We, the PEOPLE!!

In a dramatic political upset that was suspected only two weeks ago but should have been seen coming for almost two months, Massachusetts voters chose republican Scott Brown by a 52%-47% margin yesterday over democrat Martha Coakley.  Coakley is the Massachusetts State Attorney General who was considered to be the odds-on heir-apparent to the US senate seat held for 47 years by Ted Kennedy, and for seven years before that by his older brother, John F. Kennedy.

GOP pundits were quick to categorize this election as a referendum on President Barack Obama and the democrats in general, and health care reform in particular.

The White House responded that Coakley was simply a weak candidate who ran a lackluster campaign and made a ton of really bad mistakes which upset local citizens.  They claimed that her campaign manager didn’t pay attention to the strong and effective campaign being run by Scott Brown, neglecting to do adequate polling until just two weeks before the election.  The Coakley campaign staff blamed the National Democratic Party (NDP) and the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee (SDCC) for not supporting her strongly enough, early enough, and financially enough.

So which one was right?

The answer is:  All of them.

Coakley and her aides and staff believed that she would cruise into senate seat because it belonged to the democrats.  They also believed, as did the democrats at the national level, that it was impossible for a republican to win this senate seat in what is perhaps the most liberal state in the USA.  Coakley didn’t campaign very forcefully until two weeks before the election when polls indicated a rude surprise upset was in the making.

Scott Brown, on the other hand, ran a very effective campaign, consistently staying on the issues, and driving across Massachusetts in his pickup truck to meet with voters.  People were able to connect with him and with his message.

And then, of course, the GOP and big business played their respective roles like a fine Stradivarius violin.  The republicans kept up the hate & fear campaign against health care reform while the health insurance companies and related businesses pumped over US$10,000,000 into the Brown campaign. They fully realized that if he won, it would kill the democrats’ 60 -40 majority in the senate and allow the republicans to block any legislation proposed by democrats, including health care reform, with a filibuster.

But more than any other reason, this election was the democrats’ election to lose.  And they lost it.

One important reason is that people are still hurting from the economic downturn and resulting unemployment which started in December 2007 with the recession.  While the democrats were painfully developing their health care reform legislation, they didn’t accomplish much else.  New jobs were not created to point where they exceeded those lost.  Though all indicators are that the economy has turned the corner, that still has not translated into better conditions for the middle class.  Wall Street still hasn’t paid back all of the stimulus money, and yet Wall Street executives continue to receive huge bonuses.  The democrats have yet to pass legislation that would curb the Wall Street abuses that led to the recession in the first place.

And while the GOP has made a Olympic high art form of scaring the hell out of the American people with unending false and scary information regarding health care reform while slowing down the legislative process to the point where many people are just sick of it, the democrats have been absolutely AWFUL in correcting the record on reform and marketing it as a benefit, continuously or otherwise, to the American people.

Finally, President Obama promised during the presidential campaign to make government transparent for the American people, allowing them to be continuously informed of what the government of We, the PEOPLE was doing and why.  That simply has not happened.

Thus, the people of Massachusetts sent a clear message to the Obama Administration and the democrats, that they have got to change their methodology if they want to remain viable.  And their first lesson should come from the republicans who were considered to be moribund just one short year ago.

Yet, out of the last four off-season elections, the democrats have only managed to win a congressional seat in New York’s 23rd district, while the republicans have won the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey, and now the US senate seat in Massachusetts.  That’s three out of four for the GOP.  Obviously, something they’re doing is working.

That something is their marketing.  They’re very, very good at selling sand to desert dwellers, ice to Eskimos, snake oil to health food enthusiasts and tobacco to cancer patients.  They do it by employing the same tactics used since forever by advertisers:  Making you live in fear life without it (or with it, as the case may be), and making you hate being without it (or with it, as the case may be).  They also made friends with entities that have a vested financial interest in the product and lots of money to finance the message over and over and over.

Politics is a dirty game and is won by the party that plays that game the best.  If the democrats want to be taken seriously and seen as the protectors of humanity they claim to be, they must learn to do what the the republicans do so well.  They must market themselves by repeating over and over that the GOP is the party from hell.  Instead of constantly being put on the defensive, they must attack as the presently GOP does.  They must repeat it over and over and over.  They must take the offensive and make the GOP continuously explain why they even bothered to get out of bed this morning.  “Making you afraid of it, and telling you who’s to blame for it.  That, ladies and gentleman, is how you win elections.” (Michael Douglas as President Andrew Shepard in the 1995 movie, “The American President“).

In other words, the democrats have to learn to play the GOP’s game.  Otherwise, our progeny might be reading about them in US history class along with the Tory and Whig parties.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 at 4:43 pm and is filed under The State of Our Country. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.