The Brown Fallout - Part 2 (Obama's move)

Yesterday I postulated that there were a number of possible outcomes for 2010 as a result of the Brown win in Massachusetts. Other than discussion of my poor diagram-building computer skills, the post needs a revisit. Principally the revisit is needed because what I thought would take some time to start shaking out, is already underway.

The first steps are visible already. What is the President's course of action? Blame Bush and plow ahead. Never mind that it's been his economy for a year, or the voter backlash against his health care efforts. It's Bush's fault Brown won, let's just accept that as fact and move on.

Blame. There it is. And the continued effort? Courtesy of Gateway Pundit, via Drudge:

U.S. President Barack Obama will stick to his policy agenda despite his Democratic Party’s loss of a key Senate seat in a Massachusetts special election, a top White House aide said on Wednesday.

“We’ll have to think through this next year from the standpoint of tactics but in substance the mission can’t change,” Obama senior adviser David Axelrod told reporters.

Alright, so we know that we are the health care double down path. What's also clear, at least assuming that the Democrats are not being deceitful (a big premise to be sure, just ask people who believed Ben Nelson or Joe Lieberman that they would not support the legislation), then the Congress is not about to accept the Senate bill as is. And according to Obama (again, he's broken promises many times before) letting Senator Kirk vote in place of Brown is not an option either.

So we are going down the most likely path - Obama continues to push for reform and the Congress fights back. What does it mean for the country? Here are my predictions, and they are not all good.

Health care will not get done by November 2010. It's dead for now. That's good. This will allow President Obama an out on his promise and an excuse to turn his attention to the issue of unemployment. That's bad. It's bad because his solution will be another stimulus package, requiring more taxes and more spending and more debt. On top of which it won't solve anything short term - the previous stimulus was supposed to create government jobs. That's bad for Americans out of work. Luckily it's also bad for the Democrats, who will soon be out of work.

But another reason that's bad is because part of the Obama and Democrats' solution will be to re-approach the topic of green jobs. That idea right now is a sinkhole for money. It's not a smart investment in terms of payback or quick resolution of the energy problem or the job problem - it's just more dogma.

The President and the Democrats are in for a real shellacking if the economy doesn't turn around in spite of their feeble and misguided best efforts. If it doesn't, Congress will be Republican. If it does, there is a chance, combined with the cover that Brown offers the President with his base for not getting health care through in 2010, that Democrats might have their base fired up too and might be able to mitigate the losses the are bound to suffer.

Thee's a big difference between a 20 vote Republican takeover of 20 seats and 50 seats. The former is a nuisance to Democrats, the latter is a loss of domination and control. That layer of the tree diagram though is still far enough away that I'm not ready to make any predictions about the outcome.