The Massachusetts message: What the voters are saying

Everyone in this troubled country owes the citizens of Massachusetts “a huge debt of gratitude,” said Michael Goodwin in the New York Post. When voters in that overwhelmingly Democratic state last week elected Republican Scott Brown to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, they essentially “ripped the facade off the Obama presidency.” Brown’s victory was a stunning rejection of Obama’s attempt to ram through a massive government takeover of health care, but it was more than that; it also marked the end of “the cult of Obama-ism,” with a stampede of white, middle-class independents and Democrats showing a general lack of faith in the president’s competence and priorities. Democrats are in shock, said Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post. But that’s because for months, “they have been ignoring or disdaining the clear signs of resistance”—from the birth of the Tea Party movement to November’s drubbings in the New Jersey and Virginia governors’ races. Now that even Massachusetts, the bluest state in the union, has called for a halt to Obama’s Big Government agenda, perhaps Democrats will stop blaming all their troubles on “a redneck, retrograde, probably racist rabble.”

The loss of that Senate seat certainly was a “political fiasco” for Obama, said William Greider in The Nation, but not because it proved that the country had suddenly turned conservative. Rather, the results laid bare the extent to which an aloof Obama has lost touch with “the rage and fear” roiling a nation still struggling with double-digit unemployment, housing foreclosures, and stagnant wages. The longer Obama’s signature health-care reform dragged on, “the more people wondered why Democrats weren’t talking about their problems—jobs and income.” With “a full-scale populist revolt” now breaking out across America, said William Schneider in Politico.com, the message to incumbent Democrats in Congress is clear: “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”

Actually, “Republicans aren’t sitting as pretty as they think,” said Ed Kilgore in The New Republic. A lot of the populist rage sweeping the country is targeted at bankers, Wall Street, and the GOP’s big-business friends. Sooner or later, voters will notice that in the public debate about enacting tougher regulations on financial institutions, taxing the super-wealthy, and cutting into the profits of insurance companies, Republicans are on the side of the fat cats. And while polls show that congressional Democrats are trusted by only 32 percent of voters, even fewer, just 24 percent, trust Republicans. “The Republican brand remains damaged.”

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Brown’s “Mass-acre,” in fact, should worry everyone in Washington, said Dan Gerstein in Forbes.com. His main campaign message was that the national leadership was out of touch. His victory exposed “the most important fault line in American politics”—not between Left and Right but between “inside” and “outside.” In response, a clearly panicked Obama is “embracing the public anger,” said Michael Gerson in The Washington Post. But despite his sudden attempts to recast himself as a champion of the frustrated middle class, Obama is, at heart, a cerebral liberal with a fundamental belief that government is the solution. Can he convince the country that he’s suddenly morphed into a deficit hawk who shares—and can effectively address—the concerns of all those hurting people on Main Street without spending even more federal tax dollars? Unless Obama can figure out a way to blunt the anger on display last week in Massachusetts, “he will feel it again.”