Suburban independents turning against Obama

ANALYSIS: Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts is being hailed by Republicans as the start of their retaking of Washington

BLUE HILL Avenue runs through the middle of Boston, the spine of the city’s African-American and Hispanic communities, and 14 months ago there was an Obama sign on every block. The buzz generated by the prospect of Barack Obama becoming the country’s first African-American president was palpable.

On Monday I drove the entire length of the avenue, nearly five miles, and counted exactly two signs touting the candidacy of Martha Coakley, the Democrat who wanted to inherit the safest Democratic seat in the US Senate, the seat that belonged to Ted Kennedy for 46 years and his brother Jack for 12 years before that, the Democrat Obama needed most.

Like many I talked to, Edgar Martinez, a 22-year-old Guatemalan immigrant, said he voted for the first time in his life 14 months ago, casting his ballot for Obama. But Martinez saw no reason to vote for Coakley.

“I don’t even know who she is,” he said.

On Tuesday morning, I drove my son to school in our suburban South Shore town and got tied up in a massive traffic jam outside his school, which doubles as a polling place on election days.

“It’s crazy,” a flustered police officer said, trying to direct traffic. “This has never happened before.”

Boy, did he get that right.

Scott Brown’s shock win in Massachusetts is being hailed by Republicans, and especially their cheerleaders on Fox News and talk radio, as the start of a revolution, a retaking of Washington by Republicans who had their electoral heads handed to them after eight years of an administration that got America stuck in two unpopular wars and presided over a meltdown of the economy.

Like most things in life, it’s a little more complicated than that. This was an election won and lost in the suburbs such as Wrentham, the small town with the big outlet mall where Scott Brown lives. And it was an election decided not by partisans, but by independents.

In Massachusetts, Democrats outnumber Republicans three to one. But the two million independents, most of them suburbanites, outnumber Democrats and Republicans combined. The towns along Boston’s South Shore are sometimes called the Irish Riviera, because the Irish are the biggest ethnic group in them. Obama carried all these suburbs – Quincy, Weymouth, Hingham, Cohasset, Scituate, Marshfield and Duxbury – and yet Brown won the length and breadth of the Irish Riviera on Tuesday.

Massachusetts voters have a long tradition of electing Republican governors to keep an eye on the overwhelmingly Democratic legislature. Three of the last four state governors have been Republicans. Brown’s victory is the first time Massachusetts voters have applied the check-and-balances tactic to a federal seat. Brown’s margin of victory was provided by the Massachusetts independents who helped give Barack Obama 63 per cent of the vote. It was provided by suburbanites who have been disproportionately hurt by the recession, who pay taxes and don’t want to see them go up, who already have a state universal healthcare plan and worry that Obama’s plan to provide it to all Americans will only cost them money they don’t have.

Fourteen months ago, Massachusetts independents were mad at Bush and the Republicans. Now they’re mad at the Democrat-controlled Congress. Many accept that Obama inherited a mess from Bush. But unemployment has only got worse since Obama took office. Blaming Bush doesn’t wash with most independents any more.

Coakley was not a strong campaigner, and some think a more charismatic candidate could have edged a victory. But even if Brown had lost by a narrow margin, the message, in Massachusetts and across the country, would have been the same: the independents who propelled Barack Obama into the White House aren’t happy with his biggest policy issues, and certainly don’t think providing him with a super-majority in Congress is in their interest.

Coakley never managed to articulate to the working poor like Edgar Martinez, who stand to gain most from healthcare reform and much of the Obama agenda.

Whatever Scott Brown’s victory says about America, it has dashed some myths about Massachusetts as being a place unique in American politics, a liberal redoubt where a conservative candidate didn’t stand a chance.

When, in the middle of the campaign, Brown announced he was in favour of waterboarding suspected terrorists, the silence was deafening. A week before, Senator John McCain, who lost the presidency to Obama, had endorsed Brown. McCain, a former POW, has made it clear he, like Obama, believes waterboarding is torture, and that the United States diminishes itself, and endangers its soldiers, by engaging in it.

Coakley made a feeble attempt to score points on this, but dropped the issue quickly.

I asked a Coakley campaign operative why she didn’t press Brown more on torture. His response – that their internal polling suggested most Massachusetts voters have no problem with waterboarding – was more shocking to me than Brown’s eventual victory.

Romantic Massachusetts is dead and gone. It’s with Ted Kennedy in the grave.

Kevin Cullen is a columnist for the Boston Globe