I definitely did not see it coming that the Democrats would lose Kennedy’s senate seat in Massachusetts. Here is the first solid information why the Republican candidate, Scott Brown, won the election. Click on More to find out who the man behind the stunning political upset is.

Brown’s Massachusetts victory fueled by frustration with Washington, poll shows
By Dan Balz and Jon Cohen (Washington Post Staff Writer)

Dissatisfaction with the direction of the country, antipathy toward federal government activism and opposition to the Democrats’ health-care proposals drove the upset election of Republican Senator-elect Scott Brown of Massachusetts, according to a new post-election survey of Massachusetts voters.

The poll by The Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University’s School of Public Health underscores how significantly voter anger has turned against Democrats in Washington and how dramatically the political landscape has shifted during President Obama’s first year in office.
Sixty-three percent of Massachusetts special-election voters say the country is seriously off track, and Brown captured two-thirds of these voters in his victory over Democrat Martha Coakley. In November 2008, Obama scored a decisive win among the more than eight in 10 Massachusetts voters seeing the country as off course.
Nearly two-thirds of Brown’s voters say their vote was intended at least in part to express opposition to the Democratic agenda in Washington, but few say the senator-elect should simply work to stop it. Three-quarters of those who voted for Brown say they would like him to work with Democrats to get Republican ideas into legislation in general; nearly half say so specifically about health-care legislation.
When Obama was elected, 63 percent of Massachusetts voters said government should do more to solve problems, according to exit polling then. In the new poll, that number slipped to 50 percent, with about as many, 47 percent, saying that government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals.
Like Obama, Coakley won more than 70 percent of those pro-government voters, but the bigger pool of voters seeing government overreach helped Brown claim victory.
Health care topped jobs and the economy as the most important issue driving Massachusetts voters, but among Brown voters, “the way Washington is working” ran a close second to the economy and jobs as a factor.
Overall, just 43 percent of Massachusetts voters say they support the health-care proposals advanced by Obama and congressional Democrats; 48 percent oppose them. Among Brown’s supporters, however, eight in 10 said they were opposed to the measures, 66 percent of them strongly so.
Sizable majorities of Brown voters see the Democrats’ plan, if passed, as making things worse for their families, the country and the state of Massachusetts. Few Coakley voters see these harms, and most of those backing her see clear benefits for the country if health-care reform became law. Less than half of Coakley’s supporters say they or the state would be better off as a result.
Among Brown voters who say the health-care reform effort in Washington played an important role in their vote, the most frequently cited reasons were concerns about the process, including closed-door dealing and a lack of bipartisanship. Three in 10 highlighted these political machinations as the motivating factor, 22 percent expressed general opposition to reform or the current bill.
Coakley voters, by contrast, cited the need to cover the uninsured and fix the health-care system as the main reasons the issue drove their vote.
Massachusetts enacted a universal health-care plan several years ago, and the survey shows that it remains highly popular. Overall, 68 percent of the voters in Tuesday’s election say they support the Massachusetts plan, including slightly more than half of Brown voters.
Obama also remains highly popular in Massachusetts. More than six in 10 of those who voted approve of his job performance, with 92 percent of Coakley voters expressing satisfaction, along with 33 percent of Brown’s. More than half of Brown’s backers say Obama was not a factor in their vote.
But the Obama administration’s policies draw some fire, with nearly half of all special-election voters either dissatisfied or angry about those initiatives. Nearly three-quarters of Brown’s voters expressed the negative view.
Republican policies prove even less popular, with 58 percent of Massachusetts voters saying they are dissatisfied or angry about what the Republicans in Congress are offering. Among Brown voters, 60 percent give positive marks to the policies of congressional Republicans, but a sizable number, 37 percent, offer a negative appraisal.
The Massachusetts election brought another indication that the Obama coalition from 2008 has splintered, just as the results in gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey showed two months ago.
Compared with the 2008 presidential results, Coakley suffered significant erosion among whites, independents and working-class voters, according to the new survey.
In Massachusetts, independents made up about half of Tuesday’s total electorate, according to the new poll, and they supported Brown by nearly a 2 to 1 margin. Obama carried Bay State independents by 17 percentage points in 2008. Among Brown voters, 29 percent said they backed Obama over Republican Sen. John McCain.
Tuesday’s competitive election caught many poll-watchers by surprise, with news interest in the campaign peaking too late to organize an exit poll of voters on Election Day. The Washington Post, the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University conducted this poll to provide a more complete picture of the stated motivations of special-election voters.
The poll was conducted by conventional and cellular telephone among a random sample of 880 Massachusetts residents who say they voted in the special election. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus four percentage points for the full sample.

