The Democrats were blindsided yesterday in Massachusetts, and they have nobody to blame but themselves. They have badly misjudged the mood of the American people for months, stringing out the health care debate ad infinitum while ignoring the growing anger over the slow pace of the recovery, the loss of jobs, and the obscene unfairness of the Wall Street bonuses. I don’t know what happens to people once they get to Washington, but they seem to lose the ability to understand anything that goes on outside the beltway. Health care reform is a must, but the long dither and the increasing complexity of the bill, not to mention the pork, special favors and lack of cost controls in the current bill have made it unpopular with the public. I don’t know that people actually oppose the bill so much as they have come to view the single-minded attention to it as an unwelcome distraction from more important things–namely easing the economic pain of so many millions.

The irony of the two-party system is that if the electorate has buyer’s remorse, they have only one place to go–back to the party that created so many of the problems to begin with. The Republicans smell blood in the water, but they shouldn’t be complacent, either. So far they’ve offered nothing but total opposition to anything Obama proposes. It’s still a long way to November, and the mood could shift again if they have no program other than more of the same.