I wish I could say that the special election of Scott Brown to the Senate last night came as any kind of surprise to me. I watched the news last night, dumbly hopeful that somehow the people of Massachusetts would go with the lesser of three evils (counting the Libertarian candidate), but hearing the tales of his closing the gap with Martha Coakely so quickly in the past couple of weeks, and the repeated missteps of the Coakely campaign, this result was pretty much a given three or four days before the election. The fact that the teabaggers could get a candidate into the Senate in less than a year, while the Green Party has still yet to get anyone to Congress, is the kind of thing that makes me wish I didn’t hate the cold so much, because Canada and Western Europe are looking more and more like a better fit for me and my politics.

I spent the night listening to the usual Democratic talking heads making excuses about how elections always trend against the party in the executive office, and how voters see the ruling party as the status quo, and all of that other gobbledybook. They tried to downplay the numerical significance of losing just one Senate seat when the Democrats still command such a huge lead, totally overlooking the symbolic value of losing the Kennedy seat less than a year after his death, as if their caving in on health care wasn’t making Teddy spin in his grave enough. Now he’s spinning so much he could probably power all the streetlights in Hyannis Port if you hooked them up to his corpse. As usual, the Republicans are reacting even more stupidly, claiming a statewide vote somehow counts as a national referendum and trying to get Obama to surrender the presidency to Rush Limbaugh because “obviously” he is now a total and complete failure.

If Obama and the Democrats continue on their present course, though, a winning Limbaugh-Coulter ticket (or Palin-Beck or O’Reilly-Hannity or what have you) is becoming more and more of a probability. The Coakley campaign encapsulated perfectly what the Green Party has been saying about Democrats for years now: that they think if they’re one step to the left of the most moderate Republican, that they’re automatically entitled to the votes of everyone to the left of them. I don’t know if what Coakley and her staff did should even be called a campaign, given how they took so much time off, seemingly thinking that the seat was theirs, that there was no way the voters of Massachusetts would vote for anyone other than a Democrat. From health care to gays in the military to a host of other issues, Obama and the Democratic Congress have been either putting off meaningful change or cutting it short entirely, under the same assumption that anyone to their left is somehow obligated to vote for them. It has now cost them one Senate seat, and it’s likely not going to be the last.

The irony in all of this is that this past month I’ve been reading The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience, in which author Kirstin Downey shows that, although fraught with poor compromises of its own, FDR and Perkins managed to push through grand, wide-ranging social reforms, reforms that, try as they may, Republicans have still yet to take off the books. If Republicans truly believed that a national health care program would be bad for the nation, they wouldn’t be so eager to can it. As with New Deal social reforms, and as with the civil rights advances of the last fifty years, once these programmes are in place, Republicans know that there is no way to kill them because the American people will realize how beneficial they are, and that despite their costs, they will want to keep them in place because they appeal to our better nature, a nature Republicans and the Religious Right spend the majority of their time trying to crush so their donors and benefactors can make more money. Even with majorities in both houses of Congress that rubber-stamped almost everything he did, Dubya couldn’t spend his so-called “political capital” from his 2004 election to privatize Social Security. Why Democrats cannot take a lesson from this example both eludes and frustrates me.

If yesterday’s election shows anything, it is that fractured as they may be with the whole Tea Party thing, the right-wing in this country is energized, and the left-wing is hopelessly though justly apathetic. If the Democrats want to minimize the chances of another 1994 Republican landslide, this is the time they need to get tough and start behaving like liberals. Don’t Ask Don’t Tell should have been stopped by executive order as soon as Obama took office, and not only does he need to end the discriminatory policy now, but he needs to rehire all the servicepeople thrown out of the military due to this policy in his presidency, if not all of them altogether. Our operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen would immediately benefit from aignificant influx of Arabic translators. Given that Brown’s election puts a likely end to the health care bill in its present state, congressional Democrats need to use every tool at their disposal — including budget reconciliation — to push through as much reform as they can get with 218 votes in the House and fifty-one in the Senate, hopefully including a public plan. They need to raise taxes on upper-class individuals and corporations, and they need to do so without apology.

There may be too many historical forces at work to prevent Democrats from losses in the midterms, but if they want to at least stem those losses, they need to give their base more reason to vote Democratic. I wish I could say they’ll vote Green instead, but if history has shown anything, it’s that they’ll stay at home. If that happens this year, then next year we may have a Tea Party Congress on our hands, and Goddess help us all if that should happen.