WASHINGTON — The Democratic Party's humiliating defeat in the Massachusetts special election for the Senate on Tuesday drops an enormous boulder in the path of President Barack Obama's agenda in Congress, as the loss of a single, critical vote will force his party to scale down its legislative ambitions and rethink its political strategy.
The Republican victory in the race to succeed the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass.. has already sparked a debate among Democrats about whether or not the stunning outcome was a repudiation of their legislative agenda and a warning sign that they should recalibrate their policy ideas in the run-up to the 2010 midterm elections.
The result was a watershed for a party that seized the White House and commanding congressional majorities in 2008, harboring years of pent-up desires to legislate on the nation's biggest, most daunting problems, including health care and global warming.
The most immediate and pressing challenge facing Democrats is how to salvage health care legislation now that they no longer have the 60 votes needed to break GOP filibusters. Even as Massachusetts voters streamed to the polls Tuesday, Democratic leaders showed no signs of standing down—although they clearly will need a new game plan for enacting the health care bill.
"We're right on course," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said after meeting with her leadership team Tuesday. "We will have a health care reform bill, and it will be soon."
But for Democrats facing tough re-election fights in swing districts, the spectacle of their party losing in a liberal bastion has been chilling—especially since the loss was to a Republican who pitted himself against the health care bill. That has intensified pressure on party leaders to pivot quickly to the issues that they believe are animating the angry, impatient electorate: job creation and fiscal responsibility.
"The focus has got to shift," said Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va. "It is really time now for Democrats to shift their attention to issues that will enjoy broad public support."
Most worrisome for the party are polling data indicating that Obama's health care bill has helped to turn many of his most important allies in 2008 — independent voters—into antagonists just one year after the president was inaugurated.
"If the Democrats can't win in a state they carried by 26 points in 2008, then they have to ask themselves where in the world is it safe to be a Democrat running for federal office in 2010," said Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster whose firm worked with the Scott Brown campaign. "The answer is nowhere."
In plotting their legislative course, Democratic leaders were reminded by Massachusetts of how deeply voters are seething with anti-establishment fervor.
"The strongest dynamic in politics today is not about Democrats vs. Republicans, it's about outsiders vs. insiders," said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster, who said the truck-driving Brown skillfully portrayed himself as the political outsider and Martha Coakley as someone who would do little to change Washington.
Against that anti-establishment backdrop, the Massachusetts Senate election came at a particularly inopportune time in Congress's health care debate. The final stages of deliberation have been riddled with the elements that stoked anger at Washington: special provisions to corral support from individual senators, behind-the-scenes negotiations by a handful of leaders, and a deal cut to win over organized labor.
Robert Blendon, a Harvard University public policy expert, said that Brown also benefited from the fact that the last two weeks of the campaign coincided with congressional leaders' decisions about tax increases to help pay for the bill, including new taxes on high-cost health plans, wages for upper-income Americans and possibly on investment income. That gave added force to the anti-tax themes of his campaign, which Blendon said were the most important element of his critique of the health care bill.
Browns' election creates a stark new context for debate over the jobs bill the House passed last month and the companion bill taking shape in the Senate. Not a single Republican supported the bill in the House, and Senate Democrats now face a strategic choice: Whether to draft a similar bill and dare Republicans to kill it, or to make changes, such as adding business tax breaks or curbing its price tag, to make it more acceptable to Republicans.
But Democrats worry that the Massachusetts election will scare Democratic lawmakers from what they see as necessary steps to curb unemployment, because it will involve more spending and government involvement in the economy.
"Interpreting the Massachusetts result as a call to do nothing in terms of the economy would be a big mistake," said Rep. Joe Courtney, D-Conn.
Another Obama priority is an overhaul of financial regulations — an issue that has turned more partisan as Obama has ramped up anti-Wall Street rhetoric and proposed a new tax on large banks. One business lobbyist said that the Brown victory could make Republicans even less likely to cooperate in moving the bill, figuring there would be more Republicans in Congress after the 2010 elections.
Obama's hope of enacting strong legislation to combat global warming was already in deep trouble before the election, but hope lingered that a more modest energy bill could draw some Republican support. Now, emboldened Republicans may expand their strategy of opposing just about every major proposal Democrats advance — despite complaints that they were not offering constructive alternative.
But even Democrats who are urging a shift of legislative focus to job creation and fiscal responsibility see political danger in abandoning health care legislation entirely. Their advice to their party leaders: finish it up, pronto, and then do something about the budget deficit. In a new sign of their determination to turn that page, Democratic leaders and the White House Tuesday were reported to have resolved longstanding differences on creating a commission to propose ways to reduce the deficit and to strengthen congressional budget rules against deficit spending.
"Focus on the health care thing," said Florida Rep. Allen Boyd, a leading Blue Dog Democrat. "Get the health care thing right and get it out of here. And then focus on the budget stuff."