Snooze and you lose

Snooze and you lose

Philadelphia Inquirer: Whether or not all Democratic Party leaders are willing to hear it, the election of Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown to the U.S. Senate should be a loud wake-up call.

Brown on Tuesday easily won the seat held for nearly half a century by the late liberal lion, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. Brown won in a state that’s as Democratic as they come.

His victory wasn’t just an upset. It was a humiliation for Democrats and President Obama, who won Massachusetts in a landslide a little more than a year ago and was a late campaigner for Democrat Martha Coakley.

Some elected Democrats are not ready to see a message here. Rep. Chaka Fattah, D-Pa., said it’s “morally and intellectually dishonest” to argue that the results in one state’s election trump Obama’s mandate of November 2008.

Brown’s victory should not doom Obama’s agenda, but neither can it be viewed as an isolated event. It follows November’s election of Republican Gov. Christopher J. Christie in New Jersey, another deep-blue state, and Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell in Virginia. Obama won both states in 2008, and campaigned for both losing Democratic candidates a year later.

These developments qualify as a trend, and it’s more recent than Obama’s historic victory. Voters are saying that Washington needs to revise its focus, with concentration on the economy.

High negative numbers

People are angry about lost jobs, a weak economy, deficits, and bailouts, and yes, many are also angry about the health-care bill. Seventy-eight percent of Brown’s supporters strongly oppose the health-care legislation, and 61 percent of them also said that deficit reduction is more important than health-care reform.

If Obama and congressional Democrats are to hold on to their mandate, they need to concentrate more of their efforts on creating jobs and controlling deficits. Without such an emphasis, Democratic candidates will continue to lose independent voters in droves.

Unaffiliated voters, who make up a quarter of the electorate in Massachusetts, voted for the Republican candidate by a ratio of 73 percent to 25 percent. Brown also picked up 23 percent of Democratic voters.

These recent elections are good news for the Republican Party, which hit bottom a year ago. But so far, the GOP is benefiting from anger at Democrats, rather than from anything Republicans have actually done.

As Peggy Noonan, a columnist who wrote speeches for President Reagan, pointed out recently, the GOP needs to stand for something if the party intends to govern again someday. Its elected officials cannot lead simply by saying “no” to everything that Democrats propose.