I felt sorry for Martha Coakley last Tuesday night.
Her speech after winning the Democratic primary for governor was one of the most painful political performances I’ve seen this year. It left me feeling uncomfortable.
But her acceptance speech also left me feeling sympathetic, because as torturing as it was for me to watch, it seemed just as hard on Coakley. Behind a brave face flashing frequent forced smiles, one of the Bay State’s most accomplished politicians and seasoned public officials appeared to be working desperately to connect with her audience.
To engender some voter sympathy might be the best thing the Democrat can hope for right now. It’s certainly better than the voter indifference—and worse, voter dissatisfaction—that has dogged her last few campaigns. As a sitting attorney general and the Democrats’ nominee for governor in a state heavy with Democrats, Coakley will never be cast as an underdog in this race. But she carries distinct disadvantages into the final leg of her journey, including an apparent inability to give a really rousing speech.
And if voters feel some sympathy for Coakley, perhaps they can forgive her for not being Elizabeth Warren.
Coakley’s primary night speech performance was awful, but the content wasn’t the problem—the candidate thanked a bunch of people, hit the best bits of her standard policy spray and said the words victorious leaders say when rallying the troops for the next battle.
From another person’s lips, the speech might have been plenty good enough. But in Coakley’s mouth, the words lacked luster in what should have been a shining moment. After an instantly forgettable introduction from incumbent Gov. Deval Patrick, whose own performance lacked its usual snap, a seemingly over-caffeinated Coakley jumped into action. Instead of finding rhythm and charm, she looked and sounded out of sync and twitchy, like she was pushing recently-practiced public speaking techniques way too hard.
The best thing I can say: it was a gaffe-free execution of an obligatory, high-profile task by someone who executes obligatory, high-profile tasks for a living.
The kindest thing I can say: it was a TV live shot, and the hotel ballroom where Coakley held her victory party was a big room; she got caught playing to the live audience instead of the cameras.
Of course, it’s a tall order to look confident in victory when you’ve barely squeaked by Steve Grossman and you’re about to go head to head against Charlie Baker. In the primary, Coakley underperformed against expectations established not just by her standing in her party, but by polls that consistently showed her in a strong position throughout the summer against State Treasurer Grossman and Don Berwick, the outsider progressive who presented a stark contrast to Coakley’s status as a longtime insider. When the returns came in last Tuesday showing Coakley with a slimmer margin of victory than earlier polls predicted, it merely refueled lingering questions about her ability to hold a lead once voters really start paying attention.
Coakley’s modest victory capped off a tough primary season, but it’s not the bruising 2014 primary that will haunt Coakley into the general election against a well-funded Republican with loads of telegenic charm. Unless the polls turn substantially in her favor, and soon, the stigma of her memorably poor showing in her 2010 race against Scott Brown to fill the U.S. Senate seat long held by the late Ted Kennedy will follow her through the next six weeks.
Coakley’s epic collapse in 2010 was widely interpreted as evidence that the veteran pol was arrogant, aloof and less likable the more voters saw her on television. In this race, the candidate turned to a new team of veteran Democratic strategists, including Doug Rubin and others who worked on Elizabeth Warren’s successful U.S. Senate campaign against Brown two years later. (Rubin also had a big hand in Deval Patrick’s successful campaigns.) The new handlers have attempted to combat the knocks against the candidate by keeping her out on the road, talking directly to voters and opening up about personal matters, such as the suicide of her brother Edward and its role in shaping her views on a wide range of issues related to mental and behavioral health.
If the new strategy seemed to be working throughout the summer, last week’s results suggest that its effectiveness may be waning. In fact, the alleged repackaging of Martha Coakley now seems to have been fairly superficial. While the decision to keep her in smaller venues where she’s historically done better than she has in big rooms or on television may have worked throughout the primary season, it is impossible for her to avoid playing on the big stage in the final push to the November election.
There’s little doubt that Coakley also has paid a price for some of her policy decisions as attorney general. Her attempt to keep a proposed referendum to repeal the state’s casino law off the November ballot—the Supreme Judicial Court overturned her ruling in June—pitted her against the progressive wing of her party, which she’s always been able to count on in the past. It also raised questions about the quality of her legal judgment. While Coakley has been criticized in the past for her role in the Fells Acres child rape cases of the 1980s—the Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz has made a career carping at Coakley and former AGs Scott Harshbarger and Tom Reilly for what many now see as a likely miscarriage of justice—she managed to maintain her reputation as an able lawyer, often using it to compensate for her notorious stiffness on the stump.
In the end, it may be that role—Coakley as career prosecutor—more than any other that proves to be her undoing. Coakley’s former bosses, Harshbarger and Reilly, both climbed from district attorney to attorney general before seeing their political careers stall in failed bids for governor. In Harshbarger’s case, it was clear that powerful Democrats caught up in the AG’s public trust investigations, including Congressman Richard Neal, a Springfield Democrat, refused to lift a finger to help him in his 1998 bid for the corner office. Harshbarger’s narrow loss to Paul Cellucci surely would have been a victory if he hadn’t been abandoned by key members of his own party. That Reilly didn’t make it past the 2006 primary against Deval Patrick may have been more about Patrick’s prodigious talent than Reilly’s deficiencies, but his early association with Harshbarger surely didn’t help.
Will Coakley suffer the same fate as her former bosses?
Unless she finds a way to connect with home viewing audiences, particularly in the coming debates where Baker is likely to excel, Coakley risks being passed up for reasons that have little to do with policy positions or management experience.
While I disagree with Coakley on many policy matters, including casino development, I can’t help but see the unfairness of her current situation. Coming in the immediate wake of hugely talented campaigners like Patrick, Warren, and Obama, she’s criticized for her stiffness, but rarely given credit for her courage and toughness. If her gender has been any obstacle to her continuing rise in politics, for example, you’ll never hear Martha Coakley say it. And whenever she’s been asked about her epic flop against Scott Brown in 2010, she admits she blew it and makes no excuses.
Hardworking, intelligent and willing to stick to her guns when her decisions prove unpopular, Coakley probably has all the skills we need in a governor. But we want some style with our substance, and that’s something even the new Martha Coakley hasn’t showed us yet.•
