Real Reasons Dems Might Lose Mass. Senate Seat

BOSTON (Jan. 18) -- So Scott Brown, a conservative Republican whose first act in Congress would be to sink the health care bill Ted Kennedy worked decades to pass, is surging in the special Senate election that will be held in Massachusetts tomorrow. Meanwhile, the candidacy of Martha Coakley, the state's attorney general and the woman who was supposed to sleepwalk into Kennedy's seat, has all but fallen apart. In this turn of events, the national GOP sees a referendum on health care reform, government spending, fasco-Marxism and the president himself. Even true-blue Massachusetts, they say, has turned against Barack Obama.

Here on the ground in the Bay State, though, the story looks a little different. Coakley is indeed inches away from losing a race she and her advisers had considered in the bag weeks before Christmas. But her collapse has little to do with a sea change that has Massachusetts voters signaling national trends, and much more with how a shortsighted campaign strategy and her own shortcomings have combined to turn her into a candidate who seems almost custom-designed to alienate the state's fickle electorate.

In other words, Massachusetts, the first state to offer gays the right to marry and everyone else the right to universal health care, is not Virginia, and the race to fill Kennedy's seat hasn't suddenly turned it into a hotbed of teabaggery. Instead, voters are strongly considering replacing the Liberal Lion with Brown because he knew enough to ask for their vote. Coakley didn't think she had to do that, so she didn't bother.

Instead, Coakley projected a sense of entitlement that for Massachusetts voters still has the power to dredge up old class resentments. She compounded that mistake by also seeming aloof -- not unlike the way Sen. John Kerry often does, to gleeful derision from Boston pundits. In a state where people haven't yet entirely turned away from the president (Obama's approval rating in Massachusetts hovers above 50 percent in aggregated poll results) but are much less OK with the performance of a Democratic governor working alongside an overwhelmingly Democratic, largely ineffectual and occasionally lawless legislature (Deval Patrick's numbers are in the 30s), she made herself a big, lolling target for sending a message to the local powers-that-be.

"Scott is a much better candidate," says Charlie Manning, a longtime, Boston-based Republican consultant. "From the start, she ran a coronation campaign."

You'd expect that from someone with Manning's résumé. But Warren Tolman, a former Democratic state legislator who now works as an attorney and political consultant, notes, "I think the Rose Garden strategy was invoked too early. ... It was the prevent defense. She underestimated the extent to which she needed to campaign."

"The national Republicans want people to think it's about health care," adds one veteran Boston Democratic operative. "It's not the issue. The president is not the issue. It's really the economy and jobs, and people don't get the sense she's talking about those issues. People always felt Ted Kennedy was on there to take care of them. They're not getting that same feeling from Martha."

"The national Democrats are desperate," says Manning, chortling. "They've taken over. There's no sign of her in her own ads."

Probably that's because deflecting attention away from Coakley herself is now the party's last best chance for preventing an upset.

Reversal of Fortunes, or, Brown's Stealth Rally and Coakley's Wildly Premature Victory Lap

Brown, a state senator previously best known for his wife (TV newscaster) and daughter (an "American Idol" contestant who now plays the national anthem circuit), announced his candidacy on a rainy Saturday in September, at the Boston hotel where John F. Kennedy hosted his bachelor party. He was nervous, stammering and unfocused. He was not ready for prime time.

Which was fortunate, because nobody was paying attention. Everybody assumed Brown was following the trail blazed by Ronald Reagan and, locally, Mitt Romney and William Weld: assemble some underpaid operatives to run a losing race, get your name out there and position yourself for an election you can actually win. In Brown's case, most assumed he really had his eyes on the attorney general's job, the position Coakley would vacate when she waltzed into Washington.

Coakley's supporters in the state's Democratic establishment have had her ticketed for D.C. for some time now. Her political patrons were dropping less than subtle hints about her Senatorial ambitions nearly two years before the seat opened up. And when she jumped into the race after Kennedy's death, she drew on two key pools of support: powerful Bay State women who had propelled Hillary Clinton over Obama in the state's presidential primary, only to watch Obama go on to win the nomination (with a boost from Kennedy's endorsement); and ambitious statehouse politicians with a vested interest in the opportunity for upward mobility -- a rare thing, in Massachusetts' ossified Democratic hierarchy -- that an open A.G.'s office would create.

