In the coming days, as they have in the last moments of the campaign to elect someone to fill Daniel Webster’s Senate seat, many Democrats will dismiss the election of a Republican in a state which hasn’t elected a Republican to federal office since before the president won his first election as an aberration, the consequence of a weak candidate running a poor campaign.
But, before they dismiss this good woman, they should recall that, in a Democratic state not normally friendly to women statewide, she rose to political power rather quickly and easily secured her party’s nomination to succeed Ted Kennedy. She was running a smart campaign until she, like everyone, including most right-of-center pundits, became aware of the power of the Brown juggernaut.
We all give Barack Obama’s for running a great presidential campaign back in ’08, but even he was caught off-guard by McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin. It took an economic crisis for that Democrat to right the listing vessel his campaign had become in early September. Had it not been for the mortgage meltdown, Obama may have limped his way to November, handing the White House to the GOP for another four years.
There were 17 days between McCain’s announcement of his running mate and the collapse of Lehman Brothers and 15 between the first sign that Democrats should not take the Massachusetts race for granted and Election Day. And, in some ways, fewer than that; it took the Democrats a few days to realize the significance of the January 4 Rasmussen poll showing Brown within striking distance. Perhaps, their delay in realizing the survey’s significance was due to their party’s prejudice against that pollster (as Politico reported just days before the release of that milestone survey).
She had once led by 30 points and even after the new year, other polls still showed her up by comfortable margins.
When it sunk in that they had a race on their hand, Martha Coakley or her campaign aides, more likely the latter, panicked. They were unprepared for a competitive race. So, unable to come up with a strategy, they pulled the standard bromides out of their bag of tricks. Blame Bush! Bring in Palin! Call the challenger an opponent of change! They didn’t have time to consider how the electoral landscape had shifted since Obama’s election, particularly in the only state McGovern won in 1972, where a Republican hadn’t gotten more than 38% of the vote in a statewide fedearal election since the president’s first year in law school.
Would another candidate have reacted any differently? Would he have panicked as well? Was Martha Coakley’s panic in January 2010 any different from Barack Obama’s in September 2008?
Recall that Massachusetts is not a swing state; it was smart strategy for a Democrat to lay low while most people were celebrating the holidays. Recall, that when the holidays began, she led Brown in the polls by a margin greater than 2 to 1.
Had this been Colorado, Florida, Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio,Virginia or even Wisconsin, a Democrat would have no excuse for taking a Senate race for granted. But, here, most people considered the Democratic primary the de facto election, with the general just a formality. After all, it had been that way in Massachusetts in well over 70 federal elections over the the past 14 years.
Scott Brown’s victory in the Bay State is not just a repudiation of Martha Coakley. She had made none of her famous gaffes before that Rasmussen poll. She was fighting against forces she herself couldn’t control, similar to the forces which saw Republicans like Norm Coleman and Gordon Smith lose to men far lesser than themselves.
Voters even in Massachusetts were upset by Democrats trying to pass health care behind closed doors, buying off Senators from other states despite the transparency Obama promised in his campaign. Indeed, Rasmussen found that health care was “a huge issue in this election“, with 78% of Brown voters strongly opposing the health care legislation before Congress.
In a swing state, perhaps, one could attribute a Democrat’s loss to an inept candidate alone, but when it happens in Massachusetts when you see a novice* Republican candidate run 16 points ahead of his party’s presidential nominee, something is going on.
Democrats would be wise to pay attention. The political landscape has shifted and a good woman with a fine education found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time.
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*in the sense that he was new to voters statewide
We all give Barack Obama’s for running a great presidential campaign back in ‘08, but even he was caught off-guard by McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin. It took an economic crisis for that Democrat to right the listing vessel his campaign had become in early September.
What, you mean the standard post-convention bounce that had dissipated by mid September? I can still quite clearly remember 2008, and McCain was not seriously competitive at any point during that cycle. In fact, I think the gains Palin gave McCain from the evangelicals was more than offset by the losses she gave him among moderates and independents.
The economic crisis was certainly what sealed the election for Obama, but 2008 was always a big ask for McCain. We’ll never know for sure, but I think it was always too big.
@Serenity, there were gains in Massachusetts for McCain that came from Democrats. These were the Hillary supporters who knew the character of Obama and they had decided to push McCain/Palin. It is far more complex than you think. The evangelicals had almost no impact in such a situation.
Daniel I am not sure that I agree with your analysis here. I have been following this very closely and there were many factors. I agree that Obamacare was one of the factors, but it was not the only one. In fact I would never call Coakley “that good woman”.
Here are the reasons why:
1. The Fells Acres case – known as the witch trials. Her involvement here was to keep Tookie Amirault in prison even though he was innocent of any crime. This was a case based upon evidence obtained via what can only be considered as “coaching”, causing false memory syndrome. The judge was also to blame when it came to that man being in jail even though he was innocent.
2. the Winfield case – the man in this case used a hot curling iron on a 2 year old child who said “uncle hurt me”. Coakley refused to prosecute. The man’s father was a major donor to her campaign funds for Attorney General.
3. Louise Woodward the English nanny – another innocent person.
4. Fr. Geoghan the pedophile priest – she allowed him to go free so that he was able to go back and continue his actions. Charming.
These things are just the legal reasons that caused people to view her as being repugnant. There were plenty of people on the left who refused to vote for her because of these cases. She did not know the meaning of justice. The only thing important to her was her political career and her feminist views.
Then there were the gaffes and there are plenty of examples. She managed to insult Red Sox fans, Catholics and Obama rubbed salt into the wounds by insulting truck owners. Not very smart at all. Others were upset when Meehan roughed up the journalist and sent him sprawling to the pavement whilst she looked on.
It was the elitist attitude that she displayed that also rubbed people up the wrong way.
Then there were the letters sent out to the garden clubs. The timing was really very bad because those little old ladies were determined not to vote for her.
Each gaffe had its impact and lost votes. What had been a commanding lead was lost when she decided to have a vacation in the middle of campaigning. She believed that the seat belonged to her. I think many were not impressed when they found out that she began her moves before Teddy Kennedy was dead.
There are just so many reasons why Coakley was to blame. The passing of the AbominableCare in the middle of the night just before Christmas would have definitely had an impact but I would say that Coakley disregarded that fact as well.
Yes, she was a “laid back” candidate not realizing the strength of her opponent. However, it is time for the president to realize that he owns this. No blames rest more squarely than on his shoulders.
Disgusting nice, as usual, Dan. However, I think they can blame her a bit. Not too much, as her faults are definitely theirs, but still…
And who says Coleman lost? (Or won for that matter.) Franken’s margin of victory was the result of shananigans to be sure, but I recall that both his and Coleman’s previous margin of victory were less than the number of dead people who voted. How that counts as a legitimate election is beyond me.
I’m from Massachusetts and I think I can offer a different perspective. Martha Coakley lost the election because Harry Reid decided to make a political payoff to Senator Nelson with taxpayer money while our President applauded it. Coakley suffered and lost ground although she still was going to win. Then Reid made another backroom deal with SEIU that pissed off most of us Union guys who know our representatives don’t represent the rank and file union guys doing the actual work. Coakley suffered further losses. Brown gained even more momentum. I supported Brown from the beginning, believed in his stances, and am conservative all the way but even I could see that Coakley was helpless. She had a choice to abruptly reverse direction in her already stated support of Obamacare and risk being a flip flopper or stick with it. She stuck with it and these incompetents in Washington sunk her. Being an ultra-liberal she was ill prepared to deal with other issues that Mass citizens were concerned with because she was an elitist and completely out of touch and ill prepared to be questioned on her views. For all her gaffes she still would have won if not for Obama, Reid, and SEIU who tried to ram this Health Care abortion down the throats of people that already have a health care system that we already pay for. For them to throw the blame in her direction is cowardly. THEY lost it for her. Although I’m glad and Brown is going to be a great Senator, these guys are cowards if they continue to blame her and her campaign without taking responsibility themselves.
I used to canoe a lot. If you get sideways to a log across a stream and you tip a little and the downstream current catches the side edge and starts to fill the canoe, you suddenly have tons of force working against you. Often as not, you lose the canoe.
That was Coakley. She and the Democrats in general have no idea of the power of a little stream on the move.
I do not think that the Democrats can let go of the mess they have made of things. Obama has his chin in the air and he is going to do this Mussolini pose until the people tear him down. The Democrat rats (Demo-rats) like Barney Frank are going to abandon him and repair their own bunkers. And lots and lots of pawns in the House and Senate are going down to defeat. There is nothing they can do to save themselves.
How do you re-do health care reform in an open and bipartisan manner after you kneecapped so many important groups who belong at the table?
How do you unspend the billions of wasted stimulus and then take the tax cut hits that are necessary to reassure small business?
How do you turn Rosy Senario 180 degrees and sell the opposite solution?
How do you abandon “Progressive” solutions when all your “hope and change” is grounded in that amorphous wad of psychobabble?
Your analysis makes no sense Dan. If the loss in MA is attributable primarily to the trajectory of the Obama presidency, and Obama care, then the weakness of the Democratic candidate would have been apparent in Dec.
