Apparently, one monkey really does stop the show

That is, if you believe the sensationalist media coverage of the Massachusetts Senate election results: Scott Brown's victory will deal a death blow to the healthcare legislation, cost the Democrats the midterm elections, force Obama out of the White House in 2012, and keep other minorities out for years to come.

Somehow the fate of progressive politics has come to rest on the bare shoulders of a former Cosmo centerfold model.

It is shocking and disheartening to see how quickly we can shift from celebrating MLK's promise and perseverance on January 18th to drowning in feelings of self-pity and defeat on the 19th.

Granted, the stakes of this election were high. With Brown's victory, the Democrats no longer have the supermajority necessary to break a filibuster in the Senate; Massachusetts will have its first Republican Senator in 30 years (the last being the progressive Republican Edward Brooke, the first African American elected to US Senate by popular vote); and Obama's path to achieving the goals on his agenda has become significantly more circuitous.

In reality, the election results present an opportunity for the Democratic Party to realign its goals with those of the populace. While health care reform remains top on the list of the Democratic agenda, voters are more concerned about unemployment. The general unemployment rate stands at 10 percent. Black unemployment, on the other hand, hovers around the 16 percent mark and is projected to reach 17.2 percent this year, a number dangerously close to the Great Depression unemployment rates. Blacks have been hit hardest by the economic downturn, according to The Washington Post, because we are disproportionately concentrated in the two fields hit hardest by the recession--construction and manufacturing.

If Democrats respond to the election results by turning their focus to job creation, they can save our jobs as well as their own. As much of the stimulus money is being used to rebuild infrastructure, the prospects for the construction and manufacturing industries--and thus, for black folks--are promising.

American voters have never had the best collective memory: We began blaming Obama for the economy one month after he was in office because we somehow forgot about the mess he inherited from Bush. We learned the hard way from W. that cutting taxes during war is not the most sound fiscal policy, yet when the Republican forerunners suggested the same half-baked plan during the 2008 presidential election many of us fell for it again. And now we are all too eager to run back to the chokehold of the party that used and abused us for 8 years because the Democrats did not immediately undo all the problems that the Republicans created.

I say all of this to say, last night's defeat was not necessarily an omen for the death and destruction of the Democratic Party. If the economy begins to rebound by the midterm elections, for better or worse, all will be forgotten and forgiven by the voters, and the show will go on as always, with or without the monkey.