And for Coakley herself, an unchecked ascendancy to the Senate would fit the pattern that has held throughout her comfy political life. She rose easily to district attorney of her left-leaning county, and then to attorney general, with the Massachusetts Republican Party -- what there is of it, anyway -- mounting feeble opposition to her statewide run. The state GOP typically only has the resources, and the candidates, to run one competitive statewide race. When Coakley followed her political mentor Tom Reilly (who was running for governor that year to replace Romney) by using her post as a springboard for a bid for A.G., the GOP threw everything it had into a losing race to hold the governor's office.

In her Senate run, Coakley's campaign machinery and decisive backing were in place and rolling before Kennedy's body was in the ground -- an edge that let her coast to the Democratic nomination over the far feistier Michael Capuano, a congressman from the state's 8th District. After winning comfortably, she cast aside the staffs of her vanquished opposition and rewarded herself with an extended Christmas vacation. When she did occasionally venture onto the campaign trail, it had the feel of celebrating a race that had already been won.

"She did what any smart candidate would do with a huge lead over a low-visibility candidate with no dough," says another veteran Boston political consultant. "Every day with no engagement, you win."

Until you don't, because, meanwhile, Brown was hustling, benefiting from the chance to learn on the job as a candidate and fine-tune his messaging even as Coakley's inactivity was turning voters off.

By the time the campaign entered its stretch run, that aspect of the Coakley campaign had come to feel wrong to many Bay Staters, in a way that reverberates more deeply than it might in other places. Massachusetts' political culture, as it exists today, was forged in the power struggle between entrenched wealthy Brahmans and the state's Irish immigrants. It was organization and patronage -- but most important, hustle -- that broomed the Brahmans out of power. The ethnic part of that equation has faded, but the favored style of politics remains. Voters reward hustle and the personal touch, and they punish those who display neither. That's why Ted Kennedy, the Senate's hardest-working member, drew thousands to his wake, while John Kerry remains tolerated but far from beloved.

"The question that resounds is, 'Who takes your side?'" says the first Boston political operative. "I don't know that people have a sense why she's running."

Walks Into Trap, Shoots Self in Foot, Inserts Foot Into Mouth: How Coakley Made a Bad Strategy Worse

"It's all very strange," says the operative, sounding somewhat rueful. "As a political person, you see it and say, 'What the hell's going on here?'"

But in fact there's one ready answer to that question: What's going on is the same thing that always happens in Massachusetts elections, just usually with less dire consequences for the ruling party. Massachusetts has one of the least competitive state legislatures in the country. Every other year, its nearly exclusively Democratic members take a vacation that stretches from August to New Year's. Nominally, this break affords members of the Great and General Court to defend their seats by means of the democratic process. But, in fact, they mostly coast to re-election. Although the governor's office remains competitive, virtually all other statewide and constitutional offices belong to Democrats, as if by divine right.

The complacency and strategic flabbiness that dynamic breeds yields standard-bearers who make terrible candidates for higher office. Kerry and Michael Dukakis became national losers because they had no idea what it took to win a fight when it turned filthy on them. Their opponents defined them, and they weren't able to respond.

That's a big part of what's sinking Coakley now. The Romney brain trust running Brown's campaign took advantage of Coakley's dulled interest in campaigning to paint her as a sort of tax-hungry she-vampire, and Coakley's camp, unaccustomed to having to play rough, had no idea how to respond. In their debates, the career prosecutor was fully unable to advance a contrasting message or defend her political stances. The things she has said that have resonated have been even more unhelpful: declaring that there are better uses for her time than shaking hands in the cold outside Fenway Park (as Brown did, lustily), mumbling an unintelligible joke about Curt Shilling that seemed to mistake the Red Sox World Series hero for the New York Yankees lover.

"When she did engage, she was unprepared," the first Democratic consultant says. "She couldn't articulate anything."

Tolman complains that while Coakley has been "handcuffed by speaking the truth," Brown, his former law school classmate, "shows no such hesitancy. I see Scott Brown doing and saying anything he can to win it." He believes the barrage of press surrounding Coakley's plummeting poll numbers has woken up a machine that should propel her to an ugly, uncomfortably close win. "At the end of the day, Scott Brown will say he peaked a week too early," he predicts.

Other local Dems aren't as sure. "It's her race," the first party operative says. "Bill Clinton and Barack Obama aren't going to save her. She didn't need another picture of her with Democratic leaders. She needed a picture of her knocking on a door in [working-class] Worcester, asking people for their votes. It's as simple as that. She needs to show people she really wants the job. We haven't seen that."