With his signature health care bill on the line, President Obama on Friday threw himself into the political brawl in Massachusetts, where Republicans have a growing chance to win a special election for the Senate that could make it far more difficult to enact the landmark health legislation.
Growing uncertainty about the race to replace the late Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) put enormous pressure on Democrats to settle final details of the health care bill.
A Republican win in Tuesday’s election would strip Democrats of their 60-vote supermajority in the Senate and allow the GOP to block legislation with filibusters.
After negotiating with Democratic congressional leaders on the bill until nearly 1 a.m. Friday, Obama decided to travel to Massachusetts on Sunday to campaign for the Democratic candidate, state attorney general Martha Coakley, whose once-wide lead over Republican state senator Scott Brown has evaporated in recent polls.
Obama also recorded an automated “robo-call” to urge Massachusetts voters to support the Democrat, and he cut a Web video with the same message.
The president’s actions were a clear sign of the alarm spreading among Democrats over their prospects in the race. “If Scott Brown wins, it’ll kill the health bill,” Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) bluntly told reporters before heading to his home state to campaign for Coakley.
Money from labor unions and business interests flooded into Massachusetts, and activists on both sides heard appeals that they volunteer for the competing campaigns. “Every able-bodied Democrat who can be out there in wintertime is up there campaigning,” said Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.).
Speculation swirled in Democratic circles about what would happen to the health legislation if Brown won. Congress could rush to pass the bill before the results were certified and the Republican was sworn in–or, after he was seated, the bill could reach Obama’s desk if the House agreed to pass, unchanged, the version of the bill already approved by the Senate.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Friday dismissed reports that leaders were speeding the health negotiations out of fear of losing the Massachusetts seat. But the Senate race still loomed when former President Bill Clinton addressed a meeting of House Democrats and tried to buck up the lawmakers.
Clinton, who saw his own healthcare campaign collapse in 1994 just before Democrats lost control of Congress, exorted the lawmakers to help get out the vote next Tuesday.
The special election in Massachusetts is the opening act of a year-long political drama leading to the 2010 midterms.
Republicans are casting the midterm elections as a referendum on Obama’s agenda, especially on the health care legislation. Democrats, by contrast, are trying to cast the elections as a choice between the two parties and two agendas, with Republicans as the guardians of an unpopular status quo.
Those dueling strategies were on display in both Washington and Massachusetts this week as Obama proposed a new tax on big financial institutions, designed to recoup the taxpayer bailout money.
In Massachusetts, Coakley immediately backed the idea and challenged Brown to do the same, asking whether he stood with the banks or the taxpayers. Brown opposed the bank tax as a misguided economic policy in the middle of a recession.
“Raising taxes will kill jobs,” Brown’s campaign said in a statement.
Vice President Joe Biden, in a mass email on Friday criticizing Brown, illustrated how Democrats will try to turn the coming elections into a choice between the parties rather than focus solely on Obama.
“Given a perfect opportunity to show where his loyalties lie–with working families in Massachusetts or with the bankers on Wall Street who helped lead us into the mess we’re in–guess who he chose?” Biden wrote of Brown.
Drawing a bright line on health care, the conservative Club for Growth is asking Republican candidates to pledge to seek repeal of any health care bill Obama signs into law. Democrats have seized on that idea, as well, to draw distinctions with GOP policy prescriptions.
“What are they going to say, ‘Well, you know the old system really worked well; let’s go back to the way it was,” Obama told House Democrats in a meeting Thursday.
“I’ll be out there waging a great campaign from one end of the country to the other, telling Americans with insurance or without what they stand to gain.”
Republicans sought to turn the spotlight on Obama, whose handling of health care is drawing low approval ratings in public opinion surveys.
Brian Walsh, spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said that Coakley’s problems in Massachusetts “are a direct result of her decision to embrace the Democrats’ massive health care bill and tax-and-spend agenda.”
The health bill continued to command Obama’s attention Friday, as congressional Democratic leaders came to the White House for the fourth straight day to hammer out a compromise.
A big obstacle had been surmounted Thursday, when labor union leaders and the White House reached an agreement on taxing high-cost health plans. Unions had initially opposed the tax.
Read the original article from Tribune News Services.
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