Democrats are in a fright over the toss-up race to fill the late Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat. The Suffolk poll has Republican Scott Brown with a four-point lead over Democrat Martha Coakley, and the momentum.

Independents are now the majority in Massachusetts and are swinging Brown’s way. Brown’s zinger in the lone debate — asked about “the Kennedy seat” Brown said its not the Kennedy seat but “the people’s seat,” boosted the obscure state senator, along with ads hailing President Kennedy’s tax cuts. Just to stir things up, there is a Joe Kennedy in the race running as a Libertarian, but he is no relation to the Kennedy clan. He could salvage the race for Coakley if he draws conservative votes from Brown.

A Democratic loss Tuesday could kill health care reform — Ted Kennedy’s lifelong dream — by depriving Democrats of their 60th Senate vote. Kiss goodbye the rest of the Obama agenda for this year, including bold talk on immigration and climate change.

An independent political analyst here in Dallas figures that Democrats have made “a colossal miscalculation” on health care. On the flip side,  Bill Clinton called it a “colossal blunder” to let this chance slip — of course he fights over the meaning of the word “is.”

Hopefully Massachusetts, the only state seeing the evil of Richard Nixon in 1972 (i.e. the only state voting for George McGovern in that election), will show us the way again and this disasterous health-care debacle will die a well-deserved death.