It's really simple

Here we are, on the morning after Martha Coakley lost her bid to replace Ted Kennedy in the Senate, poised to "welcome" Rethuglican Senator-elect Scott Brown. One of the macro outcomes is Dems lost their supermajority in the Senate and now will have to contend with a cohesive, obstructionist minority with enough votes to prevent anything except their fascist agenda.

If, like me, you thought the Senate was the place where good policy went to die, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

The last several months have produced little short of dithering and delay on health care reform (HCR), arguably the centerpiece of the Dems' agenda. Except for Obama's inexplicable admonition to seek a bipartisan bill in the Senate, HCR could have been done before the August recess. They had the votes, the momentum and the opportunity, but it all was squandered.

Now, the focus on bipartisanship may mean all that effort will have been wasted. There are some paths to an HCR bill remaining, but all of them require Dems to forego some of their expressed priorities for the legislation while manipulating the process. It will require Dems to forge ahead as the majority party while the media and Rethuglicans wring their hands over the raw exercise of power.

Since the idea of Dems simultaneously bucking both the media and the opposition have proven rare since early 2009, I'm not optimistic. We'll see.

But as this process drags on, the HCR bill becomes more diluted and convoluted. All of this is happening in public, leaving even casual observers to conclude of the last 13 months that Dems aren't up to the task of governing. Since the Rethuglicans demonstrated their inability to govern over the preceding eight years, that kinda, sorta leaves us in a bad place.

Last night, a close friend expressed the optimistic view that Dems will eventually pull this out, their incompetence notwithstanding. I guess that depends on what your definition of "this" is. He also maintained the Dems collectively want to do the right thing and enact legislation embodying good policy, for the benefit of the citizens. I think it's all relative: More Dems want to do the good-policy thing than do Rethuglicans, but by no means do a majority of Dems feel that way. Thus, we get lousy outcomes.

My bottom line is that these outcomes -- which basically continue the status quo and prevent anything but progress in its smallest increments -- are what is desired by our elites. As a whole, these are smart people, even though they do things which appear often to be at odds with their expressed goals. Reduce all of these events -- the delays, the bipartisanship, Lieberman/Nelson, etc. -- to their simplest explanation, and we're left with this:

This is the outcome sought by those in positions of power. It's really that simple.

And, yes: We are that screwed.

DCr