Learning Lessons Right and Wrong from the Massachusetts Special Election

Illinois Review ^ | 1-20-2010 | John F. Di Leo

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The right is cheering, and the left is, well, blaming. The candidate blames the White House; the White House blames the candidate; the state and national party leaders blame each other. There’s plenty of blame to go around.

Just as predictions were all over the map for weeks before it, explanations and theories will be all over the map for months afterward. Like the adherents of Nostradamus, citing every historical event in the past few centuries as proof that he called it, spot on… people will twist the message of the Scott Brown election to fit their own narrative. But unlike much else that we debate in politics, we should accept that there can indeed be more than one correct answer here.

The right desperately wants the American electorate to recognize the error of their ways in recent years, to repudiate the whole Obama/Reid/Pelosi crowd, and we are tempted to take this election (and New Jersey and Virginia last November along with it) as proof that the public has indeed been awakened. The left desperately wants to convince us all that every electoral defeat of a Democrat is a local and isolated case – a bad candidate, a bad campaign, bad weather, etc. – it’s never precedent-setting at all.

The truth is somewhere in between. Yes, Coakley was a bad candidate, but she still “should” have won, considering Massachusetts voting patterns. But while the entire American electorate hasn’t yet left Obama for the GOP, some have, and many more are open-minded, ready at least to consider an alternative approach, if the GOP is able to enunciate it.

Continue reading at http://illinoisreview.typepad.com/illinoisreview/2010/01/learning-lessons-right-and-wrong-from-the-massachusetts-special-election.html

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Massachusetts had a poor candidate in Martha Coakley, but not as abysmal a candidate as has been claimed. She was in fact fairly typical for a Democratic senatorial candidate – a reasonably normal resume, normal past experience in dealing with the media, looked the part.

Was she a really awful candidate?

Well, there were some really stupid gaffes. Mocking Brown for being willing to stand out in the cold shaking hands was surely one.

It might be more accurate to say that she was the kind of candidate who could hard to get out once she gets in, but she put in an awful performance for someone wanting to make it into the Washington club.

Martha Coakley was running the way incumbents do.

Plan A: ignore your opponent and start picking new drapes for the office.

If that fails there's Plan B: Go negative in a big way. Put on dark, ominous ads about the evil designs of the other party.

In most years that would work for a Democrat in Massachusetts, but this year was the exception.

All over the country, Republicans will face opponents similar to her, and better, and worse, this fall. It won’t help us to get self-confident and assume that we can coast to victory just because it’s the other party’s midterm election.

True.