MAN IN THE NEWS: SCOTT BROWN
Discipline Helped Carve Path to Senate
By MARK LEIBOVICH
WASHINGTON—Scott Brown lives by what he calls “Army values,” instilled 30 years ago when he joined the Massachusetts National Guard. “The most regimented person I know,” his oldest daughter calls the Republican politician, who abhors disorder while sometimes inviting it with audacious pursuits—whether jumping into frigid lakes at 5 a.m. (for triathlon training) or into a seemingly quixotic Senate race.
“I treated this campaign like a sprint triathlon,” Mr. Brown said in an interview Wednesday. “You have to be good in everything, 18, 19 hours a day. We were just out there cranking.”
“Just out there cranking” could be a mantra of a man quick to boast of his athletic accomplishments and confident enough to challenge President Obama—who had called to congratulate him Tuesday night—to a basketball game. He strives for “total discipline” but can be prone to curious public statements (declaring his 19- and 21- year-old daughters “available” in his victory speech ); he has fashioned a “nice guy” image while sometimes offending ( saying, for instance, in 2001 that lesbians having children was “not normal”).
Scott Philip Brown, 50, is the unlikely successor to Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the possibly fatal agent of Mr. Obama’s health care bill and the protagonist in of one of the great political upsets in recent memory. ( Mr. Obama’s top political aide, David Axelrod, praised Mr. Brown’s campaign as “spectacular.”) Mr. Brown was even asked at a news conference in Boston on Wednesday whether he would consider running for president. (He demurred.)
While pundits of both parties were ascribing his victory to discontent over the economy and a radical shift in the nation’s political mood since the 2008 election, Mr. Brown has dutifully separated himself from any grand cause. By Wednesday he seemed eager to put the symbolism of his win behind him.
“All eyes are going to be on me; I’m not stupid,” Mr. Brown said in the interview. “I get it. And I’m going to make sure I’m going to be the best senator I can possibly be.”
Mr. Brown’s craving for discipline and order was born of a chaotic childhood. His parents were divorced when he was 1, and each one was married four times. He lived for a time with his grandparents and dealt with an ever-changing cast of stepparents.
“Some of these marriages were not that pretty,” said John Encarnaceo, a retired colonel in the Massachusetts National Guard and former boyfriend of Mr. Brown’s mother, Judith Brown.
“I grew up fast,” Mr. Brown recalled. “I remember waking up in the middle of the night, and hearing the banging and the screams and having to be the 5- or 6-year-old boy having to save Mom.”
He grew his hair long, listened to Aerosmith and Kiss and, at 12, was arrested for shoplifting a bunch of albums (Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and Grand Funk Railroad) at a local mall.
He went before a judge, Samuel Zoll, who invited him into his chambers and asked him about his life. Mr. Brown responded by saying he loved basketball and had younger half siblings who looked up to him. “How do you think they would like to watch you play basketball in jail?” the judge asked, according to Mr. Brown’s telling. Judge Zoll demanded that Mr. Brown write a 1,500-word essay about the episode and eventually let him go.
Mr. Brown said that experience was a pivot point in his life, leading him to be more serious about school and sports. His long-range shooting skill at Wakefield High School and, eventually, Tufts University, earned him the nickname Downtown Scotty Brown.
He joined the National Guard at 20, in part to help pay for law school at Boston College. He was drawn to the Guard during an epic blizzard in 1978 that dumped more than three feet of snow on eastern Massachusetts and left motorists stranded on local highways—requiring an all-out rescue effort. Mr. Brown has been deployed in areas as far-flung as Paraguay and Kazakhstan, though never in a combat zone.
Fiercely competitive, he is ever mindful of his Guard ranking (lieutenant colonel) and athletic benchmarks (“I made All-America this year in triathlon,” he noted).
That ambition may help explain his political rise. While Mr. Brown runs a small law practice out of his home in Wrentham, in the Boston suburbs, he ran for town assessor after he felt slighted by a town official in 1992. He won his State Senate seat in 2004 in a special election.
Mr. Brown was considered a relatively conservative Republican in the Legislature, which would place him closer to the center among Senate Republicans in Washington.
Mr. Brown has tried to project a more conciliatory image even while unloading criticism on the state “Democratic machine” and being embraced by many conservative hardliners across the country. He sprinkles his sentences with “sirs” and “ma’ams” and “with all due respects.” He has been generous in praising Mr. Kennedy and said the first person he called after his victory Tuesday night was Mr. Kennedy’s widow, Victoria.
He is also confident, which would seem a prerequisite for anyone who poses for Cosmopolitan magazine in his birthday suit (as Mr. Brown did when he was 22). And he is at times superstitious, carrying good luck stones in his pocket, according to his daughter Ayla, and calling everyone he knew on Election Day to remind them to vote. When the president called to congratulate him Tuesday night, Mr. Brown challenged him to a game of two-on-two hoops: he and Ayla, a senior forward on the Boston College basketball team, against the president and a player of his choosing.
In a phone interview Wednesday, Ms. Brown—the older of the two “available” daughters—confirmed that she is single. (By Wednesday morning, she said she had 1,080 new friend requests on her Facebook page and 285 new messages in her Facebook inbox, “most of them from guys.”)
Ayla sang on “American Idol” and Mr. Brown’s wife of 23 years, Gail Huff, is a longtime reporter at WCVB-TV, the Boston ABC affiliate.
“I am the third most famous member of my family,” Mr. Brown used to joke, but not anymore.

