Brutal ironies abound in Scott Brown’s Senate victory in Massachusetts. First and most obvious, Brown won Ted Kennedy’s seat, despite promising to kill what Kennedy called the cause of his life – a federal push to expand health care coverage to millions of uninsured Americans.
Apparently, Bay State voters – or at least the independents who put Brown over the top — aren’t sentimentalists where the Kennedys are concerned.
Another incongruity: Scott comes from the first state to achieve a nearly universal health care system – and whose system is the model for what President Obama and Democrats are trying to achieve nationally. The reforms before Congress share the same basic architecture as the Massachusetts plan: health exchanges where people can choose among competing private insurance plans, subsidies for those who can’t afford to buy coverage, and an individual mandate to prevent people from “free riding” on the system by getting coverage only when they get sick.
Yet Brown says he won’t work to undo his state’s system. Apparently, what seems to be working in Massachusetts becomes something hideous, a hydra-headed example of “big government” and “socialism,” when the federal government tries to apply the same principles on a national scale.
It’s tempting to dismiss Brown’s improbable upset as purely a reflection of a bad economy. Economic distress, compounded by public anger over the perceived injustice of bank bailouts and bonuses, has surely contributed to the voters’ cranky and volatile mood. But there’s more going on here.
It’s not an ideological shift to the right so much as an upsurge of anti-establishment, even anti-politics, sentiment. Brown ran not only against health reform, but also against Obama’s stimulus package, the administration’s plans to cut U.S. carbon emissions through a cap-and-trade system, and its decisions to ban “enhanced interrogation techniques” and to try terrorist suspects in civilian courts.
It’s not hard to discern in all this an angry rejection of elite certitudes, and hostility toward the way politics is played in Washington. Although the media predictably casts the Massachusetts result as a repudiation of President Obama, he remains personally popular and will rebound from this setback. But Congress is another matter. Public attitudes toward the legislative branch seem particularly sulfurous. This suggests that Obama needs to be more forceful in shaping his major initiatives, lest parochial and special interests run rampant as they have often seemed to do during the endless negotiations over health care.
For now, though, Democrats should make this clear: Scott Brown won the right to represent Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate. He did not win the right to thwart the will of a president and party that won solid majorities over the last two national elections. As the governing party, Democrats have not only a right but a responsibility to advance health care reform, for which they won an unambiguous mandate in 2008. If Republicans want to stop them, they will need to win a lot more than one Senate seat.
