Heartily agree that the election was a wakeup, but does anyone doubt that had Ted been 20 years younger and healthy, his liberal ass would have won in a walk? Poor candidate, poor campaign, plus a media that made the same assumptions that she did and didn't bother covering Brown until the end also had an effect. But message is liberals have to work for support, and better now than November. And Democrats with spines will do better than Ted Van Dyk wanna be republicans. 
   Also notable is that Edwards is finished in a way that 2 conservative Senators and 1 governor are not. Funny how that works. And Edwards is hardly the first notable to disown his own bastard, not that that makes the act a whit better. I'd still vote for him against McCain on policy grounds, whose treatment of his first wife is usually overlooked in this kind of storytelling. 
  Doesn't Scalia hunt with Chaney? Best  not go there, although it is tempting.
The difference between people and corporations is that people can be turned to Soylent Green. I don't suppose that error will ever be rectified now.  

Good post, Mossback.
   
   
  

Excellent piece generally, but how the writer thinks Obama and the Dems can abandon health reform now without severely demoralizing their base, electrifying the Republicans, and setting the stage for a 1994-style election rout is beyond me. Paul Krugman and E.J. Dionne had it right today, as did these health policy experts:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/opinion/22krugman.html
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/6827231.html
http://www.tnr.com/blog/the-treatment/47-health-policy-experts-including-me-say-sign-the-senate-bill

When Democrats have a bad day, I have a good day.

@Harris Meyer- you are correct that no health care bill is bad news for the dems. But the Senate bill's poison pill of a mandate for working people to buy crappy insurance that won't pay for most of their health care costs is also very bad news for them. They've been put into a no-win position- by the the right, the moderates, a shallow-minded media, but most of all their own faint-hearted leadership. "We're better than those guys" is not the most inspirational fighting slogan, but at the moment it's all a year has given us. If the Republicans had those numbers in Congress with McCain or Palin in the White House, their base would have a lot more to crow about.

Good piece, Knute, but "100 years of lawmaking"? the only thing overturned was a decision of about ten years ago. I note that the ACLU argued in favor of the appellant.

A lot of this talk proceeds about how bad a day the Democrats are having. But the people really having a bad day are the citizens.

Tomorrow will be a day much like any other for the Democrats, as will the day after. The rest of us have to deal with rising health care costs (or no insurance at all), paying half our income tax for war (if we're lucky enough to pay taxes on income), and living in a country with no effective form of governance in a time of AGW and peak oil.

No, not a very good week- but it's not the Democrats I'm worried about.

Kieth: I was referring to attempts to restrain corporate influence in federal elections that date back to the Tillman Act of 1907.

Thank you, Knute. Incidentally, I think your article was funny as well as to the point. You are saying that as of 1907 it was not legal for corporations to contribute money to political causes. If that is true I stand corrected.

I've been boiling over with rage all week. That the Democratic Congress would fumble their main priority and let themselves be intimidated by a bunch of insane protesters, that voters in Massachusetts have already forgot that the GOP has caused virtually every disaster since 1980, that the Supreme Court would make such an outrageous and cynical ruling, that I can't find a date, and so on.

Once the emotions quiet down, it will be time to take a serious look at what is going on and see what it all means. My survey of the American landscape suggests that no more than about 20% of Americans are partisan Democrats and no more than about 20% are partisan Republicans. Maybe about 5 to 10% fall into various fringe groups. That leaves a majority, with attitudes ranging from liberal to conservative, with libertarian, socialist, or green bents, whose emphasis is on problem solving. They will support, or at least accept, leadership the opposite of their preferred party if there is the perception that said leadership is solving problems. The fact that Democrats had better accept soon is that there is little sense of the federal government solving problems.

There is a similar problem on the foreign policy front, which hasn't gotten as much attention lately. I can tell that the war in Afghanistan is not what President Obama wants to be working on. I think that he sees it as an obstacle to what he really wants to do in the foreign policy arena, which is to work on nuclear nonproliferation and climate change. As much as I support these efforts, the Afghanistan war is his most pressing concern, and not giving that a credible response diminishes his ability to do anything else.

The other issue is trust, and for this I would refer to David Brooks' piece. My parents are moderate Republicans, who support (or at least have so far) President Obama and his health care initiative. But they were deeply offended by the wheeling and dealing that had to be done to get Ben Nelson on board, and now it seems to have been for naught.

If there are any Democratic party leaders reading, my plea is to save us by speaking out at your party meetings about what I have written. Party loyalty does not mean rigid ideology or allegience to the President; it means that we do what it takes to govern successfully, which at the present time means getting the middle back.

