So the Democrats have lost Ted Kennedy's seat in the Senate to a relative political unknown and now everyone is starting to point fingers. While there might be plenty of blame to go around, having watched this from the inside, unlike the commentators who live elsewhere, the blame has to be placed squarely at the feet of Martha Coakley. She campaigned harder to win the nomination then she did for the actual seat. For the primary she was running ads all the time, there were signs up all over town and people on the streets carrying her signs as well. When I went to the polls on primary day she had about twenty people standing outside with her signs urging people to vote for her. Yesterday there were three people outside and they were all for Scott Brown. She did absolutely nothing to mobilize the base. Don't believe all the hype about this was anger at the Democrats or the White House or anything else. This was all about campaigning, plain and simple. If Coakley had run even a semblance of a competant campaign she would have won, but she didn't.
It appears she made the deadly assumption that merely because she was the Democratic candidate in a Democratic state that she was going to win, and basically shuttered her campaign for well more than a month. You cannot do that. I did not vote for her in the primary and she did absolutely nothing to win me over, and even less to win over the moderates. She again assumed that people in the middle and on the left would simply hold their nose and vote for her over Brown, but that isn't what happened. Her commercials were stiff and uninspiring, and while Brown did not win me over at least his commercials made it seem as if he was human and actually interested not only in the campaign but the position.
On Saturday I drove down to Framingham to go shopping and when I got back home I told Linda that Coakley was going to lose. When she asked me why, I said because there were no Coakley signs anywhere on the roads, but there were Brown signs including homemade ones, at the grocery store there were people campaigning for Brown but not for Coakley, and we had already received three phone calls from his campaign and we are not even registered Republicans. On the last weekend before the election, even though the polls were incredibly tight, there appeared to be no effort being made to reach average people. I know the President came in to help on Sunday, but who cares? Maybe if he was here two weeks ago it may have mobilized the base, but on Sunday it looked like an act of desperation, and did not get anyone out onto the streets.
Brown simply wanted it more and worked harder for it, and that will often make a difference. When I was in college, one of my political science professors was head of the Democratic Party for the county. When he couldn't get anyone to run for the state legislature he decided to run himself. It was a district in which the seat was held by the third generation of a Republican family, and no one could even remember when a Democrat held the seat. But, he literally went to every house in the district asking for their vote, and got to most of them a second time and those he didn't get to others in the campaign did. He worked his butt off and only lost by 54 votes. When the campaign started no one gave him even a fighting chance, and yet he nearly won. Why? Because he simply worked harder than his opponent. He out campaigned him in every aspect.
Let us not forget that our last governor was a Republican, so it's not as if they can't win a statewide election, but that's certainly how the Democrats acted. And don't go saying that it was simply because the national GOP dumped a lot of money. There is no doubt that they did, but the national Democratic Party did a lot as well. As Tip O'Neill said, all politics is local and if you act like you don't care or are taking people for granted, then you will lose. It's that simple.
So congratulations to senator elect Scott Brown, I will pray that you represent us well. But I do wonder, have we ever had a senator serve who has posed for nude photos before?
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