The Man Who Can Stop Obamacare — By: The Editors

The Democrats have gotten to the precipice -- to borrow President Obama’s word -- of victory on health-care reform for one reason above all others: 60 votes.

Their supermajority in the Senate empowered them to muscle through a sprawling mess of a bill by partisan fiat. If the ball had bounced the other way in a close race or two (or if Arlen Specter had felt more loyalty to his party of decades), the Democrats wouldn’t have gotten to 60. Once there, they were willing to resort to any expedient to stay at the magic number. After Ted Kennedy’s death last summer, the Massachusetts legislature rushed to change state election law to allow for an interim replacement in advance of a special election, explicitly to keep the Democrats at 60.

Now, the special election for the seat is less than two weeks away. It represents the only electoral threat to 60 that Democrats will face until November. Republican Scott Brown is mounting a surprisingly strong bid, trailing Massachusetts attorney general Martha Coakley by only 9 points in the latest Rasmussen poll. A state senator, Brown is running an anti-spending, anti-Washington campaign perfectly suited to the political moment. Should he win, it could make it all but impossible for Harry Reid to get 60 votes for the current version of Obamacare -- and he’ll almost certainly need to meet that threshold at least one more time. In short, Scott Brown is the man who could pull the brake on this train right before it gets fully out of the station.

Of course, his chances of winning in Massachusetts, in a race for Ted Kennedy’s old seat, are somewhere on the continuum between unlikely and unthinkable. Democrats have more than a million-voter edge over Republicans in registration, and Coakley’s name ID is higher and her bank account flusher. As of mid-November, she had nearly $2 million left to spend to Brown’s $250,000. In short, it’s David versus Goliath, except even David didn’t have to worry about getting overwhelmed by paid advertising.

Yet it’s still possible Brown could pull off a stunning upset. Since Reid managed to get the health bill through the Senate, we’ve heard the plaint of so many conservatives, “Is this really happening? Is there any way we can still stop it?” Anyone who has asked those questions in recent weeks should go to Scott Brown’s website and contribute, eroding at least one of Coakley’s key advantages. We don’t ordinarily make fundraising pitches for candidates, but these are special circumstances. The way the health-care debate is projecting right now, the Democrats will get their bill and Republicans will exact their retribution in the fall. It’d be even better if retribution arrived early this year.