Massachusetts: Revolt of the middle

GOP's Scott Brown Wins Mass. Senate Race
GOP Candidate, a Dark Horse a Month Ago, Represents Crucial 41st Senate Vote for Republicans
Massachusetts: Revolt of the middle

by Mark Silva and updated

A little over a year ago, President Barack Obama carried Massachusetts by about 25 percentage points in an election that signalled a readiness for "change '' -- yet about what one would expect from the only state tthat backed George McGovern in 1972.

Less than one month ago, Martha Coakley, the Democratic attorney general in Massachusetts, held an apparent 15-percentage point advantage in her contest with Republican state Sen. Scott Brown in a special election for the Senate seat of the late and long-serving Sen. Edward M. Kennedy -- about what one would expect in a state that sent Kennedy to Washington for nearly five decades.

Yet tonight, the Bay State went Republican.

This, however, is not a tale of Democrats versus Republicans.

This is a story about the vast middle ground of voters who have no real use for either party. Tonight, they rejected the party in power.

They voted for "change.''

Massachusetts: This is a state where one's political affiliation, like one's religion, or one's ethnicity, might as well have been embossed in one's birth certificate in the old days.

In the new day, more than 2 million of Massachusetts' registered voters are "unenrolled'' in any political party -- more than the roughly 1.5 million registered Democratic, more than the roughly 500,000 registered Republican.

This much is clear: Republicans did not elect Brown, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate.

The unenrolled did.

The implication for the president's party is less clear.

It will be tempting for the president's party to write off the loss in Massachusetts as a lesson in bad campaigning: Coakley's lackadaisacal, take-it-for-granted approach to the race until, too late, recognzing the trouble she was in and calling on the president to help bail her out. But Brown and his pickup truck didn't come from nowhere.

It will be much easier for voters, particulary all of those middle-ground, unenrolled voters whom national polls have portrayed as moving to the right during the past year, to take the Massachusetts vote as a measure of how unhappy Americans are with an agenda that is notable for one thing: Big spending.

Everything that Obama has promoted during his first year in ofice -- an anniversary arriving the day after the election in Massachusetts -- has relied upon big spending. The $787-billion economic stimulus. The $1-trillion-or-so, depending on whose version prevails, health-care bill. The cap-and-trade energy bill. And now, even education, albeit a mere $1.35-billion price tag on Obama's plan to expand the "Race to the Top."

And then there are the wars.

Brown campaigned, at the end, as "the 41th vote'' for the Republicans in the Senate -- a bloc sufficient to stop the Democratic agenda in its trakcs. But he is not so much the GOP's 41st vote as he is the middle-ground's key vote.

The president, whose party faces midterm congressional elections in November that threaten an even deeper erosion of his party's control over Congress, will have to assess in coming days how seriously he takes the message of the unenrolled in Massachusetts. He can take advantage of a slow certification of the vote in the Bay State to propel his health-care legislation in the waning days of a Democratic super-majority. He can push the Senate's passed bill through the House.

Yet, that too, could carry a toll.

The president telephoned both of the Senate contenders tonight. He told Brown, the newest and Republican member of the Senate that he looks forward to working with him.

The president will not have a lot of time to reframe his agenda in the terms of the benefits that Americans stand to gain from it, as opposed to what it will cost them. But if there is any hope for the president's agenda in the coming months, it will take some recasting.

Around the nation, the unenrolled are waiting to vote this fall.

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