When I opened my email this morning, I found dozens of emails analyzing the outcome of the Massachusetts Senate election, but most of them seemed to miss the boat. In a state where almost everyone already has health care, this election was about who ran the better campaign – NOT a mandate for giving up on America’s desperately needed health care reform.
The outcome of this election is about one side executing a better strategy than the other, plain and simple. The Democratic Party should have been on the ground on day one with all of the resources they could muster. If they thought this was a safe seat, they should have pushed for a landslide victory. I am really angry with them. It was not a general election where resources were splintered because they were running hundreds of campaigns across the country. We know how to do this – we know how to win elections. They didn’t do the hard work. Instead, they were comfortable, lazy and clearly absent. (Of course, they may have been a little busy with the business of running the country.) The Republicans, however, decided that even if they lost, but made the race close, then the left would turn on itself, convinced it was about health care and not about which side worked harder to get out more votes. Why do we constantly have to prove the right right?
In a special election, when such a small percentage of people vote, the outcome is always about how many doors were knocked, how many calls were made, how many voters were turned out on Election Day, and how many political operatives were on the ground. And which side were they working for.
Clearly the answer in Massachusetts was not enough Democrats and too many Republicans.
Now, the left is playing right into their hands and questioning moving forward on health care reform. Some people want to go back to the drawing board. Some people want to just raise questions. The bottom line is, we need this win. We need it for the 30,000,000 people who don’t have coverage today who can’t wait any longer. We need it to show that we are still a country that cares for and stands up for those who have less, rather than sit at our computers debating the details.
If the left hopes to have any chance at winning midterm elections and keeping President Obama in the White House, then we need to stay strong and move forward. If we back down now, we lose all momentum, we splinter apart and the Republicans come in and take over again.
Some people say that if we accept this health care reform now, we will never have another shot. I say the opposite is true. If we lose on health care now, we begin a snowball effect that puts the Republicans back in control. If we push forward, together, for this bill, we can come back again and make it better. We should be setting the terms of debate and telling legislators what we want them to work on, not letting our representatives dictate the terms.
But the final lesson here is that we need to stay mobilized and engaged. We can take nothing for granted.
Right now we are in a fight for our lives, the lives of our neighbors, communities, and our nation. And we just lost a really important battle merely because we were lazy, or maybe just not strategic. But, we can’t lose the bigger war. I’m committed to making sure that we win meaningful health care reform, and everyone who believes that health care is a right needs to keep fighting.