President Obama was scrambling yesterday to save his entire domestic agenda after Democrats lost the late Edward Kennedy’s Senate seat, a defeat that dealt a devastating blow to hopes of reforming the US health system.
The loss of an almost sacred Democratic seat, which Mr Kennedy had held for 47 years, was a humiliating upset that showed Mr Obama how the popular mood has turned against his policies and his party, a year to the day after he took office.
Tuesday night’s Massachusetts by-election defeat, in one of the most liberal states in America, stripped the President of his 60th, filibuster-proof vote in the US Senate. It leaves him with a dwindling number of options, all fraught with political risk, to push through the centrepiece of his legislative agenda.
More ominously, the victory by Scott Brown, who only a few days ago was a little-known Republican state senator, was in large part because of a mass defection among independents, the swing voters critical to Mr Obama’s presidential victory but who have become alienated by his huge spending plans.
Independent voters also fled to Republican candidates in gubernatorial contests in New Jersey and Virginia two months ago. Their anger has turned sharply against Mr Obama and his party, a popular discontent that presages devastating losses for Democrats in November’s mid-term election and could even decide the fate of the presidency.
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Mr Brown, who ran aggressively against Mr Obama’s healthcare plan and his big-government agenda, made up a 30-point deficit in a month to defeat Martha Coakley, the state’s Attorney-General, by 52 per cent to 47. He will take a seat from where Edward Kennedy made health reform the defining cause of his career.
The defeat triggered recriminations among Democrats, though Mr Obama’s aides accepted some blame. “I think everybody bears some responsibility, including the White House,” Robert Gibbs, the President’s spokesman, said.
The election fiasco laid bare fundamental problems for Mr Obama and his party, who have been left in no doubt about the anger, fear and disgust among voters about the Democrats’ failure to cut unemployment.
Just a year after his inauguration, a powerful anti-incumbent mood has gripped many of the voters who backed Mr Obama’s presidential campaign. They doubt whether his prescription of massive government intervention has succeeded in any area, except for exploding the deficit.
Many voters in Massachusetts said that they were outraged by the bailout of the Wall Street banks that caused the financial collapse, were deeply unnerved by what is already $2 trillion of stimulus and other government intervention, and felt that the Democratic-controlled Congress was just “business as usual”.
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Mr Obama acknowledged last night that his bond to voters had weakened. “If there’s one thing that I regret this year is that we were so busy just getting stuff done and dealing with the immediate crises that were in front of us that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people,” he told ABC News.
He said that Americans had become consumed by a “feeling of remoteness and detachment” from Washington. “That I do think is a mistake of mine,” Mr Obama added.
Mr Brown’s victory also reflected what national polls have indicated for months: that voters want Mr Obama to focus on job creation, instead of health reform, an issue that has consumed Congress since June and upon which he has expended an enormous amount of political capital.
The most immediate challenge for Mr Obama is to determine a new path to health reform without a filibuster-proof majority in the upper chamber. With the House and Senate having already passed separate Bills that need to be reconciled, the reform is now in great peril because moderate Democrats, in danger of losing their seats in November, have been left unnerved by Mr Brown’s victory.
Some called for the health reform to be abandoned altogether. Evan Bayh, a Democratic centrist from Indiana, said that his party had to scale back Mr Obama’s agenda.
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“It’s why moderates and independents even in a state as Democratic as Massachusetts just aren’t buying our message,” Mr Bayh said.
Nevertheless, other senior Democrats vowed to press on. Mr Obama could try to get a hugely scaled-back version of health insurance reform through Congress, or ram some version through Capitol Hill with a legislative tactic called “reconciliation”. That would involve attaching health reform measures to spending legislation, which cannot be filibustered and would need only a simple Senate majority of 51 to pass.
However he proceeds, Mr Obama is likely to trigger a civil war between Democratic liberals and moderates. It is no longer inconceivable that Democrats could lose control of the House in November.