I’ve been giving it some thought, I think that Brown winning in Mass is going to be a good thing in the long run – it’s a wake up call early enough in the year that it will give Dems time to pull themselves together.  They’ve spent the last year screwing up, imagining a filibuster proof majority was the answer to their problems.  Coakley was a weak candidate, a bad choice, and Brown was a good candidate and ran a great campaign.  Barack Obama ran a great campaign in 2008 but he’s done a bad job governing.  There’s time to fix it.  On the Congressional side, the Dems have blundered repeatedly – maybe for all the right reasons but they’ve still blundered.  There’s plenty of time to fix things.

Pass the damn bill.  There’s no upside to not passing health care reform at this point and there’s nothing but downside to not passing it.  From where I sit, it’s pretty straightforward: pass the Senate bill then use reconciliation to push through a series of separate bills fixing the shortcomings of the Senate bill.  Getting the Progressive Caucus in either house to agree is going to be a challenge since they’ve been cut out of the process from day one.

Pass the damn bill.

Steve Benen has a piece at Washington Monthly pointing out what should be obvious: actual information about the health care reform being proposed increases support of the proposal:

So, what we have here is … a failure to communicate. Americans don’t like the proposal, until they learn what the proposal actually entails and realize the scare tactics aren’t true. (”Wait, you mean there are no death panels and this isn’t a government takeover? Well, in that case….”)

Benen refers to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll showing that after a year, Americans actually don’t know what’s being debated in DC.  The Republicans have spent a year running an aggressive misinformation campaign and Democrats for some reason were caught flat footed by that.  So, party leadership needs to put together a coordinated information campaign – the President, Speaker, Majority leader, various caucus heads working together.  The Blue Dogs are actually at biggest risk this year; many of them represent districts that lean Republican and they’ve actually been one of the bigger problems with health care reform this year.  They need to be part of a national campaign touting the improvements that will result from the bill and the fixes.

Benen concludes:

. . . what I’m suggesting is that they give success a chance. The polls are far more likely to recover if lawmakers do what they said they would do, pass the most important domestic policy legislation in generations, reap the rewards of a historic victory, and then get out there and sell their handiwork — making clear to the country that the scare tactics were wrong. Once the bill is signed, the media won’t just have a major signing ceremony to cover, but there will be plenty of reports about what the new law does and does not do — “How the new health care law affects you” — which would further help debunk the myths.

Van Hollen thinks the public has soured on the plan. There’s ample evidence to support that. But Americans feel a lot better about the plan when they learn what it is, and they’re far more likely to learn what it is if it passes.

Dems can either deliver or break their promise. They can either help Americans who need support or let them suffer. They can either help turn the polls around or watch them fall further. They can either prove their ability to govern or prove themselves inept. They can either satisfy the expectations of those who elected them or demoralize those who are counting on them. They can either watch the media cover their once-in-a-generation breakthrough or watch the media scrutinize a fiasco for the ages.

Andrew Sullivan has been doing a series of posts making the same point a lot of folks in the blogosphere have been making for a long time: fight for what you believe in.

Sullivan writes:

He must not just rally the House Dems, he must rally the country. He must bring us back in. And we must back him up. This is not just about a centrist comprehensive health reform bill. It is about defeating an entire brand of cowardly, cynical, spin cycle bullshit that has brought this country down and promoting an adult and reasonable discourse that grapples with our problems.

That’s what we elected him for. If he caves now, if he does not mount a huge effort to retain this bill, he will have surrendered on that critical ground. He will have lost his nerve. And if we cave now, all that work we did, all that energy, all that hope, will be squandered as the old politics gets its hands on our collective throats again.

I refuse to believe he has given up; and I refuse to believe we will. This moment is too important as a fulcrum on which this country’s future hangs for him or us to give up now. The polls show a divided country. At this point in the adminstrations of my idols, Reagan and Thatcher, the polls were overwhelmingly against them. They faced them down and won.

Mr President, fight. Show you’re a fighter. And start to enjoy it.

He also makes two interesting historical parallels:

Look: I’m now old enough to remember when both Thatcher and Reagan at this point in their terms of office were being written off as failures. At this point Thatcher’s ratings were much lower than Obama’s and Reagan’s were roughly where Obama’s are and sinking to 39 percent. But that’s exactly the moment when they became the leaders they were.

Reagan made some small adjustments but insisted in retaining his core message of change. Thatcher, embattled by the opposiiton and her own party and massive public opposition, gave her famous “The Lady’s Not For Turning” speech. It seemed madness to many at the time – political suicide.

It was, in fact, political salvation. Obama has been given a gift with the timing of the SOTU. It’s in his hands now. And the position of so many of us who supported his unlikely candidacy from the very beginning is getting be clearer and clearer.

Fight, Mr President. Fight.

Part of the problem is a fundamental question of personal style; most of the Democratic leadership is risk averse.  Nancy Pelosi isn’t afraid of a good fight and the White House and Senate have been holding her back.  The President is one of the most cautious politicians I think I’ve ever seen on the national stage.  Obama’s deliberative nature – dispassionate, controlled, restrained, careful – worked well in the primaries and general election; he seemed to never get upset or worried and it worked well.  In the last year, it’s worked against him.  While the Republicans and tea baggers have looked crazed, it’s been asymmetric – you don’t want to look crazy but you have to stand up for yourself.  The President needs to recalibrate his personal style and do it now – he needs to get aggressive about leading.

And they need to unleash Nancy Pelosi; she’s got a ridiculously safe seat; she can lead the kind of red-meat fight that’ll keep the base fired up (Republicans aren’t going to start hating her any more than they already do).  The President has the biggest megaphone in the country; he needs to start using it and using it to beat up the Republicans for standing in the way of helping Americans get access to health care.

The entire Democratic needs to do something they haven’t done in a while: unite against the Republicans and conservatives.