The view of Massachussetts

Deviating slightly from my usual topics, I would like to make mention of the Massachusetts special election, which has dominated most political and US-oriented blogs and media sources. It is a story of a political upset and irony, as Obama’s political agenda is now threatened by the very forces that brought him to power: an electorate disillusioned with the status supporting the underdog candidate in a grassroots campaign.

Massachusetts, traditionally a Democratic enclave, recently had a special Senate election, which pitted the attorney-general, Democrat Martha Coakley, against little known state senator, Republican Scott Brown. It should be mentioned that the seat contested belonged to Ted Kennedy, who was the state’s ‘liberal lion’ in Senate for decades. After easily winning the Democratic nomination, Coakley settled in for an easy campaign while Brown aggressively toured the state, and has used his truck (which has picked up thousands of miles) as a symbol of his resolve to take back the ‘people’s seat’.

Coakley made a fatal miscalculation. Democrats outnumber Republicans 3 to 1 in the state, but this is a misleading statistic. Registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans; the majority is undeclared or independent. Brown was politically savvy and took advantage of the widespread political frustration among this group.

Polls were counted around 11:30 am Beijing time showing that Brown emerged victorious (51.9% over Coakley’s 47.1% see NYT analysis), and the Massachuttan diaspora was in arms. Many were shocked that the state elected its first Republican senator in about 30 years, and many more were enraged that their fellow constituents would endanger President Obama’s political agenda. The significance of this election is that with Scott Brown’s victory, Democrats have lost their filabuster-proof hold over the Senate, posing dire consequences for Obama’s health care reform.


There has been mixed review from the media.

The Economists America blog, Democracy in America, discusses the decline of Obama’s rhetorical appeal:

Oddly, the great orator's voice is beginning to grate. And it's not just me: op-ed columns have started to complain about his lack of audible passion and his monotonous cadences. Often his speechifying feels too cerebral and schoolmasterish. Welcome though it is to have a cool rationalist in the White House, a president must sometimes breathe in and express the national mood, even if this requires a bit of acting. President Obama must beware of becoming Professor Obama.

I think there is some truth to this. It is easier to say “yes we can” than “we will wait and deliberate and weigh all the options before rushing into a decision,” which was fundamentally his response when asked why it was taking so long to come to a decision regarding Afghanistan. However, this is to be expected. I want to point out that while Obama has been an attractive campaigner himself, he has not been successful in using his appeal to help other candidates (in, for example, New Jersey and Virginia), much less an un-charismatic and under-prepared candidate such as Coakley.

The Wall Street Journal depicts a pessimistic outlook for Obama:

President Barack Obama suggested he's open to Congress passing a scaled-back health-care bill, potentially sacrificing much of his signature policy initiative as chaos engulfed Capitol Hill Wednesday.
...
One day after losing their filibuster-proof Senate majority in a Massachusetts special election, exhausted Senate Democrats looked downtrodden as they filed into their weekly lunch in a second-floor room at the Capitol. "People are hysterical right now," said one Senate aide.

The New Yorker has been more merciful, blaming the unrealistic expectations surrounding Obama:

Ultimately, I think Obama’s real problem has been a familiar one, namely that, inadvertently or not, he overpromised and necessarily underdelivered. This is a problem, in some sense, that all presidents run into, since voters tend to attribute to the President far more power over the economy than he actually has. But the problem was exacerbated in Obama’s case by the rhetoric of his campaign—“yes, we can” sounds great, but it doesn’t mean that it’s easy to recover from the bursting of an eight-trillion-dollar housing bubble —and the hopes that people placed in him. I never understood the somewhat messianic qualities that certain voters ascribed to him: Obama has been exactly the kind of President I expected him to be (and the kind of President I hoped he would be), namely rational, pragmatic, thoughtful, and even-tempered. But clearly many voters—even, oddly enough, some of those who didn’t vote for him—expected a miracle worker. When they got a problem-solver instead, one with little authority over Congressional Democrats and no authority at all over obstructionist Republicans, they were disappointed.

Ending things on a positive note, however, the Washington Post quoted the former White House communications director Anita Dunn:
Asked whether Obama was having a bad day, Dunn laughed and asked: "Why? Because he's only got 59 votes in the Senate? Can we get a little perspective here, people?"