A political earthquake rattled Washington, D.C., a couple of weeks ago.

Scott Brown, who was an unheard-of Republican state senator from Massachusetts, defeated his Democratic rival to capture Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in the most liberal state in the United States.

Pretty impressive.

TV pundits used the occasion to declare the death of President Obama’s legislative agenda. Many on the right concluded that Brown’s victory was due to an overwhelming rejection of Obama’s liberal, “big government” ideology among independent voters.

Now that the dust has settled, those assessments continue to appear further and further from reality. Massachusetts proved that voters are angry, but not for the reasons you might think.

Several liberal groups commissioned a poll after the election with the goal of figuring out why so many former Obama voters jumped ship and cast their ballots for Brown. By the conventional wisdom, we should expect these Obama-Brown voters to be weary of the rapid pace of change since the 2008 election.

In fact, the poll showed that 57 percent of those Obama-Brown voters feel that the president and Democrats are not delivering enough on the changes they promised during the last campaign.

In other words, they voted for Brown not because they are afraid of change, but because Democrats aren’t doing a good job delivering it.

By conventional wisdom, we should also expect these voters to fear Obama’s “government takeover” of health care. Alas, among those who oppose the health reform bill, only 23 percent said the bill “goes too far.” On the other hand, 36 percent oppose the bill because it “doesn’t go far enough.” A full 82 percent support the government-run public option.

In other words, only a tiny fraction of Obama-Brown voters oppose the Democratic health plan because it’s too much, too fast; more oppose it because it’s too little, too slow.

Many commentators have suggested that the only way Obama can win back these moderate voters is to move to the center and stop governing as a liberal.

The Massachusetts experience suggests otherwise. Fifty-three percent of Obama-Brown voters said they would be more likely to vote for Democrats in 2010 if the party enacts tough new policies that crack down on Wall Street.

It appears that the White House may have gotten the message.

In his State of the Union address last week, President Obama took the first steps to getting his mojo back. He proposed a new tax on several major banks to recover the remaining bailout money, as well as new financial rules to prevent the reckless practices that helped cause the recession. As the president scolded Wall Street and proposed a new jobs bill in front of the entire nation, Democratic senators and representatives rose to cheer, while Republicans silently sat in their chairs.

Since the speech, Obama has seen a jump in his approval rating amounting to “the highest level of strong support for the president in more than seven months,” according to Rasmussen Reports.

The midterm elections are coming up this November, and pollsters are predicting a Republican comeback. While Democrats should be worried, they certainly have time to turn things around by passing health reform, focusing on the economy and holding Wall Street accountable for the mess that they created.

It seems that Massachusetts might have been just the wake-up call that the White House needed.

Reach columnist Chris Jordan at opinion@dailyuw.com.