Reuters

POLITICAL upsets don't get much more embarrassing than the one delivered by the voters of Massachusetts on January 19th, just in time to ruin Barack Obama's first anniversary in the White House. To lose, on a 43-point swing, a Senate seat that has been in Democratic hands since 1953 takes some doing, even in the teeth of the worst recession since the 1930s (see article). Nor has it come in isolation; last November the Democrats managed to lose the governor's race in supposedly rock-solid New Jersey, as well as the one in Virginia, the state that symbolised the breadth of Mr Obama's appeal in the 2008 election. A succession of Democratic senators and representatives have decided to retire rather than face the voters in this year's mid-terms.

Mr Obama's popularity has fallen faster than that of any post-war president bar Gerald Ford. Independents are running from him as fast as their legs will carry them: in Massachusetts they voted Republican by almost three to one. Mr Obama's personal intervention there was as ineffectual as his two forays to Copenhagen. His agenda has been dealt a mighty blow. So where does he go from here?

Diagnosing what is going wrong is easier than figuring out how to fix it, because voters' concerns are contradictory. Clearly Mr Obama's health-care proposals are one problem. Most voters are happy with their health coverage, and are not in a mood to pay more in taxes or see their benefits restricted in order to help out the disadvantaged minority; and the bill that has now been thrown into confusion (see article), with its many flaws and shady giveaways, is a much harder sell than it should have been. A bigger problem, connected to the first, is the exploding government deficit, which an expensive health-reform plan only makes worse. Hence the spectacular rise of the “tea-party” movement, an alliance of ordinary people who are spooked by the huge amount of debt that is being racked up on Mr Obama's watch. For Democrats to deride such people as “tea-baggers”, a term referring to a sexual practice involving testicles, is political stupidity of a high order. Instead, Mr Obama urgently needs to make deficit-reduction one of the dominant themes of his fightback. He can do so in his state-of-the-union message on January 27th.

The problem is that the other big theme of his speech will have to be jobs. Though the economy is technically out of recession, it does not feel that way to a lot of voters. Unemployment is stuck at 10%; and if you add to that the number of people who are working part-time because they cannot get a full-time job, as well as those who have simply given up looking, you reach a figure of around 17%. The proportion of long-term unemployed is at its highest since the government started collecting the statistic in 1948. The terrible fear is that the recovery will be long, slow and jobless. The greatest challenge he now faces is explaining how he plans to tackle these problems without inflating the deficit even more than he already has.

Time for a rethink

One thing, though, is clear. The brief era in which the Democrats felt they could push through anything they wanted, courtesy of their thumping majorities in the House and the Senate and their occupancy of the White House, is over. Once Scott Brown is seated in the Senate, Mr Obama will lose his supermajority there, so a determined opposition (which this one certainly seems to be) will be able to block anything it wants to. Making deals with the Republicans once again becomes a necessity, not a luxury. That should not be a disaster; most presidents have to govern with far fewer than 60 Senate votes.

It is not obvious, though, that the Olympian Mr Obama knows how to do this, despite all his fine words along the campaign trail about “a new politics”. What he now has to understand is that he is in a weak position: he needs the Republicans more than they need him. To get what he wants, he will have to learn to give them much more of what they want. For instance, he could now offer the Republicans tort reform and genuine cost-control to bring them on board for a slimmed-down health bill: that might be an offer they could not refuse. Likewise, any hope of getting a climate-change bill through Congress will probably have to involve more nuclear power.

Bill Clinton grasped all this after the disaster of 1994, when the Republicans took back Congress; the result was a stream of good laws that outraged many leftish Democrats, from welfare reform to free-trade deals to deficit-reduction. Mr Clinton won an easy re-election and his presidency, despite his own best efforts to destroy it, was a pretty successful one. Mr Obama, who is now faced with the possibility of a similar electoral catastrophe, needs to copy the great triangulator.