As I was saying on YouTube. This is not just a Tea Party win.
He also won big on national security: 67 percent to Coakley's 29 percent. Two themes stand out. One is that President Obama's efforts to befriend old enemies yielded little and conveyed a sense of weakness and equivocation. Iran is still building its nuclear capacity, insulting the U.S. and killing protesters. Venezuela is still nationalizing its economy and rallying the Latin American left. Russia is still bullying its neighbors and declining into a thuggish autocracy. North Korea is still North Korea. Obama's biggest foreign policy initiative, his conciliatory speech in Cairo, had little impact in the Muslim world.
With so few successes, the Obama administration must now re-evaluate its generous, multilateral diplomacy toward adversaries. That, at least, is one message from Massachusetts.
Another is that voters are unhappy with the administration's approach to terrorism, which downplays the threat and treats it mainly as a law-enforcement issue. The key officials here are Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security, and Attorney General Eric Holder. They have failed to convince the public that their approach is effective, or well executed.
Again, Brown capitalized.
In her initial testimony before Congress, Napolitano refused even to utter the word "terrorism." Instead, she used the Orwellian term "man-made disaster." Her response to the attempted Christmas Day bombing was a man-made disaster of its own. The president had to take back her inane statement that the airline safety system had worked well. Equally disturbing, congressional testimony this week showed that, eight years after 9/11, the U.S. still has no procedures to deal with a failed bomber. All the intelligence agencies say they were ignored when the Northwest Airlines flight landed in Detroit, even though it was clear the bomber was a foreign national bent on mass murder. The Justice Department won't say who decided to treat him like an ordinary criminal, or why. The choice was similar to Holder's decision on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, an al-Qaida leader captured on a foreign battlefield. In a fumbling appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the attorney general could cite no precedent for granting him a jury trial.
Scott Brown saw no precedent, and no excuse, either. "Our Constitution and laws exist to protect this nation," he said bluntly during a campaign appearance. "They do not grant rights and privileges to enemies in wartime. In dealing with terrorists, our tax dollars should pay for weapons to stop them, not lawyers to defend them."
Brown won convincingly on that, and on pledges to lower taxes and restrain Washington's grand plans. All these are national issues. That should deeply worry Democrats. Charles Lipson teaches political science at the University of Chicago.
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