The election of Republican candidate Scott Brown to the U. S. Senate seat in Massachusetts was one of the biggest upsets in American electoral history and one with enormous ramifications for national public policy and congressional politics. In winning the Senate seat long held by Sen. Edward

M. Kennedy in the very liberal state of Massachusetts, perhaps the bluest of the blue states, Brown not only became the first Republican to be elected to the Senate since 1972, but ended the yearlong super-majority that Democrats had held in the Senate.

While local factors always play a large role in congressional elections, and Brown’s Democratic opponent Martha Coakley can certainly be blamed for running a weak campaign, it is hard to interpret the election as other than a rejection of President Obama’s leadership and policies, particularly his health care proposal. The president’s campaigning for Coakley as well as both candidates’ campaign messages put the health care proposal at the center of the campaign.

The fact that voters in one of the most liberal states in the nation voted for the Republican should be read as a warning to Democrats in Washington that they need to seriously rethink the way in which they have been handling the issue. Earlier Republican victories in the New Jersey and Virginia governorship races, plus weak showings in early polls for other Democrats in next November’s midterm elections, only reinforce the message.

The Republicans’ victory in Massachusetts may also be interpreted as voter impatience with the weakness of the economic recovery from the recession that began in the last months of President George W. Bush’s second term. After a year in office, voters expected more of a turnaround in the economy. The most recent GDP figures put economic growth at only 2.2 percent and the unemployment rate at 10 percent. Obama’s approval rating now stands at about 50 percent, a decline of 15 points since he took office. His approval rating among political independents stands at about 45 percent.

The recession that was already under way when Obama took office may account for the current political situation in two ways. First, it takes longer than most people think to recover from a recession and presidents often take the blame for economic problems they inherited from their predecessor.

Obama is certainly not the first president to take the heat for inherited economic messes. President Ronald Reagan inherited an economy in recession from President Jimmy Carter. President Richard Nixon inherited an economy slipping into recession under President Lyndon Johnson, and President Dwight Eisenhower inherited an economic mess left to him by President Harry Truman. The public will cut a new president some slack, but not much. People expected results by now and many believe that the administration’s economic stimulus policies have not helped much at this point.

Second, the fact that the economy quite dramatically went into a tailspin during the 2008 presidential campaign may have played a larger role in the outcome of the 2008 election than many in the White House wanted to concede. Some Democrats read the election of Obama and his lengthy coattails in congressional elections as a turn to the left, a mandate for change in a much more liberal direction.

In fact, the 2008 election was substantially a very reluctant rejection of the performance of the Republican administration, but not of its values. For all of his faults as a presidential candidate, Sen. John McCain held a slight lead in the polls over Obama until the Wall Street meltdown crisis hit just six weeks before the November election. From 9/11 to being bogged down in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to the Hurricane Katrina recovery mess, voters had become crisis-weary. They wanted some smooth sailing. The Wall Street meltdown in the middle of the general election campaign was the last straw for many of them.

It is instructive to look at where the September change that put Obama in the lead came from. It came, not from Democrats, but from Republicans and independents. Bush’s approval rating among Republicans and independents dropped 16 and 12 points respectively from early September to mid October of 2008. At the same time, the small poll lead of McCain over Obama turned into a significant poll lead of Obama over McCain, and that is where the election ended.

Dissatisfaction with the Bush administration’s performance and frustration with crisis upon crisis was the foundation for Obama’s victory. Certainly he inspired millions of Democrats with his “change you can believe in” agenda and his soaring rhetoric, but this base of support was already enthusiastically behind him in early September. But that did not stop McCain from holding a lead over Obama in the weeks after the conventions.

The Wall Street meltdown made the difference in the election, and that was not a call to the social justice barricades of the political left. By misreading the 2008 election as a mandate for change in a very liberal direction, Obama and congressional Democrats seriously overplayed their hand, on no issue more than health care. The voters of Massachusetts sent them that message. If they do not heed the message, we may see angry voters across the nation casting a more emphatic message at the polls next November.

James E. Campbell is a professor and chairman of the Department of Political Science at the University at Buffalo.