The striking feature of this race was NOT that the Democratic candidate was struggling uphill in an environment that was hostile to Dems – it was that she lost 30 points of support in about 3 weeks. The mood of opposition to Obama and his health reforms has not changed very much in the last 3 weeks. Obama’s popularity in MA, or in the country at large has not changed in the last three weeks. The only factor that can account for the change in Dem support in this race, over the past three weeks, is the candidate herself.
Nate Silver has a far more reasonable analysis today – knd of a rough explanation, but still one that seems to try to assess the various factors in a serious way.
Also, your analysis of the 08 presidential race also make no sense whatsoever. Obama has a lead before the conventions, McCain had a convention bump that momentarily pulled him even, or even slightly ahead, the bump faded as they almost always do, and the race settled back into the pattern it had always had, and that is how it ended.
The convention bump that the GOP got was almost entirely due to the novelty of Palin. She had huge favorables after her nomination and her good speech. That is what bumped McCain’s numbers up. When the country actually got to see who she really is – in the interviews – then her favorables plummeted and the convention bump faded, and the polls went back to where they always had been.
The financial crisis was not a deciding factor – Obama had always been favored on economic issues. The significance of that event was that it could have given McCain an opportunity to look smart on the economy and change the dynamics of the election (assuming Obama also had done something to look bad), but that didn’t happen. So it may have been a lost opportunity, but it wasn’t a major driver of the dynamics.
Any Fortune 500 CEO will tell you, if you going to turn a company around, then you better be able to do more than talk about it …… “you gotta focus, focus, focus.” Unfortunately, Mr. Obama is just a talker….. fed his lines off a teleprompter when standing in front of the cameras. Seems our president and Conan O’brien have much in common…..think about it.
The only point missing, is the “who” involved in the “making sense” exercise.
When you look at the breakdown of the Massachusetts vote yesterday, Coakley took the Super Blue areas by 60-90%. But one by one the people who have had enough of the Washington antics came out and one by one they upended P-Town, Beantown and Libville. They did not join the Republican Party, they sent an atomic bomb sized message about open government, transparency and honest representation.
Tano, you should wake up and smell the coffee. Start with the simple stuff, because your whole spectrum of “sense” is out of whack.
I saw a great T-Shirt yesterday: “What you shoved down our throats in 2009 …… We are going to shove up your a** in 2010.”
Does that make any sense to you?
In a truly corrupt and pathetic world, the Democrat in MA would have won despite her many gaffes, her ridiculous decisions as AG, and despite ObamaCare. So something *is* going on here, with Brown’s victory. Maybe America isn’t quite as far gone as I feared.
But can anyone imagine Kennedy having lost, if he were still alive and on the ticket? Was there something about the Kennedy family (or myth or whatever) that made some MA voters basically shut their brains off? And now some are waking up? Is that it?
Tano,
Just for you:
heliotrope, I arrived at the same analysis, but with a different metaphor: wind shear. Right now, the shearing force between the agenda of the radical left elites that run the Democrat and the values and priorities of mainstream voters, including Democrats, is so great that it’s tearing the two apart.
Oh hey, now Tano is back. Not to keep flogging this, but Tano I do want to know you at least glanced at my open letter for you.
Well first of all, the loss in MA *is* attributable to ObamaCare because Rasmussen found that it was the number one issue on the voters’ minds. Second, sometimes it takes people awhile to overcome their old mindset. That’s why they call it an “upset”, Tano.
Indeed not; the striking feature is that she was struggling in an environment very favorable to Dems; the most favorable one there is. (MA)
I love that line of thinking. Tano, I love seeing you spin it that way because it means you’re not learning. If the rest of the Left is like you, then you will continue on your present course of ruining yourself politically. I fear the havoc and collateral damage to America that you will cause, but I relish the inevitability of your overthrow, if you can’t (or given that you won’t) adapt or learn.
No, all it did was piss off tens of millions of suburban voters who (1) watched their jobs disappear and their houses plummet in value, and (2) watched McCain rush to Washington to propose unconscionable bailouts, so that (3) Obama would seem reasonable and plausible when he promised to be something different and to give America a responsible government with a **NET SPENDING CUT**.
Hey, I found out where Tano was last night…
Suck it up, kiddo. You’ve lost. Deal with it.
DO NOT fail to see this inside information:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4aQCiRjvZY
Dave B, we’re pretty much on the same page. I may cut and paste your comment into a post, crediting you of course. 🙂
Love that rant. The speaker attributes to BusHitlerCo the policies of our current Democrat leadership:
Some people are truly delusional.
