The day after Republican Scott Brown officially won the late Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in the state of Massachusetts, Congressional Democrats struggled to regroup on their plans for the future of healthcare legislation and the loss of their partisan advantage. One of the ideas for coping with this sticky situation was for Congress to try and quickly negotiate a bill before Brown took his new seat, but reports from Washington say that President Obama is cautioning lawmakers against this move. It’s no surprise that the Senate’s version of the health insurance reform measure is vastly unpopular with the GOP – not a single Republican voted for its passage. Nor is the Senate healthcare bill as progressive a measure as many would have liked. The easiest path to reform right now would be the House gritting their teeth and passing the Senate bill onto President Obama for a signature. But the House has pretty much said affirmatively that they have no plans to do this.
If you listen to the GOP’s chairman, Michael Steele, Brown’s decisive victory in Massachusetts is reflective of nationwide voter anxiety with regard to the Democratic push to pass healthcare reform. Ted Kennedy, as one of the most senior Senate members, was a huge champion of the initiative. Does sticking a conservative lawmaker in his seat truly represent American voters’ ambivalence with regards to the fast-track focus on shaking up the entire way that America does healthcare? Steele, being interviewed on “Good Morning America” yesterday, opined that the election was the Bay State residents’ way of saying “slow it down.” He also indicted Congressional liberals for “political chicanery,” and failing to keep important negotiations regarding the future of the healthcare bills out in the open as promised before Obama took office. Steele predicted that the results of this year’s midterm elections would not be favorable to Democrats if they continued making “backroom deals” and if they tried to “wiggle out of” their dilemma with Brown taking office.
President Obama looks at the matter differently. Also yesterday, when being interviewed by the same television network (ABC), he counseled his party to “move quickly to coalesce” around “core elements” of the proposed healthcare law that were less controversial and more palatable to Americans as a whole – lowered costs of insurance, for example. He indicated that the party would focus on assuaging Americans’ fears about the package, anxiety which has been stirred extensively by Republicans like Brown.
According to outside analysts who studied voter attitudes going into the election and also exit polls, the healthcare issue probably ended up being only one of several important issues that affected voter decisions going into the Senate election. Chris Van Hollen, a key Democratic party strategist, states that the concerning state of the economy and local issues did their part to color the race, although the importance of the healthcare issue cannot be understated. Hollen’s opinion is that “special deals” included in the Senate healthcare bill – likely the tax breaks given to union members on expensive healthcare plans as a concession to get the labor industry’s support – upset voters. Hollen says that the fact that President Obama felt the need to give a speech and acknowledge an error in his single-minded focus on the healthcare issue was plenty indicative of the party knowing that they really messed up.
The only thing that is certain at this point is that Democrats will be certainly revising their healthcare strategy in the next several weeks. Nobody wants to abandon the yearlong push to enact healthcare policy at this point, and there are many who believe that the bills are not as bad-looking or as doomed as some would believe. Bill Nelson of Florida diplomatically opined that perhaps Democrats needed this setback to take a step back and meditate on the insurance bills as they moved forward, to make the legislation even stronger.
Trackback this post & | & Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed