There’s plenty of blame to go around for Martha Coakley’s defeat at Scott Brown’s hands in the Massachusetts Senate race. Let’s start with Coakley herself. She ran a pathetic campaign. Starting out with overconfidence Ted Kennedy never would have allowed himself, Coakley did virtually no campaigning after the primary. Assuming the primary was a coronation, she never let the voters get to know her. And when Scott Brown came out of nowhere to challenge her, she proved utterly tone deaf to her potential constituents, calling Red Sox legend Curt Schilling a YANKEE fan of all things. She may be a good public servant, but is utterly uninspiring. Almost any Democrat could have won this race, but she blew it.
And then there’s Harry Reid. His incompetent Senate leadership made this election matter far more than it should. If the Democrats needed a simple majority to pass legislation, the loss of one vote is dispiriting, but hardly nightmarish. But since Reid lacks the skill to challenge Republican stalling tactics, which I believe to be the most serious threat to democracy the country has faced in generations, Democrats need sixty votes to pass anything. In addition, his unwillingness to impose even a modicum of party discipline means moderates like Evan Bayh and Joe Lieberman control the party caucus, threatening to veto any legislation by withholding their 60th vote.
Reid is operating under difficult conditions with the decline of the Senate as a functional organization, but he has also proven to be one of the most ineffectual Majority Leaders in American history.
But let’s go to someone who deserves an awful lot of blame–Barack Obama. Now, I am not one of those progressives who have turned on Obama because the health care bill isn’t as comprehensive as I’d like or because he didn’t come down as harshly on the Honduran coup as I’d like. I think his heart is in the right place. But Obama has consistently chosen weak tactics in dealing with Congress, the media, and the public at large.
While Obama has presented big ideas to the public, he has shown little leadership in shaping their agenda or forcing Congress to do his bidding. In this, Obama has demonstrated party leadership so incompetent, you have to go back to Grover Cleveland to find a Democratic president worse at it. Obama and his advisors thought the lesson of Clinton’s failed health care bill was to let Congress take the lead on shaping legislation and then step in and see the bill through in the end. They were partially wrong.
While Clinton clearly erred in not consulting Congressional leaders in 1993, taking a 180-degree turn in congressional dealings has worked no better. Obama failed to recognize and act upon the very different makeup of the 2009 Congress, not noting the regional shifts that contributed to the 1994 disaster. Neither did Obama use the fact that he commanded a massive majority and had more political capital upon taking office than any president since Ronald Reagan.
Even before he took office, Washington insiders like David Broder and David Brooks were recycling tired old Republican narratives that Democrats can’t govern. But rather than promote his agenda with a consistent media blitz, Obama and Congress proved conventional wisdom true. Democratic infighting helped undermine Obama’s agenda right away.
Obama addressed the nation a couple of times to promote health care, which was a good idea but one not followed upon by any consistent narrative. Obama could have used his own media to make this happen–sympathetic reporters, the blogosphere, and the same new media that helped elect him president. He failed to openly attack Republicans, relying on ineffectual notions of bipartisanship that Republicans obviously did not share. When bipartisanship failed, Obama found himself unable to recapture momentum, leaving him increasingly frustrated.
Obama’s lack of leadership and inability to control the media narrative has undermined the public’s confidence in him. A popular electoral movement not seen in this country since the 1930s elected Obama. Millions of Americans were ready to march in the streets for him. But upon taking the Oval Office, Obama disbanded his organization in order to govern from the center. This decision will permanently haunt him.
Had Obama asked for public health care rallies, thousands would have attended in cities throughout the nation. It would have been the first step in implementing a popularly approved progressive agenda. Or at least, it would have shown the media and the Republicans that health care had massive support. Instead, Obama allowed support to slip through his fingers. Instead, the tiny astroturf movement known as the Tea Parties became the most public expression of political belief in the country.
Voters like leadership. Obama showed it during the campaign. But by the summer of 2009, only the tea-baggers and their allies in corporate media provided the leadership the public demands. This caught Obama, his advisors, and the Democratic leadership completely unawares. Republicans control the political momentum, the media narrative, and the popular impression of standing for change, despite the fact that they plunged the country into this mess to begin with.
Obama does not seem to understand the lessons of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. He has some nice-looking, New Deal-style posters promoting the stimulus package, and that’s about it. He must learn to take control over his party and his agenda. Otherwise, he will, along with the rest of the country, endure a blown opportunity.
What’s especially galling is that Republicans have learned these lessons well. They engage in iron party discipline. They control the Senate for their purposes, whether in the majority or minority. They have fantastic propaganda agencies, beginning with FOX News. They sell their ideas to the public. Their presidents dominate the agenda. It doesn’t always work, but that’s the nature of politics.