Let the Democrats blame Coakley for the loss. True or false, it allows the Tea Party movement (smaller government, less taxes) more time to increase their influence. Next time it may not be a single seat that is lost.
you lost me at “she ran a smart campaign.”
though I doubt I agree with him/her on the substance of my views on Obama, StraightAussie lays out a lot of why I think she lost. given the campaign she ran, unfortunately, she deserved to …
Eric Olsen,
Who the hell are you and why are you attributing to me things that you got,,,who knows where, things that I never said? I don’t know how they run this place, but it should be a bannable offense to blatently lie about what someone said. An apology and retraction is in order.
LOL 🙂
It’s fun to see lefties go humorless, after their stinging loss.
“Well first of all, the loss in MA *is* attributable to ObamaCare ”
Possibly, but probably not in the way you wish or think. Thanks to Republicans like Scott Brown and Mitt Romney, MA already has a universal health care system that is remarkably similar to Obamacare. So Brown’s election can hardly be seen as a repudiation of the idea of Obamacare – it seems rather that Coakley was unable to explain to MA voters why they should support Obamacare when opposing it would leave them with a similar system anyway.
“the striking feature is that she was struggling in an environment very favorable to Dems;”
Right, thats consistent with what I said.
“I love seeing you spin it that way because it means you’re not learning.”
Aye, I am not learning to analyze things the way you do. And you know what ILC? I am willing to bet on my own perspective, not yours. Because I dont really see you having much of a better track record than I, nor does Dan or anyone else around here.
“The financial crisis was not a deciding factor”
I dont find your arguments to have much counterweight. As I said before, Obama was preferred all along on economic issues. McCain had an opportunity at that moment, to show that he could be address the crisis in a level-headed and reassuring manner, and – if Obama had screwed up his response somehow – that might have worked to McCain’s advantage.
But McCain looked panicky by suspending his campaign, and he failed to show much convincing leadership. Its hard to pin his decline on his support for the bailouts given that it was a similar position to Obama’s.
Perhaps one way that the financial crisis might have hurt McCain – a bit more than he was hurt all along on economic issues, was how the crisis drove home for everyone how foolish McCain’s longstanding laizze faire attitudes to the economy were. Like Greenspan, I guess he might have been in a state of “shocked disbelief” that markets were not quite as magically self-regulating as the ideology preaches. Its never helpful to have your naivete so rudely exposed a month or so before an election.
ILC,
And no, I had not seen your open letter to me.
But now I have.
I am actually quite happy for you, that you have found some moments of joy in your life. I hope you have many more, maybe of a different kind though.
love, Tano
Oh don’t worry Tano, I have plenty of personal joy. But this is a political blog. On the political level, well, this morning I am feeling the first actual hope for America’s future that I have felt since The Surge succeeded (and thus smashed your current party’s and my former party’s hopes for American defeat in Iraq) back in late 2007.
I’m not apologizing for shit, Tano, nor are you in a position to determine what constitutes a “bannable offense.”
It’s called satire, buddy, and completely typifies your posts since that unfortunate day you found yourself here.
As for who I am, I am formerly known as “HollywoodNeoCon,” and have been posting here on and off for the better part of 6 years, so there. Bleh.
Again, you’ve just suffered the first of what I pray will be many losses to come, so maybe it’s time you find some other site to pollute.
Talk about hate. You’ve forgotten more about hate than I will ever learn.
It’s fun to see lefties go humorless, after their stinging loss.
Sully was already histrionic before the election. He’s full on raging PMS today.
Given the time Tano’s been called out on his lies and antics here, here, and here, him accusing anyone of lying is laughable at best.
Of course, he’ll never answer those lies here.
OTOH, did Tano just ask to have himself banned?
And yes Tano, this was the death of Obamacare.
I don’t know how they run this place, but it should be a bannable offense to blatently lie about what someone said. An apology and retraction is in order.
And the arrogant fool walks nicely into the trap — since Tano has blatantly lied about what Sarah Palin said.
As for Jesus and the dinosaurs, she does believe that – or something equivalent. Its in her book.
Ban Tano now. And publish to the front of the website that Tano specifically stated that, since he blatantly lied and since he demanded that other people be banned for “blatantly lying”, he’s banned.
Arrogance. Obama has it in spades. Look at any appearance…he struts to the teleprompter. “I won”. Even in MA the voters don’t like to be treated as fools. Treated as sheep. The arrogance of the ruling Democrats the past 12 months has been breathtaking.
Now at least they have to show faux humility. Let’s see how good they are at faking it.
“The secret of acting is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” – George Burns
Not a good woman, GAY Patriot. MC kept an innocent (Gerald Amirault) man in prison for political purposes, prosecuted the Sousas fir a ‘recovered memory’ crime, and refused to indict a politically connected cop who raped his 23 mo old niece. An other DA got the creep two life sentences.
Ann Coulter declares Coakley to be “a moral monster.”
Sorry, Dan, but I have to go with Ann.