Daniel Patrick Welch jumps the gun with Why Martha Lost.
Excerpts.
People. Are. Pissed. There really isn’t much more to it than that. And the more you try to schmooze them into believing things are better when they’re not, the more they will turn on you. Judas said it best (or at least Anthony Lloyd Weber): “You have set them all on fire/ They think they’ve found the new messiah/ And they’ll hurt you when they think you’ve lied.”
Don’t get me wrong: Scott Brown is a Republican, and maybe the continuous reiteration of that fact will hit home with Massachusetts voters at the last minute, helping democrats to tap the almost overwhelming advantage they enjoy in the state. But the national party has quickly allowed itself to be something other than what voters wanted in 2008; if you can’t live up to expectations, you can’t take loyalty for granted.
Obama’s handlers in particular seem unaware of the anger seething at the grassroots. People are hurting, they are scared, they are angry, and Obama’s cool customer routine has worn thin fast. It doesn’t take a year to figure out that the same neoliberal crap won’t work, and it doesn’t help that he has kept on some of the same flunkies, signed on to the same domestic as well as foreign policies, and just plain been too cautious even in a symbolic way. It wouldn’t surprise me if the last straw for some voters was Obama’s recent appointment of George W. Bush to help head up the Haiti relief effort.
But back to Massachusetts and Martha Coakley. As a lifelong resident, I am well aware that the Massachusetts “solution” to health care is not the wildly popular program the elites like to make it seem. Obama, in fact, nailed it dead on when campaigning here in the primary in 2008: “Somehow I find it hard to believe that poor peole don’t have health insurance simply because no one has yet forced them to buy it.” And yet it is exactly this wildly unpopular concept that has been woven into the industry-approved health insurance bailout now bubbling on congress’ front burner. My wife and I pay $10,000 a year for insurance just for the two of us–and that is not at all uncommon. They may not run in power circles, but many people I know pay the fines instead of buying the insurance–they have no choice.
Working people, poor people, are very, very angry–and they simply don’t see saving this lousy legislation as a reason to go to the polls on a snowy day in January. As far as the grassroots progressives, whose vaunted people power supposedly catapulted Obama into office? Though they lapped up his best seller, Audacity of Hope, they are not lining up for pre-orders on the sequel, The Audacity of Bombing the Crap Out of Everyone for their Own Damn Good. Democrats have stupidly squandered an incredible opportunity. The populist anger is still very real, but they have ceded it to the right in one of the worst performances in modern politically history. If they want to save their party, they had better take a much more radical turn–and fast. History doesn’t wait.
I guess what people refuse to see is that they can’t just vote in a president or a senator and get what they want – if there had been 60 real democrats in the Senate – more would have been done and better too. Not perfect, but way better than what we saw the current Senate create. Now MA has cut off it’s nose to spite it’s face. Coakley has problems but by voting in a tea party Republican they have guaranteed a stand still Senate where nothing will get done. They better not try to blame Obama for that. It is their own doing.