What I find bizarre puzzlement is some weird combination of, as you wrote, a "59-41 majority in the Senate" and "the early signs of panic..."

This moaning and whining and kvetching makes me sick about Democrats.

Democrats need to "screw your courage to the sticking-place."

Perhaps it's time for us to admit that none of our supposed betters are actually better. The argument could be made that because they feel as they are better, they therefore are more egregious in their offences, thus making the John Edwards of this world actually worse, and the same with Bill Clinton, and Mark Sanford. Just look at this Rielle Hunter affair – Edwards goes way out of bounds, and then gets Andrew Young, a key associate, to take the fall for him. Young is going to get more than a couple payday loans for his upcoming book, The Politician, and Edwards hopefully is going to get publicly shamed for his utterly inexcusable behavior.

The years 2008-2010 might be looked on as nothing more than nostalgia for a liberal past that never existed. Plus 65 age hippies, took one last charge at "The Establishment" to try and "Bring Down The System". What they found is that most people are still trying to become part of the Establishment and what people really want is for politicians to put it all back together again so they can get a job (with a good health care plan), a 3 bedroom house in a low density exurb and a school where the kids don't do so many drugs. What they have right now are a lot of ideologues who completely ignore unemployment, and focused on making life as miserable as possible for the rising middle classes...the one group that can remake the 21st century economy. Instead they threw their lot in with every unfulfilled retrograde salve from the past -- from global warming, to battery cars, to universal health care -- ideas that were long ago defrocked.

What we're left with is a petty government that looks like its mostly made up by the people who will send you emails from Nigerian bankers...and the puny site of a President who people really don't know, who goes to a burger joint and says "no secret sauce please, I'm watching my weight".

Yes, old Hippies, you had your Swan Song and your Last Dance. It was fun to watch, but we have a century to build. Take your ill gotten gains and get off stage. For good!

re jabailo--

I agree. long live government
of the corporations
by the corporations
for the corporations.

If people "Looked back" to the past, perhaps its because looking forward to the corporate serf state that looms in the future seems a pretty stark place.

After all, presidents and senators only make a small percentage of what corporate CEO's make--why should they be running the country?

Voters dumped the Republican Congress because they were sick of the way it was throwing money around with wild abandon. They got a Democratic Congress that's throwing money around with wilder abandon. They elected Obama because they saw in him a man who would bring people together and lead from the pragmatic center. They got a man as partisan and blindly ideological as George Bush, just in the opposite direction. It looks like the voters are ready to give Republicans another shot in 2010. If the Republicans don't know why they're getting another chance they will have wasted their time in the wilderness. Whether it's "Homeland" security or government takeover of healthcare, most Americans do not want an all-powerful government taking more of their hard earned money and giving them only more restrictions and regulations in return. Does any politician stand for the freedom of the individual anymore?

Meaningful health insurance reform is gone until there's a crisis that warrants taking what will then necessitate a drastic action. The Ds can look in the mirror as to why it did not happen. They had a tenuous 60 votes, yet the administration delegated the bill to Senator Reid and Representative Pelosi, neither of whom was elected nationwide. As a result, the insurance industry helped write the bill. The Ds had to cave in to at least Senators Lieberman and Nelson to essentially buy their votes. They didn't plan for the "worst case" possibility, their losing their 60 votes due to this election, an illness amongst one of their own, etc. Now, they will be fortunate to get a watered-down bill. A few months ago, after the President's first deadline was missed, I advocated the Congress pass the 80% that most of them agreed to, things like pre-existing conditions, then work on the last, tough 20% separately. Instead, they chose to bull ahead, and they now face the same fate as the over-confident Republicans did in 2006 when they controlled both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, big electoral losses and incremental change for the next 2 years and a challenging 2012 election when it could've been a cakewalk on both. But, that would have necessitated a more - dare I write it - conservative approach to health insurance reform.

I never listened to a lot of "Air America," but it seemed like a well-meaning liberal attempt to do what Rush and Beck do better. But now we've got John Stewart and Steven Colbert ruling the airwaves, doing what Air America and the humorless, lying right wing could never do: combining truth and satire to inform, entertain and expose hypocrisy. The Right is not very funny precisely because it is so mean-spirited. I dare any one of those guys to go one-on-one against Colbert. He'd shred them.

Amen to — dbreneman who said "Doesn't any politician stand for the freedom of the individual anymore?" I totally agree with that sentiment.