Obama Loses His Supermajority

Barack Obama, ever the gentleman, has already congratulated the winner. The president made a call on Tuesday night to Republican Scott Brown, who won the Senate seat in Massachusetts with some 52 percent of the vote, according to initial results. The handsome Republican, who conducted his campaign out of his pickup truck like a populist “good old boy,” defeated former District Attorney Martha Coakley, who had felt all but assured of victory in Kennedy country.

All of Obama’s niceties can’t hide the fact that he has suffered a stinging defeat in Massachusetts, on the very date of his first anniversary in the White House. In conceding Ted Kennedy’s seat—the special election this Tuesday aimed to replace the senator, who died in August—the Democrats effectively lose the “super-majority” of 60 senators necessary to overcome the opposition’s obstructionist strategies. For the first flood of comments, visit Politico.com.

Given what the Democrats have done with their majority during the first year—the climate and financial reform bills have already been languishing for months in the Senate, and health care reform was only put to a last-minute vote on December 24th, at the price of numerous compromises—this is not exactly a major loss, so to speak. Nonetheless, the White House wanted, justifiably, to finish up health care reform at last by pushing through the Senate a final version squared with the bill passed in the House. This is now far from a done deal.

In order to expediently get the reform of health care over with, as Obama has said he wants to do, we can now imagine Washington asking representatives to vote for the bill already adopted by the Senate, which will be a hard pill for House Democrats to swallow. Never mind that Massachusetts’ vote can be read as a rejection of this bill fraught with difficulties, disfigured by compromises and tactics throughout the entire past year in Congress. In national polls, a majority of Americans now say that they are against the version of health care reform currently stuck in the legislature. On the date of his first anniversary in the White House, Barack Obama finds himself at a strategic crossroads: to force the bill through, or to let it drop, like Bill Clinton before him?