WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama grappled Wednesday with the fallout from the stunning Republican Senate election in Massachusetts, a stinging loss that could drive him to stay the course in tough times — a la Ronald Reagan in 1982 — or tack toward the center and work more with the Republicans — as Bill Clinton did after 1994.
Whichever course he pursues heading into his second year as president — Wednesday marked the one-year anniversary of his inauguration — the loss of a Democratic-held Senate seat in Massachusetts, and with it his party’s 60-vote super-majority in the Senate, means he has to adapt his governing style if he wants to get things done.
“Successful presidents are able to adjust,” said William Galston, a former aide in the Clinton White House. “But you can’t adjust unless you acknowledge that you’ve made some mistakes. The first question about this very self-confident president is whether he’ll be able to acknowledge mistakes. Not just verbally, but in his mind and his heart.”
Obama and his top aides insisted Wednesday that he would change. But it may be a change only in tactics, not substance.
Senior aides said that Obama still would push to expand health care, his top domestic priority, as well as the rest of his agenda. They said that the White House now would have to rethink how it gets priorities through Congress.
“We … have to take into account what voters were saying yesterday and what we’ve heard from folks around the country,” senior adviser David Axelrod said on MSNBC. “We will take that into account and then we’ll decide how to move forward.”
Obama said Wednesday that he didn’t take the evident voter anger in Massachusetts as a verdict on him or his agenda.
“People are angry, they are frustrated. Not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years, but what’s happened over the last eight years,” Obama told ABC News.
Democrats have now lost three straight elections since November — governorships in Virginia and New Jersey, and now the Senate seat in Massachusetts. Obama won all three states in 2008. How Obama reacts to the reversal will say a lot about what he accomplishes for the remainder of his term — and whether he wins a second one.
Several centrist Democrats and Republicans are urging him to move away from the liberal Democratic congressional leadership and toward the political center, much as Clinton did after the Democrats lost control of Congress in 1994.
“The loss in Massachusetts should serve as a wake-up call to the wing of the Democratic Party that wants the federal government to overreach and overspend,” said Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La.. “We need to get back to the basics. Senate Democrats must use this setback to increase our efforts to find bipartisan, fiscally responsible solutions that make sense to Americans of all walks of life.”
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