My dad is a human astroturf machine. He knows spin when he sees it. And he knows elections. Here's what happened:
First of all, this is a referendum on Obama and Washington.
Coakley is a well-regarded statewide officeholder running in one of the most liberal states in America, and she was beaten by a tea bagger for control of a seat previously held by the last lion.
This isn't about Coakley. It's about a Democratic agenda that has gone off the rails.
If this President and Ted Kennedy's colleagues in the Senate were honoring Kennedy's legacy through their actions, they would never have lost in so spectacular a fashion in Massachusetts, no matter how many gaffes the candidate made, nor how badly the local party bosses are behaving.
If things were right with the Democratic agenda, it would be impossible for a guy channeling Reagan to get away with masquerading as a Kennedy:
That's not to say that Coakley doesn't deserve a measure of blame. She does, dad says.
As the race went on, it was clear that Coakley was playing four corners offense while Brown was in it to win. As a recent rec'd diary noted, Brown has had 69 campaign events since the primary, compared to 17 for Coakley. That's not a winning number for a Democrat in a blue collar state.
Also, a search for "Coakley" on YouTube shows that the Brown campaign and its supporters invested a great deal more energy leveraging viral advertising through the web. The network is replete with ads like this one:
But you can't even find anything from Coakley.
That's a gutless campaign that dad says reminds him of the campaign that Republican Gordon Smith ran when he was defeated by Oregon's next liberal lion, Jeff Merkley, who held hundreds of public campaign events between the primary and the general election, while Smith spent the campaign at cherry-picked private meetings trying to duck a macaca moment, just as Coakley tried (unsuccessfully) to do in this race.
But none of that speaks to why the campaign was close enough in Massachusetts for any of that to matter. And the reason this campaign was close is that just 1 year after giving President Obama wide majorities to enact his agenda, too much is left undone. Americans don't trust the Democrats right now because too many Democrats are serving the K-Street lobby, and the best among them are too reluctant to stand and fight for the American people.
The Democrats don't get it, says dad. How else can you explain why they tapped Corzine in New Jersey knowing that he couldn't distance himself from Wall Street sleazeballs because he is one. What does it say that after trillions in expenditures on Wall Street bailouts that party leaders wanted to send a guy like that to higher office?
Does the the beltway wing of the Democratic Party really believe that the American people are happy that President Obama put a Goldman Sachs executive in charge of the Department of Treasury?
According to my dad, the Democrats could regain their momentum by clearly demonstrating to the people of this country that they can stare down the insurance lobby and their shills on both sides of the aisle, and that they can create jobs, pay down the national debt, and rebuild the middle class.
Dad says that this election, like the elections in New Jersey and Virginia, is about the failure of Democratic leaders to clearly put themselves on the side of We the People who have been getting screwed for the last decade and longer.
And when Democrats don't stand with We the People, they lose. Period.