A little-known Republican rode a wave of voter anger to a jaw-dropping upset victory last night for the Senate seat Ted Kennedy held in deep-blue Massachusetts — a debilitating defeat for President Obama a day before the first anniversary of his historic swearing in.
The win by GOPer Scott Brown over Martha Coakley deprived the Democrats of their crucial 60th Senate vote to push the health-care plan through over Republican objections.
And it terrified the White House and already jittery Democrats about their prospects in the fall, when the congressional midterm elections take place in far less liberal states.
With 100 percent of precincts reporting, Brown had 52 percent of the votes to Coakley’s 47 percent.
Brown, a conservative who had appealed to the Tea Party movement, giddily mocked Obama as he tossed red meat to the Republican crowd.
“I’m nobody’s senator but yours!” he said, as the crowd cried out “41! 41!” – over his stump pledge to be the 41st vote killing the health-care bill — and chanted “Seat him now!”
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Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid said last night Brown would be seated quickly, cutting off a brewing controversy.
Brown jabbed at the president for making an “emergency landing” in Boston last weekend in an eleventh-hour bid to shore up Coakley.
The new senator hit his stump points hard, saying, “Voters do not want the trillion-dollar health-care bill that is being forced on the American people.”
And Brown told the crowd that during a congratulatory phone call from Obama, he’d offered to bring his dusty black pickup truck to DC to show to the president, after Obama had mocked the ride over the weekend.
A “heartbroken” Coakley said she’d gotten a call from Obama shortly after she conceded to Brown, in which the president said, “We can’t win them all.”
Gleeful Republicans said the race was a referendum on Obama.
“Democrats nationwide should be on notice,” the National Republican Senatorial Committee said in a statement, while possible 2012 presidential hopeful Sarah Palin called it a “bellwether.”
And nervous Dems tried to figure out how to respond, with Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee head Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey saying, “I have no interest in sugar-coating what happened . . . there is a lot of anxiety in the country right now.” Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) said, “The country is speaking to us, and we will hear them in the agenda we pursue over the next election.”
Brown’s win was propelled by a remarkably high voter turnout for a special election amid winter weather and snowfall in much of the state.
More than 2 million people cast ballots in the contest to replace Kennedy, who died last summer after serving 47 years in the Senate. He had said he was thrilled his lifelong goal of universal health care might happen soon.
Instead, Brown campaigned on a vow to be the 41st Senate vote against the bill — and voters angry over jobless rates, high taxes and the sprawl of the government agenda delivered him.
No GOPer had been elected to the Senate from the Bay State since 1972.
The race between Coakley, the state attorney general, and Brown, a state senator, was supposed to be a yawner of a special election.
But Coakley ran what was widely slammed as a lackluster effort, and the bottom dropped out on her poll numbers in the past few weeks.
The finger-pointing among Democrats exploded into full view yesterday even before the polls closed, with the White House putting the blame on the Coakley campaign in comments from senior Obama adviser David Axelrod and press secretary Robert Gibbs.
Obama was “surprised and frustrated . . . not pleased” by the race, said Gibbs. But Team Coakley leaked a memo blaming the Democratic National Committee and Beltway Dems for the loss.
“DNC and other Dem organizations did not engage until the week before the election, much too late to aid the Coakley campaign,” read a memo from a campaign adviser.