The moment Martha lost

Forgive my presumptuousness, but I believe I know exactly when and how Martha Coakley lost the Senate race in Massachusetts. It was on the day that Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska sold his vote for health care reform in exchange for exempting people in his state from Medicare tax increases.

Politicians continue to believe, and behave, as if party affiliation, or labels like liberal or conservative, are what matter to voters. It’s understandable how they get this impression. They are members of gigantic national organizations that have to be fed, their meals are served by legions of wealthy private interest groups and both of these cadres are well served by these distinctions. Moreover, the cable news industry, and to a lesser extent, the media in general, perpetuate these myths of philosophy because it makes good TV.

But they are so very wrong. What people want is change. They want to change self-dealing into altruism. They want to change corruption into honesty. They want to change partisanship into cooperation and problem solving. They want to change grasshoppers into ants. They want to throw the bums out.

This deep desire for change made Barack Obama’s message so powerful last fall, but it has turned into a tiger that the President has by the tail. The contempt in which the American people hold Congress gave Obama the perfect leverage to build upon his electoral success. The Democratic Party owed its success to him, his favorability ratings were more than double those of Congress. He could have scored huge points with Americans of all political persuasions (especially independents) if he had taken a firm hand with his party from the very beginning, during writing of the stimulus legislation, and if he’d turned to a few non-Goldman advisors for developing the TARP program.

But he didn’t. He gave us more of the same: a pork-packing Congress and special status for privileged interest groups, with the average Joe picking up the tab for all of it. The voters are starting to let him know what he can expect this November, and in 12/12, if all the change he’s going to give us is the next generation of self-serving, partisan political leadership, funded and stage managed by Wall Street.

This may sound ridiculous to you, or maybe even vaguely like a Tea Party manifesto. For this reason I will again say that I do not regret voting for Obama, I believe him to be a sincere and honest man, trying hard to do the right things, after being left a complete shit-show by his predecessor. Never-the-less, I don’t see that the big things have changed much (the Taliban shut down Kabul yesterday) and I’m not happy about it.

If I lived in Massachusetts there is no way I’d have voted to let him keep the 60th vote in the Senate because he’s not using it. It belongs to Harry Reid. Any uncertainty about that evaporated when Reid paid Ben Nelson’ s price for his health care vote, and all Americans lost whatever illusions they may have had about real change.