QUESTION OF THE DAY: Is the Massachusetts Senate Race a National Referendum?

While the world has been focusing with heavy and hopeful hearts on the cataclysmic earthquake in Haiti, a special election to fill the senate seat left vacant with the passing of Senator Ted Kennedy last summer is suddenly upon us. The candidates are Massachusetts Attorney General Democratic candidate Martha Coakley and State Senator Republican candidate Scott Brown.

I follow politics religiously, but I have to admit this one did sneak up on me. While politics are still important news out of Haiti puts it all into perspective – at least for some of us. In conservative circles however it is all that is talked about. This race has become a bell weather race, a referendum against the Obama White House and against national health care reform. In his eerie tone deafness about the news of the day, conservative talk show host and Fox News anchor Sean Hannity says if Brown wins this seat it will be “a political earthquake” registering “9.1 on the Richter scale”.

It is common for the national parties to use a victory or a close defeat especially in a race where they are usually the underdog. This past November Democrats saw the victory in New York’s 23rd district, one that hasn’t been occupied by the party since the Reconstruction period, as a referendum against the Sarah Palin, the Rush Limbaugh, and the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party.

And now the tables have turned. Coakley, once thirty points ahead in the polls is now in a statistical dead heat against Brown. The question of whether this is a referendum against the Obama agenda notwithstanding, you have to wonder how does a liberal candidate in a liberal state running for the seat of a beloved late senator who put his opponents away with commanding leads watch such a comfortable advantage evaporate. Joan Vennochi of the Boston Globe puts it all into perspective on the Rachel Maddow Show:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

If anything this reveals that Ted Kennedy always took his senate seat, the Massechusetts voters, and his political opponents seriously. But now that the seat is in jeapordy of falling into Republican hands, especially when every vote counts as the president tries to pass health care reform and other key measures through a fragile super majority in the US Senate, Is Today’s Special Election in Massechusetts a National Referendum?