President Obama made a last-ditch bid last night to save Edward Kennedy’s old US Senate seat for the Democrats in a high-stakes by-election that could imperil US healthcare reform.
Mr Obama changed his weekend plans to dash to Massachusetts to campaign for Martha Coakley, the Democratic candidate in the vote on Tuesday. The president was repeatedly interrupted by hecklers as he spoke to a crowd at Boston’s Northeastern University.
“People are frustrated and they are angry and they have every right to be. I understand,” Mr Obama said. “The thing is this: You know how politics is. At times like these there are always some who are eager to exploit that pain and anger to score a few political points… Unfortunately, we are seeing some of that politics in Massachusetts today.”
Mr Obama stressed how crucial the election was to his own legislative programme. “We know that on many of the major questions of our day, a lot of these measures are going to rest on one vote in the US Senate. That is why the opponents of change and progress are pouring money into the commonwealth (of Massachusetts) in the hope of promoting gridlock and failure. They want to keep things just as they are,” he said.
Democrats are panicked that Ms Coakley, a former prosecutor who made her name pursuing the British nanny Louise Woodward in a notorious 1997 baby-shaking case, could lose what they assumed was a safe seat in the most liberal state in America.
Defeat would deprive the Democrats of the 60th vote in the US Senate that they need to overcome a Republican filibuster on healthcare reform. The symbolism is huge because healthcare reform was Senator Kennedy’s signature issue before his death from brain cancer on August 25.
Scott Brown, the Republican candidate, has vowed to vote against the Democrats’ health-care reform package if he wins the by-election. “If Scott Brown wins, it’ll kill the health bill,” said Barney Frank, a Democratic Congressman from Massachusetts.
The Democrats have held the Massachusetts seat since 1952 when John Fitzgerald Kennedy won it – before Ms Coakley was born. Edward Kennedy won the seat in 1962, a year after his brother vacated it to become president.
The last time Massachusetts elected a Republican to its other US Senate seat was in 1972.In the 2008 presidential election, Mr Obama won the state by a crushing 26 percentage points. Ms Coakley, now the state attorney-general, appeared to be coasting to victory after winning a huge majority in the four-way Democratic primary election.
But Mr Brown, 50, a state senator, has ridden a wave of popular anger over healthcare reform, taxes and government spending to pull neck-and-neck in some polls. The lawyer, former model and US Army National Guard officer challenged Ms Coakley in a televised debate: “It’s not the Kennedys’ seat, it’s not the Democrats’ seat, it’s the people’s seat,” he said.
Big-name Democrats have flocked to help Ms Coakley campaign. Bill Clinton took time out from his duties as the UN special envoy on quake-ravaged Haiti to join the Democratic candidate at a rally on Friday. Sen. Kennedy’s widow, Vicki, has filmed a televison ad for Ms Coakley and campaigned with her on Saturday.
If Mr Brown pulls off an upset win, Democrats may try ram through health-care reform in a controversial move before he could be seated in the US Senate, with the House of Representatives simply adopting the Senate version of the huge bill.
William Galvin, a Democrat who serves as Massachusetts secretary of state, the state’s top election official, has suggested that certifying the by-election results could take weeks.Until the winner is certified, the Senate seat is held by the interim senator, Paul Kirk, a Democrat who has said he will vote for health-care reform.
