The state of the Senate race in Massachusetts
Since the special election to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat has evolved into a horse race, in the end, the outcome next Tuesday will be decided by the composition of those who turnout to vote. Unsurprisingly, Massachusetts’ Republicans (all ten of them) are highly motivated and energized. But what bodes especially ill for the Coakley campaign is that according to the latest Rasmussen poll, her Republican challenger, Scott Brown, has captured independent voters by a wide margin.
Coakley for her part has become the candidate of the Massachusetts Democratic Party political machine, the unions and fellow Democratic state politicians. But this is a different political moment; there is widespread and palpable discontent in the air — even in Massachusetts — most visibly against the entrenched political party. The election has become a referendum on Obamacare, strongly opposed by most independent voters in the Commonwealth, and the wisdom of treating terrorists like criminal defendants. Coakley is in lockstep with the Obama Administration on these defining issues, Brown is not.
The central issue for the Coakley campaign is has she offered Democratic-leaning voters a compelling reason to vote for her? Cool, aloof and utterly detached from the retail campaigning in which Republican Scott Brown has engaged and excelled, Coakley has remained in seclusion, hiding from voters. At one point during the campaign, she seemed to denigrate Brown for pressing the flesh outside of one of the most inviolate and sacrosanct institutions in Boston, Fenway Park. She thus created the impression that meeting with and actively seeking the vote of Massachusetts’ residents is an activity that is not only unnecessary, but clearly beneath her. From the start, the race has been Coakley’s to lose, yet her campaign continues to falter, a seeming endless comedy of errors. She has cast her electoral fate with the party bosses, union leaders and the DNC. And it shows.
With less than a week to the election, while Scott Brown continued to drive his truck around the state meeting with voters, Coakley embarked on a mission to Washington DC to hobnob at a fundraiser with lobbyists for the health care industry. In tow was Democratic operative, Michael Meehan, on loan from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to assist the Coakley campaign with its “messaging.” After the event, Meehan was involved in an unprovoked altercation with John McCormack, a reporter from the Weekly Standard. Neither Coakley nor the Democratic Party came out of the incident unscathed: it made the Democratic Party machine look rather sinister; it made Coakley look foolish and complicit.
But Coakley kept digging the hole deeper. Despite an existing photograph of her looking at McCormack as he lay on the ground, she claimed she was not “privy to the facts.” At the same time she was offering her lame explanation to reporters in Boston yesterday, Michael Meehan was in the process of trying to contact McCormack, to offer his apology for being a “little too aggressive.” Coakley thus managed, in an inexplicable act of self-immolation, to further erode her own credibility.
Coakley’s stance on the matter not only taxes one’s credulity, but it also, in light of the incontrovertible evidence concerning the incident that existed at the time she made her statement, insults the intelligence of the voters of Massachusetts. Her lack of candor on the assault incident and the many unforced errors she has committed throughout the campaign, is indicative of her political strategy. For Coakley has conducted her campaign with an overweening sense of entitlement. She is expecting Massachusetts’ voters to do what they are told, and like automatons, pull the lever come election day solely because she has a D after her name. But in the end, will this posture be sufficient to win the race?
We shall know the answer next Wednesday morning.
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Mr. Kinsellagh,
I do not think you have thought your posting through carefully. Your argument seems to be that the Democratic candidate is doing poorly because of being a very weak campaigner. You actually make a very good case I have to say for the weakness of Ms.Coakley skills and strategy in this race. I do not think that this is the angle you really want to take however. I think that this would diminish the national significance of this election. I suspect that the point you wanted to make was that even this bluest of blue states is voting red because they are rejecting the politics of the Democratic Party. However, if the Democratic candidate is founder due to her lack of charisma and campaigning panache, then the electorate is not so much rejecting the national political agenda of the Democratic Party as this particular candidates lackluster effort. That is how I see it anyway.
I agree. That’s why I said the election is a referendum on the policies of the Obama Administration — more specifically on Obamacare and treating terrorists as criminal defendants.
In response to another comment. See in context »You may be aware that Scott Brown said he is running for the peoples’ senate seat, not Ted Kennedy’s….Coakley is running for Ted Kennedy’s seat…there are two separate races going on here
Coakley not only wants to sit in Kennedy’s seat….she want to use Teddy’s ultra liberal rubber stamp
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