Essentially, the democrats in the Senate do not believe they can pass the legislation without 60 seats, which would prevent Republicans from filibustering.
No matter what you're feelings are about health care reform, it has to seem odd for anyone that a political party cannot work with a 18-seat majority.
As Jon Stewart of The Daily Show acknowledges (eventually) in the following clip from Monday night, President George Bush never had more than a nine-seat majority, yet passed at least 22 pieces of legistlation, including the PATRIOT and Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Acts.
Here's what the Wall Street Journal had to say on its front pages today:
Health Care, Jobs Lay Behind Stunning Upset Economy, Health Turned Tables
The Democrats' stunning loss of Ted Kennedy's old Senate seat raises a host of intriguing questions, but they can be boiled down to one: How did it come to this—in Massachusetts of all places?
There's no simple answer, of course, because the Massachusetts saga, like so much of what has happened over the past two years, suggests that strange and unpredictable currents continue to run through America's political waters.
But much of the explanation of Republicans' Massachusetts miracle surely lies in two giant factors: an economy that is largely beyond Democrats' control, and a failure to close out a health-care debate that certainly has been within their control. Those two dominant forces were compounded by some underappreciated local factors, and garden-variety campaign stumbles by failed Democratic candidate Martha Coakley.
Political analyses often walk straight past the most obvious answer on their way to more exotic ones, and that's a danger here. Any analysis has to start with the simple fact that the economy is in bad shape—and is widely seen as being in even worse shape than it probably is. Democrats, as the party in power, are paying a huge price for that. Significantly, the Massachusetts campaign may come to represent the event that showed their ability to lay the blame on the previous Republican administration is nearing its end.
"In a different political environment, this race wouldn't even have been competitive," said Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster who surveyed Massachusetts for his party.
It's hard for voters to feel good about the party in power amid the pain of 10% official unemployment, and an effective jobless rate (counting those who have given up looking) that may be closer to 17%.
Worse for Democrats, the process of fighting back against those kinds of economic problems has prompted a revving up of the government machinery, which has played into a populist impulse among independent voters, from Massachusetts to California, that the government was simply getting more expensive while its citizens were forced to cut back in their own lives.
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