Why Coakley Never Had a Chance

The article I wrote with Peter recently went up, and I had a few thoughts that I wanted to add. I’m from Massachusetts — Plymouth to be exact — so this election was pretty much the only big news for the greater part of our J-term. This was bound to be one of the big new stories, simply due to the fact that Senator Kennedy’s seat was being replaced, but it quickly turned into something that no one could have seen coming. While to some it may have seemed clear that this was Coakley’s election to lose, looking back on it now, one has to wonder whether she really even had a chance to begin with.
Everyone we talked to blamed her for not being a good candidate, and this was true—she wasn’t a good candidate and simply failed to inspire anyone. But they also told us that she never would have thought that there would be a reason for her to step up her game, especially being a democrat in Massachusetts. But if we ignore the national attention that this has attracted, we can see this for what it really was—a senate election. Are senate candidates really suppose to campaign vigorously and inspire multitudes of people and promise change on a national level? I wasn’t really sure since throughout my whole life our senators never had to really campaign against anyone. So this was the first time I witnessed a senate election that was really a big deal, and since I hadn’t followed other states’ elections in the past, I really don’t have much to compare it to. But I was definitely able to figure out that this senate election was going to be quite a bit different than other recent ones. Back in 2008, when some of the state races were close, the media closely followed them, anxiously waiting to see what the final numbers in congress would be, but even then, they didn’t get as much coverage as Coakley vs Brown. I suppose that this may not have actually been the case, and that I only experienced high coverage from watching the local news, but soon after, when all the national news outlets started talking about this, I knew it was a big deal.
So can Coakley really be blamed? Technically, she did everything that was expected of a senate candidate, it’s just that for this election, she needed to do more. Scott Brown decided to take advantage of the current political state of the nation to try to get a win in a state that was once thought to be impossible for Republicans. So right from the start, each candidate chose a different approach to tackling this election, and by the time Coakley figured out what was going on, it was too late for her to change. She did the only thing she felt she could do—go on as normal and hope for the best.

The media excitement over the possibility of a Brown win certainly didn’t help her either. Every time I turned on the news or read an article online, there was always the mention of how Brown could win and how that would be a total change. At this point, Coakley continued to lose control, with the constant focus on the possibility of her losing. We were told that the climate was “very difficult for Democrats” in the sense that nationally they were going to have problems, but at the same time, regardless of what national opinion was, the climate was just plain bad for Coakley. One of the people we talked to felt that another candidate would have performed better. While we’ll never know the truth, I feel like any other Democrat would have done just what she did, since no one would ever have guessed that that would have been the wrong way to do it.
Finally, in some instances, it just seemed like Coakley was destined to fail. Brown ultimately won on his campaign tactics. But let me say, he got really lucky with that. His main message to the people was that he was just an average guy. That was his big thing. With each new commercial he would be wearing plainer clothes, and he always talked about his truck. But let’s be honest: any politician these days is not an average Joe. Brown was already a state politician, his wife is a news anchor, one of his daughters is a college athlete and had previously been a contestant on American Idol. This isn’t exactly the average American family, and if anything, it reeks of the ‘liberal elitism’ that Republicans have been using as a method of bringing down the Dems. But somehow, Brown got away with this, and the ads continued, and no one ever questioned them. Either he just got really lucky, or people had already made up their minds. Looking back on it now, Brown seemed to be the better candidate, the one to beat. So far, he has done a decent job, and is being an ‘independent’ republican as he promised (to the disappointment of some). So what lesson can we take from this? Candidates need to start going all-out right from the beginning, or else they’ll lose control before they even get to figure out what’s going on. This is how the elections in the fall will ultimately be won.
photo credit: wikipedia