Nothing Madisonian in this Martha
A loser and a sore one at that
No matter what happens at the ballot box tomorrow, one thing is certain: Martha Coakley is a loser.
Even if Bill Clinton and Barack Obama can somehow rescue her candidacy, Coakley will never recover from the self-inflicted damage of the worst political campaign in recent history.
Win or lose, she will forever be Martha the Blind - the woman who couldn’t see terrorists in Afghanistan, or a staffer giving a beatdown to a reporter right before her eyes. She’s Sen. Spellcheck, forced to pull one ad because her campaign misspelled Massachusetts, then another because it superimposed Scott Brown’s image in front of the World Trade Center.
Given the incompetence of her campaign, she was lucky it was a pre-9/11 photo of the towers.
In the Democratic primary, Coakley ran on the one thing she couldn’t get wrong: being a woman. It’s been downhill ever since.
Right after losing the primary, Rep. Michael Capuano was asked what he learned on the campaign trail. “You’re screwed,” he told his Democratic colleagues. Everyone wondered what he meant. Now we know.
While Scott Brown was wearing out a set of truck tires on retail politics, Coakley sniffed at the idea of “standing outside Fenway Park [map], in the cold, shaking hands.” She certainly didn’t waste time explaining her positions on health care or national security to the voters, in part because when she tried, it became painfully clear she didn’t understand them herself.
Coakley’s arrogant assumption of victory was so strong that midway through the brief campaign season, she simply disappeared off the campaign trail for days.
When independent voters and moderate Democrats were wondering if Coakley was out of touch, she answered by jetting off to Washington for a big-dollar lobbyist fundraiser. Why didn’t she just stop by AIG and present them with a bonus check while she was at it?
Then suddenly she found herself in a competitive political race. And how did Coakley respond? She threw a political tantrum.
Voters were deluged with Coakley’s attack ads - so many they could barely fit in the commercial breaks. Dark, ominous and ugly, Coakley’s media message was the polar opposite to that offered by smiling Scott Brown.
In the end, Coakley spent millions on TV ads that actually drove her own numbers down.
And then, as though to prove she couldn’t do anything right, she held a fundraiser starring the U.N. envoy to Haiti.
What was Coakley thinking, having Bill Clinton at a $2,400-per-person fundraiser at the Fairmont Copley while crying Haitian families were clawing through the rubble looking for loved ones? Is rescuing a desperately incompetent Democrat really more important than saving the starving of Haiti?
This is the kind of political stupidity it takes for a Democrat to lose a Senate race in Massachusetts. You can’t just run a weak campaign, or commit a gaffe or two. You’ve got to run an absolute disaster of a campaign to lose to a Republican here.
And that’s what Coakley delivered. It wasn’t the Hindenburg or the Titanic. It was the Hindenburg crashing into the Titanic.
She may end up in the Senate yet, but Martha Coakley will never recover.
An election for President and Commander in Chief of the Military must strive to be above reproach. Our public institutions must give the public confidence that a presidential candidate has complied with the election process that is prescribed by our Constitution and laws. It is only after a presidential candidate satisfies the rules of such a process that he/she can expect members of the public, regardless of their party affiliations, to give him/her the respect that the Office of President so much deserves.
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