What happened in Massachussetts ? I think that, along with the unease and anti-"establishment" potential that the current economic debacle inevitably generates, a mediocre, presumptuous Democrat insulted the electoral constituency by running a terrible, lazy "safe-incumbent" style campaign against a fresh, energized opponent. Any read more hysterical than that is a stretch. Despite "conventional wisdom" the relatively moderate Republican winning statewide is not a novelty in "Blue Mass."
What does it all mean ? Not as much a many would have it. My own hope is that it serves as a wake-up call to Democrats for 2010. And a "wake-up" call doesn't mean a signal to retreat more and take on the country's problems less. It means more clarity, more consistency, more fight, more principled proposals that ordinary people can see as serving their interests. It means organizing and energizing the base to organize and energize Democrats and independents in the fall elections. It means fielding effective, attractive candidates who can reach out and speak to traditional Democrats and independents. It means pushing forward on health care, not evading or watering-down the issue.
The best take I've seen so far - and it's been less than 12 hours - is columnist Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post. (Complete column, which is worth reading in its entirety, here.
The first thing to say is that while those of us who are Washington insiders may be focused on health reform, the country has its mind on lots of other things. First and foremost is a lousy economy that has resulted in lots of lost jobs and lost wealth, a big spike in the federal deficit, and big budget shortfalls for state and local governments...(Y)ou don't have to be George Gallup to figure out that Americans are in a grumpy mood and might want to take it out on the politicians and parties in power.
That seething discontent is no less evident in Florida and California, states with Republican governors, than it is in Virginia and New Jersey, which until this month had Democratic governors. And it's even true in other countries -- Britain, Ireland, Greece, Japan, Mexico, Canada, Chile and Argentina are several that come to mind. The common thread in those places isn't health-care reform...(T)he Massachusetts contest was not a referendum on health-care reform, despite the best efforts of the national media and the national parties to make it so. It has been more than a few years since I worked the political vineyards of my home state, but even from a distance it's not hard to see that the political fault lines haven't changed all that much. Despite the state's reputation as a Democratic stronghold, its voters have routinely elected liberal Republicans as governors and senators as counterweights to the ethnic Democratic pols who have long controlled the state legislature. And at the moment, the voters are rather fed up with the whole statehouse crowd. The House speaker and a number of others have recently been ensnared in a long-running corruption investigation, while the Democratic governor has turned out to be a huge disappointment to those who thought he could clean up the political process and bring stability to the state's troubled finances.
Against that backdrop, it's not hard to understand the attraction to a fresh Republican face promising independence from the political establishment rather than an attorney general whose campaign was closely tied to it. All of this was reinforced last weekend by the juxtaposition of Scott Brown traveling around the state to meet voters in his pickup truck and Martha Coakley scrambling to revive her campaign with a series of appearances with the president, the governor, mayors and members of the state's all-Democratic congressional delegation.
As for health care, Massachusetts has already adopted a reform plan that, with its subsidies and individual mandate and government-run insurance exchange, looks to the naked eye not unlike the plan now before Congress. Despite some initial glitches and higher-than-expected costs, the program has broad support among voters and the business community-- so broad, in fact, that Brown himself has said he would not vote to repeal it. So why would those same voters now be rising up to defeat a national plan modeled on the Massachusetts experiment, only this time with better cost controls and special provisions to protect the state's teaching hospitals and increase its Medicaid funding?
As U.S. House Speaker Tip O'Neill of Massachusetts famously reminded, all politics is local. There are lots of reasons other than derailing health reform why normally liberal Massachusetts voters may have wanted to send an angry signal to the state's political establishment. For Democrats in Washington, the danger now is not that they will ignore the election returns, but that they will misread them and sound a premature retreat from a historic and game-changing opportunity.
Update: Steve Benen has a pretty good summary of "lessons learned" here.
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