Even when things don’t go their way, Republicans recognize the soundness of the strategy and stick to the game plan. While I’m not suggesting the Democrats mimic the intellectual dishonesty and cynicism of the Republican Party, they must apply the rules of effective governance their own ancestors created.
In the end, Scott Brown may not stay long in the Senate. I would be shocked if he ever wins election to a full term. He is out of touch with Massachusetts voters, and will vote against everything they believe in. Meanwhile, the economy needs to turn around, so that people think more positively about the Democrats. Despite early polls suggesting the public would give Obama time to fix the economy, there’s no evidence in American history that voters ever have done this, except for Roosevelt and the New Deal. The Roosevelt exception happened because he implemented far-reaching programs that immediately put people to work and contaminated the public image of Republicans for fifteen years with economic greed and incompetence. Obama has failed to do this and now pays the price.
How Obama leads from this, the lowest point of his presidency, will determine his success in office. He could be Lyndon Johnson or he could be Jimmy Carter. To no small extent, the choice is his.
This piece nails it absolutely. An excellent summation of the facts of the matter.
Hahahaha…. Wow… Blaming Obama for governing from the center. Hate to tell you this, but it was the center that is fed up with the democratic party and their incompetence. Harry Reid is inept, this is true. Martha Coakley acted like she received a coronation, that is true. Obama however does not come across as somebody governing from the center, he comes across as a radical leftwinger to the people voting against him. Sure the progressives might say he doesn’t go far enough, but I am sure all of those types voted for Coakley. The reason you lost is obvious to anybody… Obama failed to sell people on healthcare and yet you insisted on forcing it. Why would you try to tack on forcing people to buy healthcare – without a public option – at the threat of being arrested? Nobody wants to be forced into buying anything. Even if Obama sounds like a progressive, when one sees stuff like that one must conclude that he is in bed with insurance. Also, why the hell is he attacking doctors for amputation? Doesn’t anybody have the guts to tell him, study up you moron? Don’t wing your speeches and rely on the teleprompter. I am a conservative, I relish seeing when liberals fail. I just thought I would give you my observations. Otherwise this piece is accurate.
Also… You liberals need to get your priorities right. Pass the essential parts of your plan first and then get out the smaller controversial things after you get the foot in the door. You were too greedy, you went for everything in one swoop. You made ulterior interests too obvious. You should have compromised a tiny bit – stolen the thunder of the Republicans a bit by reeling in your interest groups and protecting the doctors a little bit. You could have offered a little malpractice protection for the genuinely good doctors and protected them from sleazy trial attorneys. You could have found other ways to appease the trial attorneys in the long run. You could have waited on financing abortion… You needed discipline to prioritize the interests most important to the democrats at large. Now everyone sees the filth that corrupts you. If there was a shred of genuine good to come out of health care reform, we may not see it now – even if you ram it through.
Great column.
But I would like to add two points:
First, the continued high unemployment rate (8% to 10%) throughout 2009 and 2010 has provided the leverage that the GOP, Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson, Blance Landrieu, and Bart Stupak have used to either block legislation (GOP/Lieberman) or extort unreasonable concessions (Nelson/Landrieu/Stupak)from Harry Reid. Harry Reid and other Democrats are watching the unemployment rate. If it remains 7% or greater by August 2010, then incumbent Democrats risk losing their seats in November 2010. Since Reid and Obama have decided, mistakenly, that healthcare reform enacted by November 2010 is their best electoral trump card against the unemployment rate, Reid has granted almost every concession asked of him, thus ending up with a bill that nobody likes. Republicans played this cleverly, but they couldn’t have done it without the high unemployment rate which has provided unbeatable leverage for the GOP. So Reid and Obama are accountable for their ineptness, but the high unemployment rate is a very hard hand to play against.
Second, the U.S. is currently prosecuting two major wars (Iraq and Afghanistan) at a huge fiscal cost even without new entitlement programs. To try to enact a gigantic new entitlement program even while paying the costs of two major wars (“guns and butter” fiscal policy), while the economy is still in recession and U.S. gov’t revenues have fallen, is not wise policy and doesn’t play well with voters (who are already disgruntled because of the aforesaid high unemployment rate). In January 2009, Obama and the Democrats should have foreseen that trying to pass the entire healthcare reform package as a lump sum was not doable, and as the commenter above noted, Obama and the Dems should have passed initially a limited program of health insurance reform and then saved consideration of further entitlements until both war expenditures and the unemployment rate had decreased and voters might be more receptive to further healthcare entitlements. As it is, Obama and the Dems have chosen the wrong time to put themselves into a fiscal hole.