How Does Obama Stack Up One Year Later?

The surprise victory of Republican Scott Brown on Tuesday in a Massachusetts special election causes a terrible problem for the Democratic Party and might definitively jeopardize the already poorly laid out reform of the health care system for Barack Obama. Brown took 52 percent of the vote against 48 percent for his Democratic rival Martha Coakley. This electoral reversal was even more painful in that it was the position vacated by the late Edward Kennedy, a Senator who served the district as a Democrat for almost 50 years.

In addition to the symbolism, the loss of this seat makes health care reform, dear to President Obama, practically impossible. After this defeat, the Democrats will no longer have the qualified majority of sixty seats in the Senate that would have permitted them to keep the Republicans from blocking passage of the bill. Even worse, Scott Brown, who has already committed himself to vote against reform at the Capital, based his campaign around this rejection.

This highly publicized election, where voter turnout was relatively high, seemed to have drawn strength from the formidable populist and reactionary offensive launched by the Republican Party. Conservatives believe that putting individual liberties in danger by allowing the federal government to intervene in order to facilitate health care coverage to some 50 million citizens is more costly than beneficial. The force of this particular campaign, however, did not only benefit from a cultural atavism founded on the individualist concept of the “American dream.” The Democrats have, in the eyes of all observers, failed to mobilize their own camp to rally around health care reform. This can be traced to simple reasons: After all of the amendments and compromises, the health care bill no longer supports the main idea of the project in the first place, to finally offer health care for almost everyone.

Gone from the latest versions is “the public option” that would have created an insurance agency managed by the federal government at rates accessible to everyone. Private companies and their advocates in Congress have proclaimed that a public option would introduce unfair competition into the U.S. health care market. The text has even been amended, under pressure from an anti-abortion Democratic senator, to prevent all public subsidies to buy insurance which may fund abortions. These types of deals and the ever-increasing compromised character of the project have fed the disappointment. Many of those independents who supported Barack Obama in 2008 in the hopes of change went to the ballot boxes to vote Republican. What is worse, they have been joined by regular Democratic voters who are sickened by the accelerating deterioration of their social situation. Unemployment has more than doubled in the country over the space of a year and a half (surpassing 4.5 percent to more than 10 percent of the workforce).

Disappointment is at the heart of the distress that affects millions of an already precarious citizenry. More programs have been employed to bail out Wall Street than have been implemented to stimulate employment. The example of General Motors Corp., nationalized, de facto, by the federal government in order to avoid bankruptcy is particularly eloquent: The public has injected billions of dollars into the firm under the condition that GM put a vast restructuring plan into place to quickly regain financial profitability and new private investors. The result of that, some 100,000 jobs have been lost.