What can Brown do for you?

The chattering class has had a ball today telling us what the U.S. Senate special election in Massachusetts means, but unlike the off-year U.S. House election in New York last November, this time the event is worth the chatter. The result seems pretty unequivocal, unmuddied by third-party candidates and suspended campaigns. Scott Brown, the Republican challenger, decisively defeated the Democratic candidate…in Massachusetts…for Teddy Kennedy’s old Senate seat. As the polls trended away from the Democrats, I still didn’t give Brown much of a shot, but he took full advantage of a few unique factors and put away the Democrat in a stunning result that deserves a lot of notice.

As much as Democrats will downplay the result, the election was a clear rebuke. Both independents and registered Democrats (and plenty of both are needed to win in Massachusetts) cited the direction of recent policy, notably health care, as their reason for falling into Brown’s camp.

The dilemma for President Obama is clear. He campaigned and won the 2008 presidential election as a mainstream, statist liberal. His policies to date have disappointed as many liberals as conservatives. Conservatives hate Obama’s rewarding of labor unions by successive bailouts of GM and Chrysler, his lax handling of the stimulus, and, most especially, his support for Congress’s health care reform. Liberals hate Obama’s seeming acceptance of certain Bush-era doctrines that have more or less remained the same, particularly those around homeland security and the military posture. If he moves to the right, he’ll lose his base of support; if he moves to the left, he’ll lose the 2012 election in a wave of popular resentment of the kind we saw in Massachusetts yesterday.

Personally, I think Barack Obama’s biggest failing in Year One was the attempt to make good on a few pet campaign promises in the face of a financial meltdown. It has been said that presidents don’t get to choose the kind the presidencies that they have. Certainly, most presidents don’t choose to be “wartime” presidents or “depression” presidents. Mr. Obama wanted to deal with a financial crisis about as much as cats want to take baths, but that was the way the cards fell. To this point, he has shrunk into the background and allowed Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke to do the heavy lifting, but the crisis he never wanted is going to define his presidency, whether he likes it or not. Mr. Obama royally screwed up by forcing the health care debate onto an already-full policy plate. As we continue to shed jobs and wealth, the last thing most folks wanted to consider was how to build a larger social health care regime, and as the crisis worsened early last year, I think it turned people off to divert their attention away from the slow-motion train wreck of the financial system and onto what is essentially another entitlement program.

Timing is everything. And the timing sucked for a go at health care, notwithstanding its centrality to the nation’s finances as the fastest-growing black hole of federal expenditure.

Despite Beltway thinking, most people aren’t grossly stupid. They might not understand collateralized debt obligations or credit-default swaps, but they do understand that the financial crisis has been treated with a band-aid…and they also understand that the greatest malefactors of the past cycle are still running the show…and doing so on the taxpayer dime. Introducing health care into this environment might not have been the policy equivalent of fiddling while Rome burns, but you can’t ask Americans to bail out corporations to the tune of hundreds of billions of federal dollars, and then say, “OK, now on to health care….”