Populist anger turns against Obama and Democrats

The Massachusetts upset poses problems for the president’s bold agenda, writes Dan Balz in Washington

US PRESIDENT Barack Obama and the Democrats rode a wave of anger aimed at the presidency of George Bush to victories in 2006 and 2008. Now, a year to the day after Obama was sworn into office, in a dramatic reversal of fortunes, populist anger has turned sharply against the president and his party.

The politics of discontent rolled across Massachusetts in stunning fashion, delivering the seat held for more than four decades by the late Senator Edward Kennedy to the Republican Scott Brown in an upset of historic proportions.

Gloomy Democrats were left to wonder whether they and Obama have an answer to the anger that can head off potentially devastating losses in the November midterm elections and faced more potential fractures within their ranks.

The widespread dissatisfaction has led to a massive erosion in the support Democrats once enjoyed among independents, who were critical to the party’s success in 2006 and 2008.

Without exit polls, it was difficult to say with any precision how independents voted in Massachusetts. But there was no way Brown could have won a state where Democrats have a huge edge over Republicans in registration without a significant margin among independents.

The loss triggered unsightly Democratic recriminations, a clear indication of the confusion, disappointment and disillusionment that has set in over the past few months as the party has lost gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia and now an almost sacred Senate seat in one of the most Democratic states in the nation.

Democratic strategists privately heaped criticism on Massachusetts attorney general Martha Coakley as a lacklustre candidate and on her campaign as asleep at the switch until it was too late. Her campaign team fired back that the voters believed Democrats in Washington have done more for big banks and auto companies than for working families and that a national wave of anger threatened serious damage to the party.

But the real debate for the Democrats will be how to proceed. The most immediate issue is what to do with the healthcare Bill. Democrats from the House and Senate have been negotiating furiously, trying to harmonise competing Bills. Now the issue is whether they can quickly agree how to pass a Bill and whether they face a public backlash by doing so.

Some Democrats have warned that they must scale back their agenda in the face of the Massachusetts results.

“That is a real drama between now and when Obama gives the State of the Union,” said a Democratic strategist who declined to be identified in order to talk about his party’s problems.

“After the challenges of healthcare and Massachusetts, does he continue to push forward with this very bold agenda of trying to address big and very intractable problems? Or does he comes to a different conclusion about the rest of 2010?”

Beyond that is the posture Democrats assume for the coming elections.

White House officials have signalled a sharper, more populist message in an effort to persuade voters that they stand with the people and Republicans stand with banks and Wall Street and health insurance companies.

Two months ago, White House and Democratic officials wrote off gubernatorial losses in Virginia and New Jersey to weak candidates and local factors. In the run-up to the Massachusetts vote, they noted that Obama’s approval ratings there remained close to 60 per cent and said

there was no way to interpret the results as a rejection of the president.

Many factors may have contributed to what happened in Massachusetts, but as Tom Mann of the Brookings Institution put it, the “inchoate fear and anger and unhappiness” with the general state of the country helped put a once-safe seat at risk. “When times are bad and people are anxious, it gets directed against the party in power,” he said.

White House officials believe the populist anger stems mostly from dissatisfaction with the economy, not Obama’s agenda or his healthcare plan. If the unemployment rate dips, they say, Obama’s approval rating will rise and with it so will prospects for Democrats in November.

At the same time, Republicans may run the risk of overplaying the anger card. They still face internal fights over purity and ideology. The Tea Party movement remains an unpredictable force.

Republicans, however, believe that Obama and the Democrats have stamped themselves indelibly as big government advocates and that, even with improvement in the economy, there will continue to be resistance to the Democrats’ agenda that will fuel anger on the right. Once again in Massachusetts, as in Virginia and New Jersey, the conservative base was more energised and motivated than the Democratic base.

In the past week, Obama has struck a more populist tone, rolling out a proposed fee on the big banks, devoting his radio address to the initiative and sounding those themes when he campaigned for Coakley on Sunday.

But even some Democrats question whether Obama can credibly turn himself into a populist. In 2008 he campaigned above the anger, benefiting from the dissatisfaction with Bush while attempting to sound a message of bipartisanship and comity. Now he will have to try to channel the anger in ways that may run counter to his personality and demeanour.

Democratic strategists have said they must prepare for a far more difficult campaign but that there are tools they can use. They appeared more determined on Tuesday night to try to deny Republicans the opportunity to be cast as outsiders in House and Senate races, particularly some Senate candidates with close ties to Washington and the Bush administration. And, they said, they must be more aggressive in calling out Republicans for blocking progress.

Democrats are faced with a fight to save their agenda and the challenge to prove they can deliver the results they promised a year ago amid the euphoria and great expectations of Obama’s inauguration.– (Washington Post service/Bloomberg)

New senator with colourful past

SCOTT BROWN, who described himself as a "long shot" only last week, has come a long way since posing as a Cosmopolitancentrefold when he was a student.

A wild youth who liked Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, and a self-confessed “jerk” whose mother was “on welfare, a little bit”, the 50-year-old lawyer has revealed how he was arrested for stealing albums from a store in Salem, Massachusetts, when he was 12.

Brown’s parents divorced when he was one, and each remarried three times. For a time, he lived with his grandparents.

Until recently, he was probably the third most famous person in his family. His wife, Gail Huff, is a Boston TV news reporter, while one of his two daughters was an American Idolcontestant.

Cosmo's "America's sexiest man" 1982 was then a 22-year-old law student. Even then, he described himself as "a bit of a patriot".

"You don't see anything [in the centrefold]," he told the Boston Globein a recent interview. He got $1,000 for the shoot. At the time, he and Huff were models and actors in TV commercials, and met when they were trying to recoup money from their agents.

Brown is a committed triathlete who rises at 5am to train and describes himself as a driven man. “I’m always doing something, whether I’m home watching TV, I’m always maybe licking envelopes or writing notes to people,” he told the Boston Globe. “If I’m riding my [stationary] bike, I’m reading a newspaper or watching the news.”

Brown is considered one of the more conservative members of the Democratic-led Massachusetts Senate.

He has served in the US army’s National Guard for 30 years, although he has never been deployed to a war zone.

His defence of waterboarding – simulated drowning, a now-banned interrogation technique for terror suspects – and denial that it was torture sparked fury among Democrats, as did his belief that terror suspects should not be represented by “taxpayer-funded” lawyers in US courtrooms.

He has regularly upset gay activists, but claims this is unfair because he favours civil unions but not gay marriages. His stance, he says, is the same as that of Barack Obama.

Brown says he is basically in favour of abortion rights, although against the procedure called “partial-birth” abortion and strongly in favour of parental consent. In 2006, he supported healthcare reforms in Massachusetts that bear some resemblance to the Senate Bill passed before Christmas, but has pledged to oppose Obama’s reforms in Congress, saying they are too costly and would interfere with his state’s arrangements.

“One thing is clear – voters do not want the trillion-dollar healthcare bill that is being forced on the American people,” he said. Months ago, he promised that “I’m going to be the only person down there [in Washington] who is going to be the independent voter and thinker.” – (Guardian service)