Scott Brown holds up a copy of the Boston Herald as the Republican candidate celebrates in Boston after winning a special election held to fill the U.S. Senate seat left vacant by the death of Edward Kennedy.Charles Krupa
Ted Kennedy's dream of universal health-care legislation was within the grasp of the very voters who put him in the United States Senate for 46 years. When their chance came to cement Mr. Kennedy's legacy, his legions of liberal voters in Massachusetts failed to seize the moment. Now his legacy is in doubt.
This is not to say that Tuesday's special election to replace the late Mr. Kennedy, won by the little-known Republican Scott Brown, was a referendum on health care. Like any Canadian by-election, it was a chance for voters to give vent to a generalized sense of grievance, on the economy especially - unemployment is up three percentage points in Massachusetts since Democratic President Barack Obama has been in power. The Democrats control the Senate and the House of Representatives; they are, likewise, in control of the state senate, the governor is a Democrat, and the Democratic candidate, Martha Coakley, is the state attorney-general. A vote for Mr. Brown, who unlike Ms. Coakley took nothing for granted, served as a counterweight against all those Democrats in power.
In effect, if not intent, the protest vote serves a narrow self-interest.
Massachusetts, thanks in part to the political groundwork laid by Mr. Kennedy, already has universal health care. Since a Republican governor, Mitt Romney, signed the health bill into law in 2006, 430,000 of 650,000 uninsured residents have got coverage. A majority are happy with the law. But extending a similar plan to the rest of the country would not benefit the state's voters. The Kennedy legacy? That is so yesterday .
And what a dead-end protest vote it may turn out to be. Mr. Brown, though he has the opportunity to work, as Mr. Kennedy did, with the party across the aisle, has not given the appearance yet of being willing to do so. With the addition of that one crucial seat belonging to Mr. Brown, the Republicans can now use filibusters to try to shut down major pieces of legislation proposed by the Democratic majority. Their leverage may oblige President Obama to be more bipartisan in his approach; on the other hand, a minority committed to opposing at all costs every Democratic bill would make bipartisanship self-defeating. If Mr. Brown is intent on becoming that sort of senator, it would be staggeringly ironic that those who voted for the often bipartisan Mr. Kennedy put him there.
The Obama health bill is not dead yet, of course. There are procedural and other answers available to respond to a long-winded minority in the Senate. But the liberal state that almost always gave Mr. Kennedy more than 60 per cent of the vote, in the end lacked the vision to see that his dream was within their grasp, and instead voted, in effect, to deny others what they already have.