Massachusetts special election and buyer's remorse

In 1996, the toy company Mattel Inc. came under intense scrutiny for its line of Cabbage Patch Kids Snacktime Kids dolls, products whose mechanical jaws activated when fed toy food. This seemed like a great idea until the dolls began ingesting the hair of their owners, prompting Mattel to voluntarily withdraw the dolls from the market. Across the country, consumers realized they had gotten both less and more than they had bargained for when they purchased these mutant hair lawn mowers, and buyer’s remorse took root across the nation.

Such is the state of the American electorate after exactly one year of the Obama presidency and a Democratic supermajority in Congress, except that the product cannot be voluntarily withdrawn from the market. For two election cycles, Democrats blamed Republicans for the unsavory state of the country. America’s misadventure in Iraq was not, they argued, the result of Democratic politicians lacking the gumption to resist the drum beat for war, but rather was produced by lies, distortion, and bullying from the Bush administration. The collapse of the economy, they claimed, was derived from deregulatory policies initiated by Reagan and nurtured by two Bush administrations, not Clinton-era Rubinomics, which failed to challenge the premises underlying deregulatory philosophy. Blame for the crippled state of health care, they insisted, lay at the feet of Newt Gingrich and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America for using fear-mongering to kill reform in 1993, not with Democrats who continued to line their pockets with mega-donations from the health insurance industry.

With enough repetition, the electorate bought the message, especially when it was packaged with sleek, captivating rhetoric and a sense of historic urgency and significance. In 2006, voters empowered Democrats to resist the Bush agenda by giving them control of the House and Senate. But even so, Democrats could not prevent the escalation of the Iraq War. Nor could they halt the effort to legally sanction the warrantless wiretapping program the Bush administration had secretly conducted. So, in 2008, voters returned to the polls thinking that a Democratic White House and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate would augment Democratic power sufficiently to enact serious change. But increased power has served only to leaven Democratic excuse-making, not the legislative process.

What more do the Democrats need in order to enact a progressive agenda? Unfortunately, no number of wave elections can insert backbone into a party whose fecklessness is only surpassed by its capacity to blame someone or something else for its failures. On Tuesday, Massachusetts voters did not repudiate the Democratic agenda, but indicated their frustration with the party’s inability to enact it. A Research 2000 poll indicated that a strong 49 percent plurality of Obama voters who cast votes for Republican Scott Brown do not believe that the president and Democrats in Congress are doing enough to deliver change. A 39 percent plurality of Obama voters who did not vote in the special election shared the same view. Martha Coakley failed as a candidate, and Tuesday’s election results are the symptom of collective buyer’s remorse. Democrats simply have not delivered on the promises they’ve made.

Unfortunately, Democrats appear to be drawing all of the wrong lessons from Tuesday’s disappointment. Senator Evan Bayh, Washington’s patron saint of mediocrity, assigned blame to “the furthest left elements of the Dem party [for] attempting to impose their will on the rest of the country,” and suggested that voters punished Democrats because “[t]hey just don’t believe the answers we are currently proposing are solving their problems.” Rather than concluding that voters are frustrated with the inability of Democrats to produce any meaningful results with the deck heavily stacked in their favor, Bayh and his fellow conservative Democrats are using the election as another excuse to defer change.

Ultimately, however, progressives will determine the party’s fortunes moving forward. They can start by insisting that Congress pass health care reform through budget reconciliation, which requires only a majority vote in the Senate. They should also forcefully push for reform of the filibuster. This arcane structure does not exist in the Constitution. Democrats who possess any guts whatsoever should stand behind Senator Tom Harkin’s proposal to make cloture subject to 60 votes initially, then lower vote thresholds, so that the minority has the ability to use parliamentary tactics to clog the Senate agenda, but not indefinitely. Changing Senate rules requires only a majority vote, so the only thing standing in the way of this common-sense reform is Democratic squeamishness. If progressives fail to lead Democrats in taking these steps to restore a sense that their party is capable of delivering on any of its promises, then buyer’s remorse will only grow, and Republicans will take back the House in 2010.

The author is a Columbia College senior majoring in political science and history. He is the founder and director of the Progressive Caucus of the Columbia University College Democrats.

Tags: Opinion, Jonathan Backer, Rebekah Kim, Barack Obama, Democrats, Massachusetts