TO state the obvious, the Massachusetts vote to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat is a game-changer.  It emboldens Republicans and shakes the very ground Democrats stand on.

When all the handwringing and finger-pointing are done – and they are coming in a tsunami force wave at this writing – there will remain critical questions and options that must be dealt with.  I suggest the dealing start immediately, regardless what Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says about “not rushing into anything.”  Harry, it’s time to get a move on.

First, the questions.

1.  The game changed, but did the political landscape on which that game is played also change?  I think not.  That landscape remains much as it was before.  It’s the same terrain that expelled the Bushies and facilitated Obama’s rise, namely a land of angered, exasperated folks, mostly inhabiting the middle ground of the American electorate, those moderate Democrats (there are precious few moderate Republicans left) and independents who flocked back to the Democratic Party in 2006 and 2008.

The anger that put the Democrats on top now threatens to dethrone them.  Uninformed anger, but anger nevertheless. .  The pollsters tell us so.  Even the White House agrees.  The usual diagnosis is that folks are angry because Obama didn’t wave his magic wand over the debacle known as the Bush economy, didn’t kiss the boo-boos and make them all go away in his first year.

Republicans crow that it’s Obama’s “socialist” agenda that he pushed over the will of the people, especially health care reform.  Democrats counter that it’s still about the economy, stupid.  I’m inclined to think it’s about both, but not in any way the Republican gloating heads would have us believe.

Clearly it’s about jobs – the economy just isn’t bouncing back as fast as everyone wants it to.  Even Obama says he’s frustrated by that.  But anyone who was paying attention in 2008 must have heard him say repeatedly that both political reform and reigniting the economy would be difficult.  He said it would be “a long hard slog.”  How soon they forget in their zeal for instant results.

2.  “Anger” over the figment of “socialized” health care reform is a different matter.  Is it because Obama reached too far or because he didn’t reach far enough and push hard enough? 

My guess is that, again, it’s a mix of both and, possibly, more the latter than the former.  Isn’t it possible the pollsters are asking the right question in the wrong way?  If I were asked whether I supported the emerging health plan, I’d have to say my support is pretty weak, but yes, I still support it.  Others less inclined to think something is better than nothing may have fallen by the wayside and now tell pollsters they oppose the plan because it doesn’t do enough.

Consider the results of a poll commissioned by Democracy for America, Howard Dean’s grass roots organization, immediately after the Massachusetts election.  Three-fifths of former Obama voters who voted for Republican Scott Brown said the Senate’s health bill “doesn’t go far enough.”  So do six out of seven Obama voters who stayed home in the special Senate election.  And 80 percent of all Massachusetts voters still want a public healthcare option.  Those numbers are unambiguous.  If they were sending a message about healthcare at all, most voters weren’t rejecting reform as too much too soon but too little too late.

3.  Are Republican pundits and politicians lumping those dissatisfied progressive voters in with their own minions, all those misinformed and frightened middle and working class Tea Partiers and the chieftains of the corporate-insurance complex that misinformed them,  those who think the plan is bad because it goes too far, or is going to cost them too much and take away the health care they now have, or that it’s just plain bad policy for the U.S. government to rescue millions of uninsured Americans from the disaster that awaits them one serious illness away?  I think they are. 

Drawing any such conclusion about health care reform from the Massachusetts vote is patently wrongheaded.  Yes, voters aren’t happy with the health reform sausage they’re being asked to swallow, but more of them don’t like it because it does too little.

4.  Is it too late to change strategies?  I think not.  Strategically, Obama’s big mistake was that he kept going back to the same wallflower to ask her to dance, despite her repeated rejections.  She wouldn’t dance.  He should have stopped asking long ago, when it became obvious that when she said “No,” she meant it.  So stop asking.  Forget the phantom of bipartisanship.

Had he been more aggressive, had he herded all those stray cats in the Democratic Party with a bit more LBJ-style arm-twisting and pushed the reforms through before the Republicans’ disinformation campaign went into full swing last August, we’d have been done with the endless debate by now and zeroed in on economic relief and job creation, addressing most people’s primary concerns.  The anger and exasperation would have evaporated.

He also needed to use his bully pulpit to repeatedly remind voters of what he did accomplish in one year.  Just pulling the nation and world back from the precipice of economic collapse was a Herculean feat.  It’s late in the game, but better late than never.

Given the treacherous terrain, what options do Democrats have in Congress?  I submit the one option they should reject immediately is the one Reid and company seem to be deciding on:  panicky retrenchment.  I can think of three other options I’d rather see, singly or in combination:

1.  Nose-holding.  With healthcare reform, House Democrats should hold their collective nose and approve without change the Senate bill, sending it straight to Obama’s desk.  It would serve as a foundation upon which to build future reforms.  Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she doesn’t have the votes to do that.  Moderates want to hide behind nonexistent Republican skirts and liberals say the Senate bill doesn’t go far enough.  Both need some harsh lessons in political science: hold your nose and vote Aye.  House leaders need to show some moxie and whip the unruly into line.

2.  The future is now.  They could later – or immediately – start work on bills to right the Senate wrongs, for example by:  creating a public option in any form that can muster 50 Senate votes; readjusting health care subsidies; shifting the tax burden from workers to the wealthiest among us who have never paid their fair share of the nation’s health care bill.  Combined or singly, such revisions all affect the federal budget and could be rammed through the Senate via the 50-vote reconciliation process, if Senate Democrats would just get the backbone to do it, as Republicans did when they ran things.

3.  Playing chicken.  As soon as the Massachusetts results are certified, Republicans will have the 41 votes they need to filibuster to death everything Obama and the Democrats want to achieve.  They’ve certainly made it clear that’s their intention – to destroy the administration and assure a return to Republican misrule in 2012, if not this year.

When they and Little Joe Lieberman threaten to filibuster any part of the progressive agenda, Democrats should dare them to do it.  Make them stand on the Senate floor day and night reading the Bible, the dictionary, The New York Times Cook Book – anything they want, but make them do it in front of C-Span cameras so the whole world can witness their obstructionism for what it is.  Then simply outwait them.  My guess is they’ll get tired of the blowback and stop talking sooner or later; then the agenda can move forward.

There’s risk in all of these options, of course.  Republicans will wail that Democrats are subverting the democratic process (1) by not going through the routine conference committee process of sausage making; (2) by evading Senate rules with the reconciliation process, ignoring the fact that is precisely how Republicans enacted their big tax cuts for the wealthy; and (3) by making them actually filibuster and reveal their shamelessness, thereby destroying Senate “comity.”  (We can already hear Sen. John McCain gearing up to whimper about that.)  Excuse me, but Senate comity was annihilated by the Republican Party a long time ago.

Fine.  Take the risks.  Show some mettle.  Then get out your bullhorns and campaign like hell against the do-nothing party that won’t let you do the people’s work.

When Republicans held the levers of government, they demonstrated for all to see that they respected only the use of political muscle.  They bullied and rammed through budget-busting legislation, tax cuts, and largesse to their mega-wealthy cronies without a qualm.

Democrats, it’s time to learn from them.  Correction: it’s way past time.