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
It's the kind of brutal reversal of fortune that can alter the course of a presidency. From charmed to cursed in a Boston minute.
The Democrat's stunning defeat Tuesday night in the Massachusetts Senate race that should have been a cakewalk comes barely 14 months after Barack Obama carried the state by 26 percentage points.
The first casualty, after Mr. Obama's once golden-boy image, risks being his health-care reform package. Unless he pulls a fast one and gets Congress to pass a final health-care bill before the 41st Republican Senator is sworn into office, a year's worth of hard labour and compromises looks like it's about to go down the drain.
There is little doubt about who's to blame. The special Senate election was less of a contest between two starkly different candidates - one a telegenic former Cosmo centerfold turned fiscal conservative, the other an all-too-serious but accomplished Hillary-like liberal - than it was a referendum on Mr. Obama's first year in the White House.
And Mr. Obama lost. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs described the President as "Surprised and frustrated. Not pleased."
From here on in, his presidency will reflect it. With another seat in the Senate, the Republicans have all the votes they need to thwart almost any piece of Democratic legislation and they vow to do just that. Presidents normally only become lame ducks in the final year of their second term. But given the hyper-partisanship of Mr. Obama's Washington, that could now change.
Instead of the rock star on whose coattails every Democrat wanted to campaign in 2008, Mr. Obama also risks becoming a liability for his party's candidates in this fall's mid-term congressional elections.
Mr. Obama was of no help to Martha Coakley, the high-profile Democratic candidate who got walloped by a relatively unknown (until a few weeks ago) Republican named Scott Brown. The President headlined a Boston rally on the weekend that was supposed to pull Ms. Coakley's iron out the fire. Instead, he may have cooked her goose.
"I'm ready to go to Washington without delay," Mr. Brown declared, suggesting his party will pressure Democrats to postpone a final vote on health-care reform until he gets there.
Mr. Brown beat Ms. Coakley by a convincing 52 per cent to 47 per cent margin.
With numbers like that in what is normally about the bluest state in the land, Democrats in Congress will have to think twice about getting behind any of the President's signature initiatives, including the climate-change legislation he hoped to make a focus of his second year in office.
There is no exaggerating the significance of this vote. In Massachusetts Senate elections, they usually don't even have to bother counting. Were this any other year, the Democratic candidate could have spent the campaign at the beach and still won handily. Any other year, the Republican candidate would garner the pity vote as the GOP's sacrificial lamb.
This, after all, is Kennedy country. The seat being filled was Ted Kennedy's until he died in August. Before he became a Senator in 1962, his brother John had held the seat for eight years prior to becoming president in 1960.
It's a well known axiom of politics that winners are never catty, while losers are incurable blabbermouths. That's why so little of what really went on behind the scenes in the Obama camp during the 2008 campaign has come out, while so much of the supposed dysfunction of the McCain-Palin campaign has already filled a library.
Well before the last ballot had been cast Tuesday, the knives had come out. Loose lips in the Obama administration were already pointing fingers at Ms. Coakley for running a disastrous campaign, as if only she were to blame for the result.
Of course, Ms. Coakley is hardly blameless. She gave off such an elitist vibe that she made John Kerry, the patrician Massachusetts Democrat she hoped to join in the U.S. Senate, look like a raging populist. When asked last week by a Boston Globe reporter to respond to charges that she had run an absentee campaign, she responded: "As opposed to standing outside Fenway Park? In the cold? Shaking hands?"
Then she accused Brown supporter Curt Schilling, the former star pitcher who helped lead the Boston Red Sox to a World Series pennant, of being a New York Yankees fan.
Mr. Brown tirelessly engaged in retail politics, standing outside every sports venue in subzero weather and running the odometer on his GM pickup more than 200,000 miles. It bought him respect from thousands of Massachusetts voters who wouldn't ordinarily give a politician the time of day, much less a Republican one.
Still, neither Mr. Brown nor Ms. Coakley was the determining factor in this race. Mr. Obama was. It's not that voters in Massachusetts or elsewhere have grown to dislike him. Like most Americans, they still like him a lot. But his policies scare enough of them to shift the weight of public opinion away from the Democrats.
Nowhere does that show up more than in attitudes toward health-care reform. Polls have increasingly shown that a majority of Americans would prefer the status quo to either of the health care bills that the House of Representatives and Senate respectively passed in recent weeks.
The bills were being merged by Democrats from both chambers in closed-door sessions with White House officials, and Mr. Obama had hoped to sign the final product into law before his State of the Union address on Jan. 27. The only way to meet his health-care calendar would be to cram a merged bill through Congress within a week and before Mr. Brown is sworn in. Given the current foul mood among voters, that is more than a risky strategy.
But it may not be as risky as letting the health-care package die altogether. That would only reinforce the impression among Americans that Mr. Obama has wasted his first year in office, spending far too much time and political capital on his pet project instead of fixing the broken U.S. economy, which remains the overwhelming preoccupation of voters.
It's what is known as being damned if you do and damned if you don't. So much for Camelot Redux.
Konrad Yakabuski