In his latest front page remarks on the Massachusetts Senate race, Kos writes, "The only reason [Brown and the Republicans] are in this game is because of the quirks and unpredictability of the special election electorate."
I think that's wrong--dangerously wrong--and I hope that someone somewhere in Democratic politics (maybe even in the Coakley campaign, although sadly I doubt it) understands why.
Details below ...
Another misguided take on the Massachusetts situation (subtly different from Kos's take, which I actually prefer) comes in a TPM post entitled "Hard To Argue With This," in which David Kurtz quotes "Boston-based Democratic consultant James Boyce" telling TPM "that the Massachusetts Senate race is a harbinger of November for Democrats: 'The fact that we're even discussing the possibility of a relatively unknown state senator filling Ted Kennedy's seat shows me they are underestimating the problems they are facing in 2010.'
I'll argue with that.
Ted Kennedy was a great legislator, or became one eventually, and the people of Massachusetts appreciated that fact and in recent years reelected him automatically. It helped that Massachusetts is a generally liberal state and thus mainly sympathetic to Kennedy's politics.
But anyone who's ever lived in Massachusetts knows that it is also a class-riven state with a significant conservative mean streak, and a state whose voters are massively ambivalent toward privileged liberals in general and toward the Kennedys in particular. I have no doubt that the Brown boomlet is being fed, not staunched, by Kennedy hagiography and the Coakley coronation campaign.
There's a deep history to this. Long before there was Scott Brown, long before there was Mitt Romney, there was Ed King, the proto-Reagan Democrat who humiliated Michael Dukakis in a primary in 1978. Sure, Dukakis returned to preside over the Massachusetts miracle, but by 1990 his career was back in the ditch. In its abject corruption, the State Government in Massachusetts may most nearly resemble Rhode Island among its neighbors; but the state is also, like New Hampshire, susceptible to reactionary rhetoric. Ted Kennedy and John Kerry may have ridden out political storms there; but how many other Kennedy allies have found political success in the Bay State? How are things working out for Joe Kennedy, say?
And how many women have served Massachusetts as Governors or Senators? The brief reign of Jane Swift seems an exception that proves a rule in this regard.
What scares me most about the Coakley situation is how oblivious to all of these difficulties the commentators seem to be. I hope to God someone in her campaign has a clue and a plan for how to deal with what in any year--not just in these tea party times--would be a very treacherous political situation.