One Year: Beware of Sudden Downdrafts
Posted by Hendrik Hertzberg January 20, 2010
Having been around a while, I have some memory of the Years One of four previous Democratic Presidents. Turbulence during takeoff has been the rule. It is wise to keep one’s seat belt loosely fastened.
J.F.K. had the Bay of Pigs fiasco and a humiliating Vienna summit with Khrushchev, unforced errors both. He dazzled with imaginative, low-cost initiatives like the Peace Corps, but the really ambitious items on his agenda (health care!) stalled in Congress. Carter mismanaged relations with Congress and “gave away” the Panama Canal, a necessary move that had the side effect of turbocharging Ronald Reagan’s political rise. Clinton stumbled over gays in the military on the way to his own health-care debacle. Only Johnson had a stellar first year, and that was largely due to the tragically galvanizing circumstances of his taking office.
That Obama let the “outside game” part of the health-care drama get away from him, so focussed was he on the “inside game” of trying to force the legislative elephant through the Congressional keyhole, can no longer be denied. He and his team can also be faulted for the political (and perhaps substantive) inattention that has allowed the right to profit handsomely from the economic disaster that their policies, not Obama’s, brought about.
Whether yesterday’s upset in Massachusetts turns out to be a catastrophe or merely a setback now depends largely on the grown-upness, or lack of it, of liberals in the House of Representatives. I don’t see any way out of the darkness right now other than for the House to tighten its stomach muscles, pass the Senate version of the health-care bill A.S.A.P., and move on to jobs and the economy. The Senate health-care bill, however inferior to the House version, is vastly superior to the status quo. The only alternative I can discern is no bill at all—a political, substantive, and humanitarian failure that would reverberate for a generation.
Thanks to my longstanding obsession with the obsolescence of our eighteenth-century political and electoral hydraulics (such as the separation of powers and the lack of a single government accountable to a national electorate) and this sclerotic system’s sadomasochistic twentieth-century refinements (such as the institutionalization of the filibuster), I am not astonished that Obama has had trouble “getting things done.” Absent only the filibuster—even while leaving untouched all the other monkey wrenches (committee chairs, corrupt campaign money, safe districts, Republicans, etc.)—Obama by now would have signed landmark bills addressing health care, global warming, and financial regulation, and a larger, better-designed stimulus package, too.
Obama came into office with a slightly better-than-average electoral mandate, but he was immediately faced with difficulties of a size and type that his post-mid-century Democratic predecessors were not: a gigantic economic emergency whose full effects weren’t felt until halfway into his first year; two botched wars in chaotic Muslim countries; an essentially nihilistic opposition party dominated by a pro-torture, anti-intellectual, anti-public-spirited, xenophobic “conservative” movement; and a rightist propaganda apparatus owned by nominally respectable media corporations and financed by nominally respectable advertisers. Excuses? Maybe. Good ones, though. Sometimes excuses actually excuse.
Meanwhile, President Obama forestalled a second Great Depression, turned the attention of the executive branch toward real problems, restored lawfulness and decency to foreign and domestic policy, damped down the flames of global anti-Americanism, and staffed the agencies and departments with competent, public-spirited officials who believe in the duty of government to advance the general welfare. In this generation, Obama is as good as it is likely to get. I’m not sure whether that’s good news or bad, and I’m not saying that liberals shouldn’t keep the pressure on him to do better. I am saying that their—our—anger and exasperation should be directed elsewhere, at systemic grotesqueries like the filibuster and at the nihilists those grotesqueries enable.

