It may well have been that the Democrats chose a lackluster candidate in Martha Coakley to contest the Massachusetts senatorial seat of the late Edward Kennedy; it may have been that the Republicans fielded an outstanding contestant in Scott Brown. However in the end this was a defeat not for the Democrats but for their President Barack Obama. And it has been a serious defeat. The Democrats no longer enjoy the absolute majority in the Senate that is bad news for the president’s keynote health-care reforms.
Recalcitrant Democrat congressman may now rue their obstruction of the president’s initiative to rebuild America’s expensive, unfair and discriminatory health system. This is, however, water under the bridge and the bridge in question is Obama’s standing a year after he moved into the Oval Office.
Some analysts would have it that the Massachusetts result is a protest vote against the incumbency driven by discontent at America’s deteriorated economic position. A lesser number might believe that it was a reflection of disillusionment at Obama’s increased military commitment to Afghanistan. In fact, it was almost certainly neither of these. The reason that Obama’s administration currently appears to be failing is precisely the same reason that he won the White House. This actually has nothing to do with the specific promises of change. Most US voters, however much they wanted to believe in the core planks of Obama’s electoral platform on health and on the environment, were not voting specifically for these. Rather they hurried to the voting booths out of sheer relief that they at last had the opportunity to choose someone other than George W. Bush, their most lackluster president of modern times.
The problem was that Obama was not simply a fresh face, in which voters could invest their aspirations for a leader of whom they could be proud. Any candidate of the most moderate intelligence could have seemed a shining star against the outgoing president. The trouble was that Obama was very far from being of mediocre intelligence. He was instead an articulate, educated, composed and highly informed candidate, whose rhetoric revived treasured memories of John F. Kennedy. Thus when Americans found that they had elected him, they forgot their motive of utter disgust with Bush and deluded themselves into believing that Obama was more than the man that he really was.
He did not have an easy ride to the Democrat nomination. There were financial scandals involving close supporters. Then there was also the question of Democrat politics in Chicago, historically a sink of corruption and payola. It used to be that you did not rise to the top of the pile in the city’s Democrat machine without making serious compromises. No one has yet had the bad manners to wonder if anything has changed or seek to analyze how Obama broke free of and emerged from the traditional political process in his home city.
Therefore the Massachusetts defeat is almost certainly the consequence of Obama’s stunning victory 14 months ago. He might now wish that his victory over John McCain had not been so overwhelming.
