Massachusetts delivers the big wake-up call

There are excuses everywhere.

For the Democrats, the main one is that Martha Coakley was a bad candidate who took her foot off the campaign pedal over the Christmas holidays.

Nursing a double-digit lead in the polls, she and her advisers believed they could coast to victory.

As the Massachusetts attorney general, she had won state office before and, hey, this was for Ted Kennedy's former senate seat after all.Was there nothing safer?

Then there was the fact that her opponent, now senator-elect Scott Brown, did not run a standard Republican campaign.

For one thing, he barely mentioned he was Republican and seldom shared the stage with any of the party's leadership, either from the state or Washington.

His victory was sealed by his ability to present himself as a moderate, someone a conservative Democrat would have no problem with.

Wake-up time

Going back over the race, it is clear the national Democratic machine did not properly fund the Coakley campaign. They did this one on the cheap, assuming an easy victory just as Coakley's Boston team did.

When Washington Democrats did wake up to the fact they were in for a tough one, their money efforts came too late.

Today, it is being argued by Democrats that Massachusetts has a strong state health-care program and therefore this senate defeat is not a reliable barometer of voter reaction to Barack Obama's administration.

Throw in the fact that the New England Patriots lost in the NFL playoffs when they should have won. That the Red Sox did not make the World Series. That there was a big snowstorm in the midst of the campaign. The excuses go on.

The truth is much harsher.

A referendum on Obama

The bloodletting came one day before the first year anniversary of Obama's presidency and, make no mistake, this was a referendum, in Massachusetts at least, on his and his party's performance.

To quote the word of the day, the results were devastating.

When word of the Coakley campaign troubles first surfaced a week or so ago, internal party polls were telling the White House some very hard truths, most of which could be landed in the president's lap.

Voters, particularly independent voters, were unhappy with the direction Obama was going. They wanted his priority to be jobs, not health care.

In Massachusetts, unemployment stands at nearly 8.5 per cent. That's better than the national figure of 10 per cent, but abnormally high in a state considered to be weathering the economic storm better than most.

Reading the entrails here, I think it's clear voters were saying that a whole year has been wasted on health care, a program that is still not ratified, that few understand and that has been gutted of some of the big proposals (such as a Canadian-style public-run option) that rallied their support for the president in the first place.

Perception

These voters are also saying that they didn't much like the bailing out of Wall Street while little was being done for the millions now out of work.

They are also worried about the mounting public debt, about a growing bureaucracy and, generally, about big government dealing with the so-called big issues at the expense of the little guy.

But another problem is the perception of the president. Independent voters, who are the majority in Massachusetts,cast their presidential ballots for someone they thought was a can-do guy, someone who told them during those magical rallies in 2008 that wholesale change was coming and that it wouldn't be business as usual.

Those independents now see a president taking more than a year to deal with health care, a president who has resorted to backroom deals with congressional members even though he has clear majorities.

One question repeatedly asked in this senate campaign was why did Obama turn over the writing of the health-care bill to Congress. Why did he seem to stand by while representatives and senators performed their usual mix-and-match exercise, resulting in pork and earmarks and straight-out buying of votes.

Where to go now?

The first immediate decision for a weakened president now is what to do with the health-care bill, which is still not signed into law.

The Democrats' filibuster-proof Senate is now a thing of the past, or will be when Brown is sworn in and the Democrats are reduced to a 59-41 majority.

There are congressional mechanisms that can be used by Democrats to get the health-care bill passed and the betting is they will be. At this point not passing health care quickly is probably more dangerous for the administration than having it hang around in the hope it can be toughened up.

The president has a job-creation plan he was preparing for later this year. But he is now probably going to have to launch that much sooner and it must be something the public can get behind.

But if his presidency is going to survive this kind of kick in the stomach, the key will be nothing short of a complete makeover of President Obama.

Man of inaction

As Massachusetts voted, CNN was releasing a poll showing Obama has a job approval rating of 51 per cent, down from 60 per cent last June. A substantial 42 per cent do not approve of his handling of the White House.

Put in perspective, Obama's rating trails that of former president George H. Bush, who had an 80 per cent approval rating at the end of his first year in office. And is pretty much on par with Ronald Reagan's (49 per cent and lower) during his first term.

Yet Bush senior lost his re-election bid while Reagan won a second term by a landslide. So there is time for Obama to turn this around.

Important to keep in mind is that only 30 per cent of Americans say they would vote for the Republican party at this point, according to the CNN poll.

But it's clear Obama has to change the way he is perceived.

His campaign sold him as a man of action, a difference maker, a bold innovator.

Massachusetts's voters clearly saw it differently.

To them, he has become what he said he wouldn't be: a conciliator, a backroom guy, a deal maker; a president who spends way too much time seeking consensus, not being out in the front on the big issues of the day.

The presidential campaign T-shirts said change. Massachusetts voters said it hasn't happened.