Polling analyst Jennifer Agiesta and special consultant Mike Mokrzycki contributed to this report.

After the Massachusetts Massacre

By FRANK RICH (NY Times)

It was not a referendum on Barack Obama, who in every poll remains one of the most popular politicians in America. It was not a rejection of universal health care, which Massachusetts mandated (with Scott Brown’s State Senate vote) in 2006. It was not a harbinger of a resurgent G.O.P., whose numbers remain in the toilet. Brown had the good sense not to identify himself as a Republican in either his campaign advertising or his victory speech.
And yet Tuesday’s special election was a dire omen for this White House. If the administration sticks to this trajectory, all bets are off for the political future of a president who rode into office blessed with more high hopes, good will and serious promise than any in modern memory. It’s time for him to stop deluding himself. Yes, last week’s political obituaries were ludicrously premature. Obama’s 50-ish percent first-anniversary approval rating matches not just Carter’s but Reagan’s. (Bushes 41 and 43 both skyrocketed in Year One.) Still, minor adjustments can’t right what’s wrong.
Obama’s plight has been unchanged for months. Neither in action nor in message is he in front of the anger roiling a country where high unemployment remains unchecked and spiraling foreclosures are demolishing the bedrock American dream of home ownership. The president is no longer seen as a savior but as a captive of the interests who ginned up the mess and still profit, hugely, from it.
That’s no place for any politician of any party or ideology to be. There’s a reason why the otherwise antithetical Leno and Conan camps are united in their derision of NBC’s titans. A TV network has become a handy proxy for every mismanaged, greedy, disloyal and unaccountable corporation in our dysfunctional economy. It’s a business culture where the rich and well-connected get richer while the employees, shareholders and customers get the shaft. And the conviction that the game is fixed is nonpartisan. If the tea party right and populist left agree on anything, it’s that big bailed-out banks have and will get away with murder while we pay the bill on credit cards—with ever-rising fees.
Politically, no other issue counts. In last weekend’s Washington Post/ABC News poll, 42 percent of Americans chose the economy as the country’s most pressing concern. Only 5 percent picked terrorism, and 2 percent Afghanistan. Obama’s highest approval ratings are now on foreign policy and national security issues—despite the relentless hammering from the Cheney right—but voters don’t care.
Does health care matter? Not as much as you’d think after this yearlong crusade. In the Post/ABC poll, the issue was second-tier—at 24 percent. Obama has blundered, not by positioning himself too far to the left but by landing nowhere—frittering away his political capital by being too vague, too slow and too deferential to Congress. The smartest thing said as the Massachusetts returns came in Tuesday night was by Howard Fineman on MSNBC: “Obama took all his winnings and turned them over to Max Baucus.”
Worse, the master communicator in the White House has still not delivered a coherent message on his signature policy. He not only refused to signal his health care imperatives early on but even now he, like Congressional Democrats, has failed to explain clearly why and how reform relates to economic recovery—or, for that matter, what he wants the final bill to contain. Sure, a president needs political wiggle room as legislative sausage is made, but Scott Brown could and did drive his truck through the wide, wobbly parameters set by Obama.
Ask yourself this: All these months later, do you yet know what the health care plan means for your family’s bottom line, your taxes, your insurance? It’s this nebulousness, magnified by endless Senate versus House squabbling, that has allowed reform to be caricatured by its foes as an impenetrable Rube Goldberg monstrosity, a parody of deficit-ridden big government. Since most voters are understandably confused about what the bills contain, the opponents have been able to attribute any evil they want to Obamacare, from death panels to the death of Medicare, without fear of contradiction.
It’s too late to rewrite that history, but it may not be too late for White House decisiveness. Whatever happens now—good, bad or ugly—must happen fast. Each day Washington spends dickering over health care is another day lost while the election-year economy, stupid, remains intractable for Americans who are suffering.
