Scott Brown Massachusetts Senate win is the day Obamacare died

WASHINGTON, Jan 20 (KUNA): Scott Brown Massachusetts Senate win is the day Obamacare died. President Barack Obama on Wednesday said his fellow Democrats should not try to "jam" health care legislation through Congress, but instead coalesce around parts of the bill that are popular with the public.

The day after a special U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts handed Republicans the power to end the 60-vote "super-majority" held by Democrats in the Senate for the past year, the President, in an interview on US television network ABC, said Congress must wait for Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown to take his oath of office before acting further on the controversial health care reform package.

Obama made that legislation his top domestic priority during his first year in office, but Congress has been unable to get the bill passed into law.

Robert Gibbs, speaking at a subsequent White House briefing on Wednesday, said health care reform was a priority for presidential candidate Obama in 2008, and "it is a priority now." "We are working through the best way forward, as the President continues his commitment to get health-care reform done," Gibbs said.

There are many paths forward on the issue, Gibbs said, "and I think we will get an opportunity in the coming hours and days to know exactly what that path is." Senior White House adviser David Axelrod, who did a round of interviews from the White House the morning after the Democratic election debacle in Massachusetts, said of the health care issue: "It is not an option simply to walk away from a problem that is only going to get worse." Addressing the political earthquake caused by the upset of the once-favored Democrat, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, by the little-known Brown, Gibbs said, "The anger and frustration in this country about where we are economically is something that we heard and saw last night in Massachusetts.

The President heard and saw it last month when he traveled to Pennsylvania. He will hear it (this week) in Ohio. We have heard it for several years." The anger and the frustration that the American people have "at the fact that a lot of work has been done, and they do not necessarily feel like their economic lives have progressed in the past year, is understandable," Gibbs said.

Obama will continue to focus on the economy and jobs, and "dealing with the problems that he felt and talked about during the (2008 presidential) campaign that existed, and have existed for quite some time, that we have not addressed, " Gibbs said.