If you like your politics neat, you’ve come to the right election.
I’m sure some people will try to spin this result — start counting your Tip O’Neill all-politics-is-local citations now — but what happened in Massachusetts is unspinnable.
Everyone understood the stakes, particularly on health care reform. And nobody can miss the meaning, not when Democrats lose in unlosable Massachusetts, not when they lose a Senate seat Ted Kennedy had held for 46 years.
This shocking Democratic defeat is about the national political narrative and how Barack Obama — the narrator in chief — has so quickly lost control of it.
Obama got the mood of the country right when he ran on change. He just didn’t understand that people still had to be convinced he meant it.
What’s startling is how quickly people have moved from anti-Bush to anti-Obama (OK, he’s still polling at around 50 percent, but you get the idea) while staying resolutely opposed to government led by anyone.
Democrats will want to blame the vast right-wing media conspiracy for this, but that’s too easy. Americans have clearly lost faith in their institutions. You can start with Congress — always a sure place to begin — but this doesn’t begin and end with Harry Reid or, for that matter, with 10 percent unemployment.
In 2008, the Democrats took over all of Washington, meaning that if they made promises, they had to keep them. The Obama election was about doing things differently, not simply about offering different policies. Health care is a hard sell at any time. Ask Bill Clinton. Ask Harry Truman. But Obama, who said he looked different from the other guys on the dollar bills, hasn’t done enough differently to convince voters that government can work.
The Republican strategy of saying no to Obama — and framing it as saying no to big government — is the narrative that is working. Scott Brown, a little-known state senator, put a local face on the national message and showed it can work, even in Massachusetts.
What remains to be seen is how much Obama has lost — his poll numbers are the lowest for a president at this stage since, uh, Ronald Reagan — and whether he can get it back.
The first thing he’ll have to do, of course, is figure out whether to keep pushing on health care or retreat. That sound you hear from Washington would be centrist Democrats jumping off the health care bandwagon — or maybe it’s Obama’s writers tearing up his State of the Union speech.
The speech will be mostly about the economy. Critics like to question Obama’s cool demeanor. But he showed during the campaign he can stay cool and still meet the voters’ mood. And so you’ll see the coolly populist Obama, who goes after Wall Street and the bankers and bonuses.
He’ll take on unemployment — saying it’s people who are too big to fail — and map out a plan to put Americans back to work. Immigration? Don’t hold your breath. Cap and trade? You wish you could hold your breath.
Nobody can miss what happened in Massachusetts, where they have some understanding of history. There hasn’t been a Republican U.S. senator there since Jimmy Carter was president.
When Obama went to Massachusetts — where he had beaten John McCain by 26 points — to campaign for Martha Coakley, he laid out the stakes. He explained, in case anyone had missed it, how Brown would be the 41st vote against health care in the filibuster-happy Senate, where 41 votes can win and a 59-vote majority can still lose.
He had no choice but to go. This was not like the spinnable gubernatorial races the Democrats had lost in New Jersey and Virginia. This was Massachusetts. And if Brown won, he would be a reliable vote against nearly everything that Kennedy would have voted for.
Let’s guess that Massachusetts voters haven’t suddenly changed their minds on the issues. It’s the state, after all, where they have their own version of near-universal health care, one that very closely resembles the Democratic bill in Congress.
According to the polls, Massachusetts residents overwhelmingly like their health care plan and, by a slim majority, oppose Obama’s. There’s more here than a referendum on health care.
It can’t be simply about Scott Brown either. Yes, he’s an attractive candidate — so attractive, he once appeared naked in a national magazine. And it can’t be simply about Martha Coakley, who, yes, ran a disastrous campaign. Two quick Coakley stories: She called Curt Schilling — who literally bled Red Sox red — a Yankees fan. And once, when asked why she seemed to be doing so little campaigning, she said, “As opposed to standing outside Fenway Park? In the cold? Shaking hands?”
Certainly Democrats are shaking now. This vote took place a year, nearly to the day, after Obama was sworn in as president, with his mandate for change. Now, he’s facing a mandate to change again.
The question for Obama is this: Can he still get enough people to change with him?
Mike Littwin writes Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-5428 or mlittwin@denverpost.com.
