Lessons from the Massachusetts Special Election
To a large extent, the special election to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat was a referendum on the Democrats’ legislative ambitions in general and the current health care reform bill in particular. There are lessons to be learned from Scott Brown’s defeat of Martha Coakley to become the 41st Republican in the Senate, and one hopes the President and Congress are a quick study.
Contrary to what some liberals (oops, I mean “progressives”) like Michael Moore would wish to believe, the Democratic base did not desert those in power because they weren’t liberal enough. On the contrary, Brown won because independents and many moderate Democrats are unhappy with what appears to be this administration’s preference for big government solutions and the resulting increases in taxes and debt.
The health care bill is a good case in point. The President and the Democratically controlled Congress are attempting to foist upon the American people a trillion dollar health care plan, bought and paid for with backroom deals, and loaded with giveaways to the health care and health insurance industries. The President campaigned on “change”. But if this health care bill doesn’t prove that it’s still business as usual in Washington, nothing does.
So what should the President do? First, he should abandon the health care reform bill in its current form. Make no mistake, neither the House nor Senate bills address the real reasons for out of control heath care costs and would do little more than force everyone to purchase the health insurance industry’s flawed product; most likely at a higher cost. Pushing this catastrophically flawed bill through Congress, especially if the effort appears to involve any appearance of political gamesmanship, would be political suicide for the Democrats. Instead, the President and Congress should concentrate on only those reforms upon which most everyone can agree. It’s likely that with a scaled back, targeted approach to health care reform a few Republicans could be brought on board. (I’ll provide details in another post.) Not only would this be a huge win for the American people, but politically it would show that Obama is not only interested in bringing about change, he’s capable of change himself.
Second, the President should recognize that you can’t win elections without the backing of moderate and independent voters, and in Massachusetts they voted for a course correction. In his first year in office, Obama made the same mistake Bill Clinton made in 1992. Clinton beat Bush by appealing to independents and the so called “Reagan democrats”. But once in office, he pushed a classically liberal democratic agenda, the centerpiece of which was a big government health care reform bill. His approval ratings tanked and in the 1994 mid-term elections the Democrats lost control of both Houses of Congress. But Clinton learned his lesson, and for the rest of that term he chose to govern from the center, rather than the liberal left. He handily won re-election and by all accounts left office a popular and successful president. (Except, perhaps, for that impeachment thing.)
President Obama is actually lucky in that he’s had some early warning signs of the impending political disaster headed his way. If last November’s Republican gubernatorial wins in Virginia and New Jersey didn’t wake him up, certainly what happened in Massachusetts should do the trick. If he’s smart, he’ll make it clear that he’s heard the will of the people. He’ll become more fiscally conservative and dial back on his ambitious agenda. He’ll try to truly usher in an era of bipartisanship by repudiating ideas that would lead to bigger government intrusion in our lives and he’ll take a more market oriented approach to the reforms he wants to implement. He’ll steer clear of job killing legislation like Cap and Trade and he’ll consider options for reducing the deficit, not increasing it.
Hopefully, President Obama has gotten the message sent by the voters of Massachusetts. If not, in the 2010 midterm elections, it will be, as Yogi Berra used to say, deja vu all over again.
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by David Boaz or 
by David Bergland, both excellent books on libertarian thought.
