Today's LA Times: The Lessons of Massachusetts? Anger

[CaliforniaPeggy]

The electorate is increasingly restive, and it's not just about the Democrats.
By Tim Rutten

January 20, 2010

You can bet that political strategists in both parties will be parsing the meaning of the Massachusetts senatorial struggle for some time to come. If there was a slam dunk left in American politics, it should've been the Democrats' ability to easily retain a Senate seat they'd held for 57 years in what has become essentially a sea-blue state. Instead, they lost.

Given its importance in the issue of the moment, the Massachusetts vote is going to be analyzed as a referendum on President Obama's healthcare reforms. Increasingly, it does seem as if this first-year president made a profound strategic mistake by pressing forward on healthcare while simultaneously trying to contend with the worst global economic crisis since the Depression, exit one war in Iraq and gear up to fight another in Afghanistan.

Truth to tell, the president and his surrogates have done a lousy job selling the electorate on reform. Social Security and Medicare are our most popular social programs because they have two crucial attributes: they cover everybody, and their benefit to the individual can be explained in one declarative sentence. By contrast, the benefits of healthcare reform are diffuse. In this nation of 300 million, only 30 million people are without health insurance. That's a scandal and, frequently, a tragedy for the uninsured. In political terms, however, the problem is that most of what the other 270 million will gain from reform seems marginal and remote.

But if the lessons gleaned from Massachusetts stop with healthcare, something far more profound and potentially disruptive will have been missed. There is a deep and increasingly restive anger stirring in the country. Its focal points at the moment may seem to be healthcare and "big government," but if there were a Republican in the White House, they might just as well be tax cuts and "limited government." The fact is that the president and both parties' congressional delegations have approval ratings under 50%. (So do California's Republican governor and Los Angeles' Democratic mayor; the Legislature doesn't even have a rating.)

More at the link: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-rutten20-2010jan20,0,1440796.column

[Warpy]

1. Shot across the bow

I've been saying for months that a corporate fuckup of health insurance reform would have most of them on the unemployment line in 2011.

It seems I was just about on the money.

[thunder rising]

2. The issue is NOT HRC. The issue was the year of watching Republicans roll over the left base

that left the base cold. We just don't want to participate if we're not included. Howard Dean was correct, the base is demoralized.

"Looking ahead." vs "Nobody is above the law". I was willing to go along if it got us somewhere, but after a year, with nothing produced worth mentioning is ridiculous. It would be laughable if people weren't dying.

[yava]

6. in Massachusetts, you don't win against ...

liberal thinking democrats and the Red Soxs at the same time.
You make the former abstain from voting and you make the fans vote against you.
She was arrogant and detached.
Two lessons not to confuse:
1) dont alienate your base (the mainstream in Massachusetts would be considered the left in most of the rest of the US).
2) dont go against the red soxs fans in their home state or baseball fans in any state.

[PDJane]

3. what it proves to me

is that the folks who voted for Mr. Brown are voting for the enemy in the hopes that he'll fix what is wrong with the Democratic party. Brilliant,

[leftstreet]

4. K&R

[Jade Fox]

5. Trite, inch-deep political analysis.....

Haven't we had enough of that?

So the problem, according to this guy, is....anger. Anger about....stuff. Okay.

It's probably way too soon to have any real understanding of what went wrong in MA. Possibly it can simply be chalked up to our biggest political problem in this country (and it ain't anger): ill-informed voters.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

7. Well, you're more than entitled to your opinion.

I found the editorial interesting and thought-provoking.

And that's why I posted it.

[C_Lawyer09]

9. I thought it was provocative

Also the author did a great job of explaining, by analogy why people can't relate to health care reform. I'd never thought about the question in that context, and I think it is illuminating. You have to SELL the MAJORITY on how they benefit, and sadly 30m without, is not enough to sell them. Thanks for posting!

[CaliforniaPeggy]

10. I appreciate your very kind comments!

[leftstreet]

8. Nothing went 'wrong' in MA. Hell, even AxelDickhead wasn't surprised

http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/local/politics/2010/01/obama_advisor_no_postmortem_on.html

The Obama strategist volunteered praise for the Massachusetts Senate campaign run by the Republican, Scott Brown, and seemed to find nothing good to point to in the Democratic effort. He said he didn't want to "delve deeply into post-mortems on the day people are voting."

Axelrod appeared to reject the criticism that he and his team had been taken by surprise and should have done more to head off a Democratic collapse. He said it was "not exactly a revelation to us" that voters are angry and anxious after a year in which millions of Americans have lost their jobs and millions more see no evidence in their lives that the economy is recovering.

Axelrod also said that there were "local issues at play" in Massachusetts and that the Republican had run "a very clever campaign."

"As a practitioner in politics, my hat's off to him," Axelrod said.