Heads I win, tails you lose — in Massachusetts and everywhere else

Massachusetts Senator-elect Scott Brown, the Republican who defeated Democratic candidate Martha Coakley yesterday, ran a great campaign. Coakley ran a horrible one — expressing shock that anyone would think that she needed to stand in the cold to shake hands with actual voters. She spent more than a week vacationing when she should have been campaigning and called Red Sox hero Curt Schilling a Yankee fan. She earned her loss.

But is what happened in Massachusetts a signal that America rejects the President’s agenda? To hear conservatives tell it, the Massachusetts results mean exactly that. Here’s influential writer Kathryn Jean Lopez in the National Review:

If you had any doubt that Barack Obama is not the political savior, it was clear tonight. A year in, he is clearly just another politician, and America sent him a message, via Massachusetts.

Lopez’s fellow editors at the right wing National Review write today that the “national environment” doomed Coakley. They say:

The Massachusetts race was as close to a referendum on [health care reform] legislation as can reasonably be imagined, and it lost.

Wow — the voters of one state speak for the entire nation. Interesting that when the entire nation spoke for the entire nation, conservatives didn’t seem to hear what it said.

Following Obama’s clinching of the Democratic nomination for president in 2008, the National Review said that

The Democrats have gone all the way. They have nominated arguably the most left-wing major party presidential nominee ever, certainly the most left-wing since George McGovern.

But when he crushed John McCain 365 electoral votes to 173, the National Review couldn’t quite find the message amidst the results:

[T]he public has not embraced many of the central aspects of liberalism. President-Elect Barack Obama’s record and positions put him well to the left of any president in the last four decades. But to judge from his campaign, he is a man who wants to cut taxes, defend an individual right to own guns, take a hard line on terrorists in Pakistan, reduce the abortion rate, allow people to keep their health-care plans, and keep trade free. The polls suggest that he was wise to run in this fashion: They show that the public remains as skeptical about federal activism and social liberalism as they have been for years.

Kathryn Jean Lopez blogged on election night 2008 that

What freaks me out about this election is how oblivious to facts people have been. Everything about Obama’s judgment and radicalism — whether Sean Hannity or Stanley Kurtz or Andy McCarthy etc. is telling you about it — was essentially deemed irrelevant (including largely by the McCain campaign, save for Palin eventually talking about Ayers). Abortion? Near no one outside a handful of conservatives were talking about his record on infanticide — beyond abortion.People are in for a rude awakening.

So when conservatives win, people are paying attention and sending important messages that politicians ignore at their peril. When progressives win, people are just too stupid or uninterested to know how badly they’ve been duped and the nation’s political leadership ought to just ignore them.

To sum up:

1. Senator Obama was “arguably the most left-wing major party presidential nominee ever.” The right wing took note of it. Obama won the election. In the wake of his victory, he was recast as a conservative candidate who has no mandate to govern from the left because the country, despite having just elected him, didn’t want him to be as liberal as they pointed out he was just weeks before; and
2. Massachusetts held a special election in an off-year. The pro-choice Republican defeated a lackluster, uninspiring Democratic candidate, which means that the entire nation rejects President Obama’s agenda and demands to see his birth certificate at the country’s first national tea party / prayer breakfast / Lee Greenwood concert.

Democrats would do well to assess what lessons can be learned from Coakley’s loss. But there is absolutely nothing to be gained by trying to divine any political wisdom from conservatives.

Partisan Gridlock with Geoff Berg airs every Friday from 3:00 – 4:00 pm on KPFT, 90.1 FM in Houston, 89.5 FM in Galveston, and streamed live everywhere else at www.kpft.org. Connect through Facebook or at www.partisangridlock.com.