"Elections don't matter!" conservatives have long groused. "No matter who you vote for, things never change."
Well, we may have an exception here.
Scott Brown told Massachusetts' voters if they elected him to what David Gergen calls "the Kennedy seat" in the Senate, he would go to Washington and run a sword through Obamacare.
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Thirty-six hours after Brown's triumph, a disconsolate Nancy Pelosi emerged from the House Democratic caucus to announce that the votes were not there to pass a bill that had, on Christmas Eve, gotten 60 votes in the Senate.
A 78-seat Democratic margin is apparently insufficient to save a health care reform bill that is the highest priority of a Democratic president elected just a year go.
What argument is then left for Democratic control of Congress?
The shock wave from Brown's victory also appears to have killed cap-and-trade and immigration reform. Democrats are in open flight.
For what Massachusetts revealed is that this Congress, where Democrats still hold 59 percent of the Senate and 59 percent of all House seats, is no longer representative of America, if ever it was.
We have a center-left Congress imposing a minority ideology on a center-right country.
Obama has gotten the message. Thursday, doing a passable imitation of William Jennings Bryan, he ripped the Wall Street banks and endorsed "the Volcker Rule" to force Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase to divest themselves of their hedge funds and stock-trading operations, or lose their protections as banks.
Panic is also evident in Harry Reid's caucus, where the Brown victory put in sudden doubt Obama's nomination of Ben Bernanke to a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve. Sens. Russ Feingold and Barbara Boxer immediately bailed on Bernanke, as has Sen. McCain.
Liberals are asking why they should go to the wall to confer a second terms on a Fed chairman appointed by George W. Bush.
Reacting to the president's attack on the Street and the sudden peril to Bernanke's reappointment, the Dow went into a three-day dive that wiped out 5 percent of its value. Should Bernanke be rejected, it is said, the effect on Europe's markets will be like that on Europe's monarchs when news arrived that Louis XVI had gone to the guillotine.
"Chairman Bernanke helped the president ... steer through some very turbulent times and rough waters," said the White House Monday.