Not living in Massachusetts, I find it hard to say. But she must be pretty ghastly if she’s really in danger of losing Ted Kennedy’s seat, as by all accounts she is.

What strikes me as amazing about this is that Scott Brown, Coakley’s opponent, is such a nothing, and the gist of his campaign is opposition to the health care bill. What’s he proposing (as one should) in its place? Back to the drawing board. Or, in other words, nothing.

And what’s really remarkable is, this campaign of nothing is working in Massachusetts and around the country.

National polls have shown dismal support for the House and Senate health care bills, which Democratic leaders are racing to merge in talks this week. A CNN poll conducted Jan. 8-10 found 57 percent of respondents opposed to the proposals and 40 percent in favor.

Granted, the White House hasn’t done much of a job of selling this bill to the public. It’s not easy to do that when the legislation keeps evolving (thanks, Joe Lieberman). But the majority opposition to it raises real concerns about an electorate that is so mindnumbed by American Idol and Jon and Kate and Twitter that it can’t see what an overall positive this health care legislation is. How can a president, any president, solve any complicated problem if the public is so easily misinformed and misled?

Rick Hertzberg had a terrific “Talk of the Town” on this theme in this week’s New Yorker. In the piece, he took on the fact that the Democratic left has grown disenchanted with Obama and many of its avatars have come out against the health care bill. Forgive me for quoting it at length:

When Congress reconvenes a few days from now, it will be on the cusp of enacting a sweeping reform of American health insurance and health care that could be, as the President put it on Christmas Eve, just after the Senate passed its version of the bill, “the most important piece of social legislation since the Social Security Act passed in the nineteen-thirties and the most important reform of our health-care system since Medicare passed in the nineteen-sixties.” Perhaps he was exaggerating, but not by much. Jonathan Cohn, the New Republic’s health-care correspondent, calls the bill “the most ambitious piece of domestic legislation in a generation—a bill that will extend insurance coverage to tens of millions of Americans, strengthen insurance for many more, and start refashioning American medicine so that it is more efficient.” Paul Krugman, the Times’ resident Nobel laureate (and a frequent Obama critic), calls the bill “a great achievement” that “establishes the principle—even if it falls somewhat short in practice—that all Americans are entitled to essential health care.” Princeton’s Paul Starr, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning history “The Social Transformation of American Medicine,” calls it “the single biggest measure on behalf of low-income Americans in more than forty years.” How big? The University of Chicago’s Harold Pollack has done the sums. By the time the reforms are fully implemented, “the Senate bill would provide about $196 billion per year down the income scale in subsidies to low-income and working Americans.” That’s more, Pollack notes, than the federal government spends on the earned-income tax credit, Head Start, assistance to single mothers and their children, nutrition programs like food stamps, and the National Institutes of Health combined.

None of these people, from Obama on down the wonk scale, deceive themselves that the Senate bill, which now must be merged with its (marginally stronger) House equivalent, comes within hailing distance of perfection. All of them recognize that the final bill, in the now overwhelmingly likely event that it surmounts the remaining hurdles, will be flawed and messy. All of them also understand that, compared with the status quo—and the status quo, not perfection or anything like it, is the alternative—it will constitute a moral and material advance of historic proportions.

Yes, the bill is imperfect. Yes, the process is imperfect. Yes, no one will get everything they want.

Welcome to democracy.

For all of this bill’s flaws, we have health care legislation that extends insurance to 30 million Americans, prohibits insurance companies from turning people away because of preexisting conditions, and is reportedly budget-neutral. It addresses a huge national problem that is costing the country unnecessary billions and hurting our productivity that presidents have been trying and failing to address for the last century.

And 57% of Americans are opposed to this?

The question here is whether Americans can grow up—whether they can act maturely to focus and solve problems in an entertainment age. Obama has been president for about a year. The changes in our government and our public life since he took office are profound—greater transparency in government, a stabilized economy, a more coherent and less militaristic foreign policy, environmental sanity, a more balanced Supreme Court. And I’m not even paying that close attention. Someone who is could probably rattle off more. For all our woes, we are vastly better off than we were under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

And yet Americans—even, especially liberals—are disenchanted with the president. Forgetting, apparently, that the problems he inherited are complex and take time to resolve; that those who voted for George Bush must hold themselves responsible for the mess the country has found itself in; that a recession does not turn around in a year; that the Republican party has chosen a stance of utter antagonism to whatever the president proposes, not because it’s in the country’s best interest, but because the GOP believes that knee-jerk opposition is its re-path to power. And it is, of course, much easier in our political system to keep things from getting done than to get them done.

These are not easy circumstances in which to lead.

Of course there are things that Obama can do better; in my opinion, he made some crucial mistakes in picking his economic team. But on the whole, he is doing many things well. The country needs him to succeed. But the public’s petulance, its refusal to grow up, makes it less likely that he—and we–will.