuesday.  And if they don't, they deserve every single loss they have coming in November.