On the economic front, Obama needs both stylistic and substantive makeovers. He has stepped up the populist rhetoric lately—and markedly after political disaster struck last week—but few find this serene Harvard-trained lawyer credible when slinging populist rhetoric at “fat-cat” bankers. His two principal economic policy makers are useless, if not counterproductive, surrogates. Timothy Geithner, the Treasury secretary, was probably fatally compromised from the moment his tax lapses surfaced; now he is stalked by the pileup of unanswered questions about the still-not-transparent machinations at the New York Fed when he was knee-deep in the A.I.G. bailout. Lawrence Summers, the top administration economic guru, is a symbol of the Clinton-era deregulatory orgy that helped fuel the bubble.
The White House clearly knows this duo is a political albatross. After the news broke that 85,000 more jobs had been lost in December despite some economists’ more optimistic predictions, Christina Romer, a more user-friendly (though still academic) economic hand, was dispatched to the Sunday shows. This is at best a makeshift solution.
Obama needs more independent economists like Paul Volcker, who was hastily retrieved from exile last week after the Massachusetts massacre prompted the White House to tardily embrace his strictures on big banks. Obama also needs economic spokesmen who are not economists and who can authentically speak to life on the ground. Obama must also reconnect. The former community organizer whose credit card was denied at the Hertz counter during the 2000 Democratic convention now spends too much time at the White House presiding over boardroom-table meetings and stiff initiative rollouts instead of engaging with Americans not dressed in business suits.
When it comes to economic substance, small symbolic gestures (the proposed new bank “fee”) won’t cut it. Nor will ineffectual presidential sound bites railing against Wall Street bonuses beyond the federal government’s purview. There’s no chance of a second stimulus. The White House will have to jawbone banks on foreclosures, credit card racketeering and the loosening of credit to small businesses. This means taking on bankers who were among the Obama campaign’s biggest backers and whose lobbyists have castrated regulatory reform by buying off congressmen of both parties. It means pressing for all constitutional remedies that might counter last week’s 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision allowing corporate campaign contributions to buy off even more.
It’s become so easy to pin financial elitism on Democrats that the morning after Brown’s victory the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee had the gall to accuse them of being the “one party who bailed out the automakers and insurance companies.” Never mind that the Bush White House gave us the bank (and A.I.G.) bailouts, or that the G.O.P. is even more in hock than Democrats to corporate patrons. The Obama administration is so overstocked with Goldman Sachs-Robert Rubin alumni and so tainted by its back-room health care deals with pharmaceutical and insurance companies that conservative politicians, Brown included, can masquerade shamelessly as the populist alternative.
Last year the president pointedly studied J.F.K.‘s decision-making process on Vietnam while seeking the way forward in Afghanistan. In the end, he didn’t emulate his predecessor and escalated the war. We’ll see how that turns out. Meanwhile, Obama might look at another pivotal moment in the Kennedy presidency—and this time heed the example.
The incident unfolded in April 1962—some 15 months into the new president’s term—when J.F.K. was infuriated by the U.S. Steel chairman’s decision to break a White House-brokered labor-management contract agreement and raise the price of steel (but not wages). Kennedy was no radical. He hailed from the American elite—like Obama, a product of Harvard, but, unlike Obama, the patrician scion of a wealthy family. And yet he, like that other Harvard patrician, F.D.R., had no hang-ups about battling his own class.
Kennedy didn’t settle for the generic populist rhetoric of Obama’s latest threats to “fight” unspecified bankers some indeterminate day. He instead took the strong action of dressing down U.S. Steel by name. As Richard Reeves writes in his book “President Kennedy,” reporters were left “literally gasping.” The young president called out big steel for threatening “economic recovery and stability” while Americans risked their lives in Southeast Asia. J.F.K. threatened to sic his brother’s Justice Department on corporate records and then held firm as his opponents likened his flex of muscle to the power grabs of Hitler and Mussolini. (Sound familiar?) U.S. Steel capitulated in two days. The Times soon reported on its front page that Kennedy was at “a high point in popular support.”
Can anyone picture Obama exerting such take-no-prisoners leadership to challenge those who threaten our own economic recovery and stability at a time of deep recession and war? That we can’t is a powerful indicator of why what happened in Massachusetts will not stay in Massachusetts if this White House fails to reboot.