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The view from Washington

Angry voters in Massachusetts elect a Republican senator, signaling problems ahead for the White House

Call it a winter of discontent in the United States as the country settles into the half-way point of winter, and the beginning of the second year of the presidency of Barack Obama, voters in Massachusetts sent a blast of cold air to the White House last week.

They overwhelmingly elected a Republican to finish the term of longtime Democratic icon Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, who died in August after more than 40 years in politics.

The message was clear: voters across the country, even those in a liberal state like Massachusetts that overwhelmingly supported Mr. Obama last year, are angry, impatient and worried about the direction of the country under the leadership of Obama and his fellow Democrats in Congress.

In a remarkable reversal a year after a nation paused with excitement to savor the election of the first Black president, the country is now moving in the other direction. Just as Obama and his party rode to victory on a wave of anger over the presidency of George W. Bush, voters have now turned against him.

My parents, staunch Republicans in the overwhelmingly Democratic state of Massachusetts, rose early on Jan. 19, braved the snow and wind, and rode in a van provided by their retirement home to reach their polling station. They cast their ballot for Republican Scott Brown, not so much as a vote for his candidacy as much as a vote against what they see as the wrong direction of the country.

Like millions of other elderly voters, they are worried that the mammoth health care reform bill that Obama is trumpeting will negatively affect their health care coverage. And they are worried that Obama has done little to put the country back on track economically, and that the size and reach of the federal government is getting far too big under his presidency.

The debate over the role of the federal government in people's lives and in the private sector has been a vexing one throughout American history. The early British colonists revolted against the King of England in the 1700s partly over this issue. Founders of the new country created a government after independence that purposely divided power between the states and the federal seat in Washington, and set up a series of checks and balances to make sure the president and his party didn't get too much power.

Nationalization

Now there's a more contemporary struggle over this issue. Consider the bailout last year of America's biggest banks and automakers. We hadn't seen anything like that since the financial collapse of the Great Depresssion in the 1930s.

Many saw this as a move toward nationalization of our banking system and of a segment of the private sector, especially conservatives who believe in limited government. And many believed that this was just the first step by a Democratic president and his leaders in Congress to expand the role of government after Bush had spent many years trimming it.

Posing nude

This is why the election of a conservative Republican to fill liberal Sen. Ted Kennedy's seat is so intriguing and important. The most pressing concern among Democrats is whether it could lead to the collapse of the national healthcare reform bill, which Obama has made a hallmark of his presidency, as Ted Kennedy did of his 40-year political career. Scott Brown, the new senator-elect from Massachusetts, has vowed to stop the bill, saying "it will raise taxes, it will hurt Medicare, it will destroy jobs and run our nation deeper into debt."

Brown, a state senator in Massachusetts who still gets criticized for posing nude for Cosmopolitan magazine 22 years ago as a law student, could very well be success-ful.

The loss of the Senate seat will cut the Democratic majority to 59 votes, just shy of the 60 needed to break GOP filibusters, in which the opposition party seeks to block legislation by talking it to death. This means that Obama can no longer count on Democrats in the Senate to easily push through his legislative agenda.

In addition, public support for health care reform has evaporated due to bitter negotiations about the details, and also anger that much of these deliberations have been in done behind closed doors and involved deal-making with lots of special interests. This is counter to Obama's campaign promise about running an open, transparent government.

The Senate loss is another stinging defeat for Democrats, signaling that the party is in deep trouble. In November, Democrats lost the races for governor to Republicans in Virginia and New Jersey, and they could face huge losses in the mid-term congressional races this coming November if this trend of voter anger and dissatisfaction continues.

But what could be the most stunning message in this most recent electoral defeat is how much the White House and the Democratic Party appear to be out of touch with the feelings of American voters.

