I won’t say I predicted it, but I had a hunch that Tuesday’s U.S.
Senate election in Massachusetts might go badly for the Democrats and
the White House.
I happened to spend a few days in western Mass a week before the
election, speaking for the Dowmel Lecture Series about the Copenhagen
climate summit and what comes next. I had taken Amtrak up from New
York City, a beautiful two hour ride along an often-frozen Hudson
river. I was then fetched from the train station and driven an hour
east to the charming town of Stockbridge, in the heart of the
Berkshires, a region known for its glorious summers, ample cultural
offerings and generally liberal politics. As we passed through lovely
rolling hills and farmland, I kept seeing lawn signs with the name
Brown on them. I hadn’t followed the Massachusetts raise close enough
to know, so I asked my companions who Brown was.
“Oh, he’s the Republican running to take over Teddy Kennedy’s old
seat,” the husband replied.
“Looks like he’s got some support,” I ventured.
“Well, maybe,” the wife said. “We’ve been hearing about polls saying
that the race is tightening. That’s okay, it reminds us to call
people and get them out to vote next Tuesday.”
You all know what happened next. Scott Brown, the Republican
challenger, took 52 percent of the vote, against 47 percent for the
Democrat, Martha Coakley. This, despite the fact that Massachusetts
has long been the most reliably Democratic state in the Union, and
despite the fact that President Obama made a last-minute trip to
Massachusetts to try to salvage Coakley’s faltering campaign.
So what’s it all mean?
Coakley did herself no favors as a candidate–she hammered the final
nail in her coffin a few days before the election, when she mindlessly
claimed that Boston Red Sox star pitcher Curt Schilling was a Yankees
fan–but I suspect the real problem goes deeper, and straight to the
White House.
As I said at a brown-bag lunch at OSI on Tuesday, the White House has
lost control of the narrative of the Obama presidency. Obama–surely
the most naturally gifted communicator who has occupied the Oval
Office since at least Ronald Reagan–and his aides have somehow
allowed their opponents to define the terms and direction of the
national political conversation. Through their own strategic choices,
Obama and his staff have let his presidency be painted as taking the
side of the much-hated bankers over the common person. On health
care, Obama is now seen as favoring higher taxes over better care. On
climate change, the White House and Democrats are in danger of losing
the congressional vote on climate legislation because they have failed
to make the case that tackling climate change will actually save, not
ruin, our economy.
The common thread through all of this is: Obama and his staff have
abandoned the political principles and organizing strategies that got
them elected in favor of cozying up to the powerful interests and
inside-the-Beltway thinking that Obama the candidate derided. The
American people, no dummies, have responded by turning increasingly
critical of and impatient with the White House.
But maybe something good will come out of this. If Obama and his
advisers draw the right lessons from the Massachusetts debacle, if
they return to first principles and make a point of siding with the
people over the powerful, they might still recover in time to avoid a
route in this fall’s congressional elections. There is some evidence
this about-face is under consideration. At the end of last week, the
president finally signaled he was going to take on the banks.
Announcing the administration’s plan to impose a fee on banks to
recover $170 billion in federal subsidies that saved the banks from
bankruptcy, Obama delivered a pretty good sound bite: “We want our
money back.”
He’ll have to go much further than that, though. Many of the people
who voted for Obama in November 2008 have been left feeling
disillusioned by his first year in office. This was not the kind of
change we were promised. One of his supporters recently posted an
angry blog, listing one issue after another where president Obama
violated what candidate Obama had promised: Afghanistan, Iraq, the
economy, health care, climate change. The supporter, after noting
that he had contributed a couple hundred dollars to Obama’s campaign–
a large sum for a grassroots activist–then concluded by saying, “I
want my money back.”