My takeaways from the special election...

...in Massachusetts Tuesday are:

(1) Martha Coakley ran a horrendous campaign; Scott Brown ran a brilliant one. Give Brown some credit; he won a seat that had been in the Kennedy family for almost 60 years. (Someone at the Boston Globe said that "a lawyer ran against a politician.")

(2) The people are angry. In case you haven't heard, there's a recession out there--a bad one. Unemployment is at 10% and shows no signs of abating. Independents, especially, are going to vote against the party that controls the White House and both houses of Congress. While you could spin the governor's races in Virginia and New Jersey, you can't spin this one.

(3) Health care reform is dead. What happened? Two things: the process went on too long, and this allowed the opposition to define the issue in the public mind. One of the first rules in politics is to never let your opponent define you. When health care reform was first taken up in earnest in April, the approve/disapprove numbers were 33%/26%. Now they are about 33%/46%. In other words, the undecideds were persuaded by the opponents of reform that it was a bad idea. At the same time, the president neglected to sell it. In hindsight, it's always easier to scare people and make them prefer the devil they know to the devil they don't. And the opponents of health care reform were shameless in the lies and distortions they spread. Remember "death panels?" (Don't laugh too hard; the woman who said that last summer also "wrote" a best-selling book. People stood in the cold for hours to meet her and get her autograph. Maybe Bill Maher was right when he said we live in a stupid country.)

(4) Money controls Washington. This may be a little like saying the earth is round, but it's worth mentioning because it's clear that those who had the most to lose from health care reform spent the most to mislead the public and buy the votes of senators. Which leads into my next take away.

(5) The U. S. Senate, and by extension Washington, is completely dysfunctional. This bill was an honest attempt at controlling health care costs. Medicare is on a trajectory to bankrupt the country by 2017. The failure to address a major problem facing the country does not bode well for tackling any of our other major problems, such as social security, the deficit and the national debt.

(6) Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina famously said, "If we're able to stop Obama on [health care reform], it will be his Waterloo. It will break him." He's right; the president is done for 2010. Forget cap-and-trade legislation, financial regulatory reform, a jobs bill, or anything else that the Democrats may have wanted to accomplish this year. (Do you think Wall Street wasn't taking notes--and writing checks--during the health care debate?)

The danger now is that Obama may be done as president. I don't mean that literally. He'll always be personally popular and will probably win reelection as long as the Republicans don't have anyone to run against him. But forget about his being a transformational presidency a la Reagan's. (Can you imagine the Gipper not fighting for what he believed in?) Instead, it could end up looking more incremental, like Clinton's. (But hey, eight years of peace and prosperity--and a balanced budget--ain't all that bad, especially when you consider what followed. Yikes!)

But what really should have all Americans concerned is take away (5), i. e., the government's inability to solve major problems. (If the Democrats can't pass a health care bill in this environment, what can they do? Reform Wall Street? Don't make me laugh!) The fiscal picture in this country is not an encouraging one. What happens when a government ceases to function? What happens when a government can't cut spending or raise taxes? Just look at California. And fasten your seat belts.