A year after his inauguration, President Obama awoke today having been sharply rebuked by Massachusetts voters on Tuesday. Will the Democrats’ stunning failure to hang onto the late Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat lead to a failure to pass health reform in Congress? Some Democrats will want to do whatever it takes procedurally to get it to Obama’s desk, public opinion be damned. But Scott Brown’s ability to deny Democrats a filibuster-proof majority, for the purposes of health reform or anything else, was an undeniable part of his triumph. Massachusetts voters’ message on health care, warned Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., was “Go back to the drawing board.” It will be interesting to see what Obama and congressional Democrats think they heard Tuesday and to watch what they do in response.
“President Obama begins his second year in the White House with such anemic approval ratings, you’d think he was another Ronald Reagan: Among recent presidents, only the Gipper had fallen so low in the esteem of voters at this stage of his presidency,” wrote columnist Eugene Robinson. “In the end, things worked out rather well for Reagan — a landslide re-election, success in changing the course of the nation and the world, canonization by the Republican Party.”
Robinson said that the Obama White House is right not to panic but that “there are important lessons from the past year that Obama and his team had better learn if he is to achieve his goal of being a ‘transformational’ president like Reagan.” One lesson is to better control the “message” war with Republicans. “The administration’s opponents are defining the issues in the minds of voters,” Robinson wrote. “That’s something the Great Communicator never would have allowed.”
The Senate Assessment and Taxation Committee’s refusal last week to introduce Gov. Mark Parkinson’s proposal to raise the sales tax and tobacco tax stunned many lawmakers and Statehouse observers. “It was the first time in more than 30 years of watching the Legislature that this reporter recalls a governor’s budget bill not being introduced, either as a courtesy to the governor or just by nodded consent of members of a committee,” Martin Hawver wrote in his Hawver’s Capitol Report. Committee Chairman Les Donovan, R-Wichita, was “a little bit taken aback” that there weren’t enough votes to introduce the bill, but he said the reason for the rebuff was that committee members “weren’t ready to discuss” the proposal.
Hawver thinks lawmakers were afraid of being linked to the legislation. “Nobody wanted his or her motion to make the routine introduction to show up on committee minutes — probably winning the moniker as an ‘enabler’ by some conservatives.” And that includes Democrats on the committee. “They didn’t show much testosterone, either, in support of the bill introduced by the governor, who is a member of their party.”
