Gerald Warner: Lights out as America gives Obama notice to quit

Exactly one year after his inauguration as President, the electorate of the most liberal state in the Union – the Kennedys' Camelot – served notice to quit on President Pantywaist, the busted flush. If Obama cannot hold Massachusetts, he has no prospect of winning any state in an election for a presidential second term. The Messiah is toast.

Last Tuesday's rout of the Democrats was neither surprising nor an isolated event. Back in November, in elections for state governor, the Democrats lost Virginia by 18 points and New Jersey by four points (after Obama had carried it by 16 points just one year earlier). That electoral tsunami had been preceded in September by the march of the Tea Party movement in Washington, which attracted two million protesters, according to ABC News, thus dwarfing the totemic crowd at Obama's inauguration, for which the highest estimate was 1.4 million.

Obama's honeymoon with the American public was one of the shortest in political history. There were two reasons for that. The first was that the extravagance of his hype was matched by the inadequacy of his performance. The second was that, harassed by recession, the US electorate – especially the section of it that is labelled 'Independent' – is fast-forwarding the political process to find a solution to its economic woes.

Voters are channel-hopping to find a programme, and the politicians to implement it, that will lift them out of recession. They have turned off from Obama because he is strictly mouth music and no substance. They enjoyed the Disney-style fairytale, with all the stardust, while they had leisure to wallow in it. Now they are in hard times and they are looking not for rhetoric but for rescue. It is a statistical fact that it was the Independents who handed Massachusetts to Scott Brown: there simply are not enough Republicans in the Bay State to deliver it.

On the foundation of this electoral fact, however, a dangerous myth is being propagated – dangerous for the Grand Old Party. It is true that Brown's campaign courted the disillusioned middle ground and seldom mentioned the name "Republican". That was a sensible strategy in an extremely liberal state. The swing-vote Independents were fiscally motivated: they worried about the cost of Obama's healthcare extravaganza, the Federal deficit and the prospect of "green" taxes. So they put both healthcare and cap-and-trade to the sword.

That was a conscious decision. The Massachusetts electors knew that their votes would destroy Obama's "super majority" in the Senate, thus dooming both the health and climate legislation, and they went determinedly ahead. If the most liberal state in the Union will not tolerate socialised medicine or green taxes, then those innovations are permanently off the agenda.

The dangerous myth, however, to which the Republicans must not succumb, is that the American right should "do a Dave" – in British Tory terms – and abandon their conservative stance on social policies. Scott Brown was on the liberal side on pro-life issues; but his election was morally defensible on the grounds that to get any kind of conservative elected in Massachusetts is a miracle of almost biblical proportions. Yet the exceptional nature of the Massachusetts situation is also the reason why it must not become a template for Republicans.

There is psephological evidence to support this: the substantial difference between the electorate that voted George W Bush into the White House on the first occasion and that which re-elected him. First time out, the cultural conservatives sat on their hands; the second time around, the Christian right came out to stop John Kerry. The GOP, over the next three years, will benefit from the adherence of many alarmed fiscal conservatives, on the Massachusetts model; but that will not sustain it if it loses its core vote.

Cultural conservatives detest Barack Obama as the personification of every evil they reprobate: abortion, same-sex marriage, political correctness, positive discrimination, feminism. To this a wider constituency adds fiscal irresponsibility, an aspiration to wealth redistribution rather than creation and a manic intent to squander $0.75 trillion of Joe Public's money on socialist projects. Obama's craven and discredited foreign policy has also provoked repugnance among Americans.

It is open season on this distasteful charlatan now. If the Republican party can hold together a coalition of cultural and fiscal conservatives – and, crucially, find a credible presidential candidate in 2012 – then the liberal nightmare that threatened to destabilise the most powerful nation on earth will be over within three years. America is an irreducibly conservative country: can it translate that instinct for self-preservation into a coherent programme for responsible governance?