Jamie Zhang / Chris Fegan – (Photo courtesy of masslive.com)

Jamie Zhang -

As former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill once said, “All politics is local.” The Martha Coakley-Scott Brown election, while la¬beled otherwise by pundits and politicians alike, is an almost perfect example of that axiom.

Let’s start by dispelling the notion that Coak¬ley lost because of President Barack Obama’s health care proposal. Massachusetts already has an individual mandate to obtain health in¬surance, with the plans of the poor subsidized by the state, yet there is virtually no clamor in our state to repeal universal health care. There are no “tea baggers” swarming about the state, screaming at politicians about socialism and death panels.

The voters of Massachusetts generally like Obama’s health care proposal, which is why among voters who cared mainly about health care legislation, Coakley did just fine. Accord¬ing to a Rasmussen poll taken after the election, Coakley actually won among voters who cited health care as their top issue by a 53 percent to 46 percent margin.

So how did Scott Brown win? He won by making the local issues the dominant issues of the election. Among voters who cited taxes as their top issue, Brown handily defeated Coak¬ley by a 6-1 margin. But here’s the thing: Wash¬ington has not raised taxes in over a decade. In fact, Obama actually cut taxes for the vast majority of Americans as a part of the stimulus bill.

Brown, by denouncing taxes, was implicitly referring to the recent 25 percent sales tax hike that went into effect a few months ago in Massa¬chusetts, a new burden that has infuriated local residents. At a time when voters are losing jobs and being squeezed economically, the seem¬ingly trivial jump in the sales tax from 5 percent to 6.25 percent seems to have had a tremendous psychological impact. Thus, Massachusetts vot¬ers who cited taxes as their main concern saw their vote more directly as a referendum on Gov. Deval Patrick and the state legislature than on Obama.

Let’s face it: Coakley ran an absolutely abysmal campaign. Between insulting Catholics and making it painfully clear she doesn’t know the first thing about the Red Sox, she alienated most of the swing voters who ended up decid¬ing the election. In a state where the majority of voters are Catholic, Coakley glibly quipped that Catholics shouldn’t work in the Emergency Room, dismissing Catholic views on abortion in the process.

Even with these gaffes aside, Coakley ran a decidedly negative campaign that, in tone, seemed antithetical to the message of hope that sent Obama to the White House. While Brown was busy spreading populist fervor around the state, denouncing a paralyzed and ineffectual Washington, Coakley was actually mocking Brown for shaking hands “in the cold” outside Fenway Park, something which she evidently considered herself above doing.

Still, for all the faults in Coakley’s campaign, one cannot ignore the tremendous impact the Great Recession has had on the elec¬tion. After all, among the quarter of voters who cited the economy as their main issue, Brown won by a 52-46 margin.

Yet in a predominantly blue state, this does not represent so much a re¬buke of the President’s economic pol¬icy as it does a lashing out at the harsh reality of the times. After all, it has traditionally been the case that the party in power tends to lose seats in Congress during midterm elec¬tions. We must view the Coakley-Brown contest in this context, which is to say that as a Demo¬crat, Coakley may have actually been fighting an uphill battle, despite running in a usually “Democratic” state. For voters who have seen the economy only decline under the Obama ad¬ministration, a fresh perspective may have been all that was needed to win over their votes.

In the end, the Democrats still have a whop¬ping 59-41 majority in the Senate, a greater advantage than they have had in decades. Just as the President urged them not to “run to the hills” during his State of the Union speech, Democrats must be careful not to overreact to Brown’s win.

Ultimately, Brown’s election was the result not of Obama’s policy decisions, but the out¬come of a perfect storm of factors that resulted in the loss of the Kennedy seat. If the Demo¬crats want to avoid even more calamitous losses in the upcoming November elections, they will have to unite under the cause that sent Obama to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in the first place. Ironically, it’s the same message that Brown used to rally support among his voters: that Washington ought to truly reflect the will of the people.

