Some Country for Old Men

Colossally terrible senate candidate Martha Coakley spent the last week of her miserable campaign sulking. Media reports had her campaign “dejected” and “pointing fingers.” They had her team “resigned to defeat.” This was all before she’d actually lost. She expected to lose while there was still time to win, while there was still more to do, while there were still votes to earn.

Perhaps thinking Curt Schilling was a Yankee is just too big a sin in Massachusetts. Maybe spelling the state’s name wrong in an ad is unforgivable. Maybe you have to drive a truck to win in the Bay State (Ted Kennedy did, right?).

While Scott Brown – famously a nude model – ran a great campaign, Martha Coakley ran a lazy one. Between the primary and election day, Brown held 66 public events to Coakley’s 19. Coakley didn’t run a TV ad until 12 days before the election, while Brown was up almost immediately actually trying to win.

We can talk about issues all we want in this race – and certainly health care was a huge issue to many voters in Massachusetts – but retail politics was also an issue. Say what you will about men like Ted Kennedy, Strom Thurmond and Joe Biden (they served in the Senate for a lifetime and held seats that were essentially theirs until they decided otherwise), but part of their inevitability stemmed from their never taking a vote for granted. Although he was a champion for huge causes at home and abroad, Kennedy also tirelessly worked the phones and wrote letters on behalf of and to his constituents. The same was true of Biden and Thurmond. People in their states knew them by their first names and had seen them in person countless times. Neither was too busy to march in parades or answer letters.

Martha Coakley, though? She thought she’d won. She was up 30 points, and figured she could coast into the seat Kennedy worked constantly to maintain. That’s part of the lesson here (for Democrats and Republicans): constituents matter, what they think matters and how they perceive you matters.

On health care – this health care bill – there’s certainly dissatisfaction. Yes, Americans oppose it (46-33, in fact), but it’s a misreading of the landscape to assume that means 46 percent of Americans don’t want health care reform. In fact, a chunk of that opposition comes from people who don’t think the current version goes far enough. People who want a public option oppose the current compromise just as much (if not as loudly or fatly) as people who want the government to just butt out of everything. That part of the equation shouldn’t be lost here.

Democrats still have a massive majority. Even after Brown’s win, it’s still the second-largest majority for either party since 1970 (the largest is the one they just had). Democrats represent massive pockets of population, hold almost every senate seat along each coast, and were elected under the premise that they’d undo eight years of disaster. That mandate hasn’t changed. We’re still stuck in two military quagmires, struggling beneath trillions of dollars in debt, dealing with 10-percent unemployment and tasked with solving what will inevitably be a health care crisis.

It was a daunting task under any circumstances, and it was made all the more daunting by the fact that Americans expected that it all be accomplished in less than a year. So it wasn’t, and now they’re mad. Of course they’re also mad about “Socialism” and bank bailouts – even though Bush did the same thing. They’re concerned that “Obamacare” is the unraveling of the American fabric, even though it’s a more conservative approach than both Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon (yes, that Richard Nixon) took.

So we’re left with Scott Brown – truck-driving, American Idoling, nude modeling Scott Brown. His election is meaningful, unexpected and significant, absolutely. But it’s not a game changer – a point the Village Voice summed up with their biting headline: “Scott Brown wins Mass. Race, Giving GOP 41-59 Majority in the Senate.”

The chants of “Forty-One” at his victory celebration were cute, but mostly an indication of how down the GOP was after their 2008 rout. They may have inched back up a bit on Tuesday, but it isn’t because Brown embraced Bush’s failed policies. Still, we’re seeing indications that Republican leaders believe the precise opposite. At the National Review, Marc Thiessen’s headline is “Waterboarding Wins.” Apparently because Brown said he supports enhanced interrogations, that’s what the electorate was voting for. That ignores a much bigger picture, and is akin to saying “This election proves that we only want nude models in the senate.” (Interesting note: On the same day Thiessen goes crazy for torture, the St. Louis Post Dispatch called for an inquiry into questionable “suicides” at Gitmo. Maybe not everyone’s pro-torture after all?)

The point is that disaffected Democrats voted for Brown and so did Republicans. Independents broke his way, and yet many, many people also stayed home.

That’s the problem Barack Obama solved in 2008 – bringing out previously disenfranchised and disengaged voters. People registered in unprecedented numbers and voted like they never had before. To borrow from Ronald Reagan, they thought it was Morning in America after a painful and disturbing eight years of dark. They thought their voices mattered and that a new brand of politics had arrived. Instead they found a mealy-mouthed and often spineless approach to doing business.

Yes, the problems were daunting, but the approach to solving them was neither principled nor pragmatic. It was haphazard, often misguided and almost without exception disappointing – to everyone.

This election should be a wakeup call to Barack Obama and Democrats, not because it means their ideas (the ones they ran on) were wrong, but because they abandoned their constituents and what they ran on. From overturning “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and repairing health care to closing Gitmo and getting us out of Iraq, the list of unfulfilled promises is huge.

In her concession speech last night, Martha Coakley stunningly invoked Ted Kennedy’s words when she said, “The work begins anew, the hope rises again, and the dream lives on.” Her vision, her approach and her campaign were nothing like Kennedy’s approach. If anything, Brown carried the Kennedy torch by listening to an angry and active base. Barack Obama should do the same. This country is still full of voters who want him to succeed, want to see the promises he ran on fulfilled and want to see real health care reform.

With his numbers flagging, Obama’s hopes of a second term are far from a given. With three quarters of a term to go, though, he has plenty of time to rediscover his fire, re-ignite his base and rededicate himself to accomplishing what he originally set out to do. If he fails, it should at least be doing what he set out to do. Here’s to hoping that Brown’s election results not just in a new makeup of the U.S. senate, but a new tone at the White House. An empowered, progressive and fiery candidate is what excites voters, what moves polls and what gets things done. Scott Brown showed that, and Barack Obama should take notice.