Massachusetts Brown Out

The Newsprint

Massachusetts has sent Scott Brown to the Senate in an election rightly viewed as a referendum on health care reform. Ted Kennedy, a legislator of peerless stature in the modern history of the commonwealth championed health care reform as the capstone of his life’s work. It was, we’re told, his dying wish. And yet, it has been largely because of that wish that his elected successor will be a Republican, and more importantly, the Republican set to kill the national health care reform.

Why? Why do Massachusetts voters dislike the health care reform proposal even if they loved Ted Kennedy?

A big reason is that they like Barack Obama a lot less than they did a year ago. But health care is a big part of his sagging popularity. Because the two are intractably related, any explanation that hinges on the President’s approval ratings is discombobulated by definition.

Martha Coakley is another big reason. She has run a middling to poor campaign punctuated by remarkable miscalculations. She botched the Curt Schilling line and failed to react to shifting political winds. And she released an ad accusing her opponent of hating rape victims, a move reminiscent of Libby Dole’s flailing “godless” spot. Finally, Coakley is a woman in a commonwealth that doesn’t elect a lot of women. But she is a Democrat in Massachusetts, the bluest of the blue states. She was well-funded. In December, Scott Brown didn’t have a prayer. Martha Coakley didn’t decide this race. She didn’t meltdown. She fizzled.

The Congressional Democrats share some of the blame. Pelosi, Reid, and Barney Frank have never been terribly popular in the wider world, and they’re getting less popular by the minute. But Frank is a Massachusetts product. And even if public opinion of the Democratic leadership in Congress craters, one would expect the Massachusetts crater to be among the shallowest.

The health care bill itself and the process that has brought this Frankenlegislation into existence have much to do with public frustration. Sprawling, sordid and soporific the health reform bill is an exercise in codified logrolling and special interest satiation. Worse yet as Congressional leaders have grown aware of expanding dissatisfaction they’ve resorted to closed-door sessions and secret negotiations. If a person only needs one good reason to hate a bill, the doorstop that will emerge from committee is guaranteed to have enough to take all comers.

There are little reasons too: the weather was bad, the Democrats bickered among themselves, Obama was too late to the scene. The list of excuses grows, but it does not change the facts on the ground, namely that Scott Brown is the new junior Senator from Massachusetts.

Scott Brown won the race by having the better argument at the right time. He opposed national health care reform in a place that doesn’t want national health care reform. When he made the race about the engorged bill working its way through conference committee, Coakley lacked the instinct to respond. Instead, she eagerly joined in on a discussion she was bound to lose. In doing so, she allowed Brown to make the race about more than just taxes and spending. Instead, he made it (implicitly at least) about federalism. And in focusing on federalism, he made it about an aspect of modern liberalism that even Massachusetts can oppose.

Now surely Massachusetts was, is, and may forever be a “liberal” place. Massachusetts is the birthplace of many a liberal champion. And strong majorities in the commonwealth support abortion, gay marriage rights, and a slue of other hallmark “liberal” positions. It has strong labor unions and a large bureaucracy. The record on affirmative action is perhaps more mixed, but a large portion of its voters come decisively down on one side in the “culture wars.”

But these particular cultural commitments of liberalism do not guarantee that Massachusetts accepts the institutional arrangements for which these commitments serve as window dressing. Massachusetts is not inherently willing to embrace financial syndicalism, ad hoc redistribution, and administrative centralization. It has no love for high taxes, high spending, government control of the banking sector (or is it the other way around?), and bureaucratic expansion. Stripped of culture war camouflage, modern liberalism stands for all of these very things, and they are proving anathema to a citizenry that values democratic process and political engagement.

The best evidence for this argument rests, ironically, in the system of government coordinated health care coverage that Massachusetts already has. The national bill would supersede the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector Authority, which was created in 2006 through negotiations and some tough politicking between Governor Mitt Romney and state congressional leadership. The Health Connector system is far from perfect and will be the subject of considerable political contention and renegotiation in the years ahead. It may prove unsustainable. But for the time being, it has reduced the number of uninsured residents in the commonwealth to a record low and is providing many people with satisfactory coverage.

More importantly, decisions about its future will be made in Massachusetts. So the national Democratic Party shouldn’t gripe about an embarrassment of riches wrought by its state-level counterparts. Rather, Massachusetts voters are rejecting out of hand a plan that would strip them of their power to shape the future of health care in the commonwealth. If their existing system is complex, with serious costs and serious benefits to be weighed, why would any Massachusetts voter want to surrender the ability to reform it to Washington?

Should we be surprised by this sudden affection for federalism? The governing machine in Massachusetts is hardly known for its efficiency or competence, giving citizens in the commonwealth a keen sense of the pathologies inherent in bureaucratic expansion and one-party dominance. And they understand that a payoff is never enough to justify giving up control down the road. Electing Scott Brown was a vote for democracy and against liberalism.