Chris Fegan -

It’s surprising that the high temperature in Boston on Jan. 19 was only 36° Fahrenheit. That was the day that Republican Scott Brown defeated Democrat Martha Coakley in the Special Senate Election to fill the late Ted Kennedy’s vacant seat. One would think that the billion-watt national spotlight shining on the state would have boosted that temperature by quite a few degrees.

This was not just a local election solely affecting the state of Massachusetts. It was the event that would affirm or reject the Democratic supermajority in the Senate and subsequently President Barack Obama’s efforts for health care reform. With the national spotlight thus shining on the Bay State, that supermajority was soundly rejected.

Certainly, Coakley was part of the problem. Her campaign was perhaps the textbook example of how to lose an election. Expressing disdain for greeting crowds and mischaracterizing local baseball legends are not tactics that go over well with the constituency, to say the least. Yet Coakley’s campaign cannot be cited as the sole reason that Democrats lost the election.

Ultimately, the election hinged on one key issue: a vote in favor of the President’s vision of healthcare reform or a vote against it. That was why Obama visited neighboring Northeastern University to drum up support for Coakley, despite the risk of putting his “political prestige on the line,” as the New York Times called it in a Jan. 16 article. That same article featured this telling line: “Senior Democrats in Congress and the White House said they continued to believe Coakley would win in Massachusetts, but they acknowledged that her loss could have severe political consequences for them.”

Coakley lost. That’s tantamount to a shift in national politics, according to Democrats. It’s impossible to examine the election without taking this into account. As such, the election had to be viewed as being at least partially a national referendum, especially on the health care bill.

Massachusetts voters had to know this when they went to the polls to cast their ballots. The reason that the election was so greatly publicized and covered was because of its national implications. If this had been a contest for the 61st Democratic vote in the Senate, there would have been far less hype; the President’s health care efforts would not have been hampered in any way.

It’s important to emphasize that this election is not a crushing barrier to the passage of a health care bill. Rather, it was the difference between a simple reconciliation of the House and Senate bills and revisiting the entire debate on healthcare in an attempt to get that final vote. There is no question that the bill can still be passed; it will simply take much more time, effort and compromise.

Yet the election still brings up the issue of how satisfied the people are with the current health plan. Perhaps the more telling information concerns recent election results in other states. These elections confirm that there is a national swing towards Republicans, especially among independent voters. The victories of gubernatorial candidates Chris Christie in wildly liberal New Jersey and Bob McDonnell in Virginia are indicators of a national trend in favor of the GOP. Massachusetts continues this surprising streak. After all, this was the seat of the Lion of the Senate that was snatched by a Republican. Health care has been the President’s primary concern for the past few months and all of these election results could indicate progressing unhappiness or uncertainty with his plan.

Perhaps the most concerning result of the election was the lack of importance placed on the health care bill as a whole. A recent 7 News/Suffolk poll found that 44 pecent of voters listed the economy/jobs as the most important issue in the election, while health care reform came in second with 38 percent of voters identifying it as most critical. This information is likely indicative of a national trend of concern over the economy as being the top national priority. After all, national unemployment is at 9.7 percent with 14.8 million people out of work. The pressing issue for these people is getting jobs and making money; health care, while important, is currently playing a secondary role.

By focusing on health care in recent months over more explicit measures to alleviate unemployment, Obama has likely incurred the scorn of some of these voters. The Massachusetts election can be seen as a microcosm of this trend — not so much of an explicit vote against healthcare, but a vote in support of focusing on more pressing issues first. Ultimately, voters did not care enough to place the President’s top priority at the top of voting checklists. Even if the election isn’t considered a critique on the health care bill, it certainly indicates that the priorities of Americans and Washington are not perfectly in sync.

Very rarely is there one explicit cause of an election result. Coakley’s poor campaigning and Brown’s hard work to rebound from relative obscurity are certainly important when evaluating why Democrats lost the Senate election in Massachusetts. But we cannot ignore the national implications that this election intrinsically held. Even if voters did not intend for their selections to have national consequences, they did. That makes the election a referendum, especially on health care, by default.