Democrats didn't foresee that their party was in trouble in Massachusetts until it was too late. They took for granted a big win in Massachusetts, given the state's Democratic-leaning history, and thus did not campaign hard or smart there. It wasn't until a few weeks before the election that they woke up and sent in the big guns to Massachusetts to stump for their candidate. Kennedy's wife, Vicki, former President Bill Clinton and then President Obama made hastily arranged last minute appearances.

They missed all the signals on just how unhappy voters have grown about the economy and health-care reform. It was a big blow, coming just a day before the president's one-year anniversary. Democrats have spent the past week licking their wounds, trying to figure out what to do next. The president has said he will refocus on the economy. But so far, he doesn't have a long-term fix to get his presidency and his party back on track.

State of the Union - Obama shifts focus to jobs and the economy

President Obama used his best oratory skills in his first State of the Union address Wednesday night to rebuild his reputation in the eyes of an impatient American electorate that increasingly doubts his ability to lead the country out of the worst economic recession since the Great Depression.

And the task was made especially more delicate since a week before his party lost the U.S. Senate seat held by the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy to a Republican in Massachusetts. This stunning defeat sent shock waves through the White House and threatened the core of Obama's promised economic and health care reforms.

In a speech that had a mix of everything - apology, defiance, conciliation, reassurance, patriotism and humor - the president attempted to reset the national agenda back to basics of job creation and fixing the national economy.

He laid out his own failings, he acknowledged people's anxieties over their jobs and their futures, he admitted to his party's "political setbacks" and addressed what he believes to be one of the biggest obstacles to progress - political deadlock, bickering and partisanship in Washington.

And he suggested that Americans readjust their high expectations of him as president, as the change that he had promised during the campaign will not come quickly, especially not in drastic forms during just his first year in office.

"I know the anxieties that are out there right now. They're not new," he said, referring to high unemployment and to the many Americans who have lost their homes during the housing crisis. "For these Americans and so many others, change has not come fast enough."

He added: "Remember this - I never suggested that change would be easy, or that I could do it alone."

The speech, which is required by the U.S. Constitution to update Congress and is usually given every January, essentially had two audiences.

He directed his remarks to the U.S. Congress, where many of his legislative priorities are now bogged down, he says because of excessive and divisive politics. And he spoke to the American middle class, which has grown increasingly frustrated with high unemployment, falling house values and controversial bailouts to Wall Street and the auto industry. Just a year ago, Obama's approval ratings hit a stunning 68 percent. Today, about half the country disapprove of the job he's doing.

Obama, sporting grayer hair than a year ago, was not willing to take total blame for the dip in his polls or for the stagnant economy. The stalled health care reform bill, the big budget deficits, the high unemployment can be blamed on the "partisanship and the shouting and pettiness" of politicians in Washington. This "deficit of trust" is what has alienated Americans from their government, he said.

Obama said his first priority for 2010 will be jobs. He proposed new tax incentives for businesses to encourage investments, tax breaks for clean energy facilities, expanding loans for small businesses and increasing U.S. exports. In a nod to Republicans, he offered to expand nuclear power and offshore oil drilling. Very little was said about foreign affairs, however, with hardly a mention of Iraq, Afghanistan, international terrorism or the failed attempt to blow up U.S.-bound airliner on Christmas Day.

But he did challenge the Congress to not abandon efforts to pass health care reform, which has become so much more complicated with the election of Republican Scott Brown from Massachusetts. Brown has vowed to defeat health care reform.

"This is a complex issue and the longer people debated, the more skeptical people became. I take my share of the blame for not explaining it more clearly to the American people," Obama said. "But I know this problem is not going to go away."

He challenged both the Democratic and Republican parties to put aside their partisan agenda, stop obstructing progress and "reform the way we work with one another."

"I am not na‹ve. I never thought the mere fact of my election would usher in peace, harmony, and some post-partisan era," the president said.

Now Obama's task is to show the American people that he can turn such eloquent oratory into concrete action.

a m e r i c a n   s c e n e

WEEK-END --- dimanche 31 janvier 2010