The plethora of gubernatorial candidates vying for the Blaine House this year would do well to look at the results of Tuesday’s special US Senate election in Massachusetts. In particular, the eventual winner in November should understand that long after the campaign has ended and the votes have been tallied on election day, a significant amount of effort still needs to be devoted to reaching out to those who didn’t vote for you. President Obama and the leadership in Congress has yet to learn this lesson.

The biggest fallacy after any Presidential election is to assume that the winner has a mandate from the people. When voter turnout is barely above 50% and the winner barely earns 50% of that 50%, how does the math result in a mandate? You don’t have to be a CPA (even though I happen to be one) to conclude that 50% of 50% is only 25%, which means that the other 75% of eligible voters are either vehemently against you or, at best, so apathetic about your platform that they did not even bother to vote. Is this a mandate?

House Speaker Pelosi seems to think so even in the aftermath of one of the biggest political upsets in recent history – the loss of the “Kennedy seat” to an unknown Republican in the special election held the day after, of all days, the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. “We’re right on course.” Regardless of what happens in Massachusetts, she said, “We will have a health care reform bill, and it will be soon.”

Can you believe this arrogance? Is House Speaker Pelosi living on the same planet? The Democrats lose a U.S. Senate seat that has been held in the Kennedy name for over 50 years and Speaker Pelosi has the gall to say “We’re right on course”? By the way, when I say the Senate seat was “held” in the Kennedy, I mean literally. When former Senator John F. Kennedy vacated the same seat in 1960 after being elected President, a close political ally of the Kennedys (Benjamin Smith) was appointed to the seat until President Kennedy’s younger brother was old enough to run for the seat in 1962. Senator Ted Kennedy won the special election in November, 1962 and was re-elected eight times, serving in the Senate for 47 years before his death on August 25, 2009.

Representative Steny Hoyer, a Democrat and House Majority Leader, seemed similarly aloof when he told reporters that “moving ahead on health care is essential,” and that passing a bill before Brown is sworn in would be feasible. Again, can you believe this arrogance? Even the Democratic Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley’s pollster, Celinda Lake, told CNN that Democrats need to wake up to the reality that Brown’s victory represents. “There is a wave here,” she said. “The first shore was New Jersey and Virginia, where the Democratic governors lost. The second was Massachusetts. It’s coming to the island now and Democrats better be ready.”

What happened yesterday in Massachusetts is simply a repeat of President Clinton’s health care debacle in 1993 when he thought he had a mandate. If anyone had less of a mandate after an election, it was President Clinton who only received 43% of the popular vote. In fact, one can argue very convincingly that the only reason President Clinton was elected in 1992 was because Ross Perot captured 19% of the popular vote. If a mere 300,000 of the 20 million Perot supporters (i.e., less than 2% of Perot’s supporters and less than three-tens of 1% of all voters) spread across ten states had cast their vote for Bush instead of Perot, Clinton would not have won. This razor thin margin of victory can hardly be considered a mandate for change. However, the Clintons approached their first year in office as if the American people had asked them to overhaul the healthcare system. The reaction from of the voters was a Republican landslide the next year during the mid-term elections of 1994. To this day many Democrats blame the Clintons for setting back the case for some form of universal healthcare by a decade or two.

It is worthy to note that Scott Brown, the Republican Senator who will inherit the Kennedy seat, did not attribute his victory to the Republican base. Instead, he recognized the role of the unaffiliated voter base in Massachusetts. “Tonight, the independent majority has delivered a great victory,” Brown said in his victory speech Tuesday night. “I will remember that while the honor is mine, this Senate seat belongs to no one person, no one political party, and as I said before and you heard it today, this is the people’s seat.” Senator-elect Brown will do well to remember this if he intends to seek re-election in 2012, the year when the late Senator Kennedy’s official term expires.

Will President Obama agree with Speaker Pelosi and House Majority Leader Hoyer that the Democrats are still “right on course” and that passing a bill before Brown is sworn in would be feasible? Let us hope not. Instead, President Obama should be listening to more sober thoughts being expressed within his party, including those of Jim Webb in Virginia. “It is vital that we restore the respect of the American people in our system of government and in our leaders,” Webb said in a statement. “To that end, I believe it would only be fair and prudent that we suspend further votes on health care legislation until Senator-elect Brown is seated.” Sounds like good advice to me.

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