If this is how it feels to live in a swing state, a colleague recently suggested, living in a swing state must be a pain in the ass.
That was about the best take-away point I heard over the last few weeks as pundits near and far endeavored to explain the cataclysmic failure of Martha Coakley and her party to secure Ted Kennedy's long-held U.S. Senate seat and preserve the Democrats' 60-seat majority.
At the local level, a lot of the analysis in the final weeks leading up to Election Day and in its immediate aftermath was pretty good. The reporters and commentators who follow Massachusetts politics locally were first to observe the important stuff: that Coakley was running an appallingly bad race; that her negative campaign commercials were tone-deaf embarrassments begging to be seen as acts of desperation; that Coakley had little statewide appeal going into the race and, as the Boston Globe's Sam Allis put it, would rather eat crushed glass than actually campaign door to door; that women don't fare well in big statewide races in Massachusetts; that Scott Brown, like Bill Weld and Mitt Romney before him, was adept at selling cartoonish conservative bromides—tax cuts will make everything OK so long as we kick terrorist butt first and ask questions later—in a folksy, wouldn't-you-like-to-have-a-beer-with-this-guy package.
The national media, however, was self-serving, negligent and utterly stupid in attempting to inject into the race—before and after the election—two issues that were not particularly relevant on the local level.
Coakley's loss had very little to do with heath care reform and even less to do with the relative popularity of Barack Obama. In addition to the long list of Coakley's failings as a candidate and the shorter list of Brown's simple charms, anyone deconstructing this race should also look at the lingering hostility over gay marriage across the state, and at the long running antipathy within the state Democratic establishment toward former state attorney general and one-time gubernatorial candidate L. Scott Harshbarger and his prot?g?s, including former AG and failed gubernatorial candidate Tom Reilly and, now, Coakley.
The gay marriage issue should have been obvious to anyone who's ever tuned in to the Howie Carr Show on WRKO in Boston (and syndicated regionally). In a state often identified as liberal despite its string of Republican governors before the election of Deval Patrick, Carr is a coalescing force among many working class conservatives, the so-called "white ethnics" who traditionally supported white ethnic Democrats like the Kennedys, but have more often supported Republicans in the years since Ronald Reagan was president.
Carr has continued to stoke the resentment spurred by, among other things, the advancement of gay rights in Massachusetts, an issue particularly thorny among Catholic voters. While polling may suggest strong support for gay marriage in the state, Carr talks to those who believe it was shoved down their throats by people like Martha Coakley—not just Democrats, but the "moonbat" wing of the party.
"Vote for Brown if they ignored you when you voted for the death penalty, and to cut income taxes, and they wouldn't even let you vote on gay marriage," Carr wrote in his election-day Boston Herald column. Carr's constituency was primed to animate Brown's insurgent campaign.
The antipathy toward what could be called the Harshbarger wing of the Democratic party may not be as palpable as it was when the former AG ran for governor. Harshbarger had made a name for himself as a reformer and "good government" type by launching public trust investigations that targeted Democrats like Springfield Congressman Richard Neal. Despite his popularity among many disaffected Democrats, Harshbarger was done in by machine Democrats who painted him as part of the state's "loony left," to borrow a line from ex-State House Speaker Tom Finneran. Neal, who has the ability to put many boots on the ground for a candidate he likes, didn't lift a finger for Harshbarger.
It's apparent that machine pols were not particularly eager to support Coakley. Neal and fellow congressmen John Olver, Stephen Lynch, Jim McGovern, Jim Tierney, Ed Markey and Barney Frank all supported Coakley's opponent, Congressman Mike Capuano, in the primary. Neal didn't officially endorse Coakley in the general election until Jan. 8—in a muted endorsement that came long after Coakley's campaign was in obvious trouble.
About 2.2 million ballots were cast in this race, which was decided by a little more than 100,000 votes. To use the outcome as any indication of a broad national shift is foolish at best, and nearly criminal when done by national wags with no feel for the complicated politics of the Bay State.
