icles/2010/01/21/now_the_postmortem/
Boston Globe
Oh, the ups and downs
By Yvonne Abraham, Globe Columnist | January 21, 2010
Time to tally the spoils and count the bodies.
There are piles of both in the aftermath of Tuesday’s special Senate
election: lots of winners beyond Scott Brown and the GOP and many
losers besides Attorney General Martha Coakley and the strategists who
helped her to this humiliating, unimaginable defeat.
First, some of the victors.
Charlie Baker and Tim Cahill: Both of these gubernatorial hopefuls
have to love it that the voters who snuffed Coakley’s ambitions hanker
to do the same to Governor Deval Patrick next fall. If you’re
Treasurer Cahill, you have cause for optimism: Your antitax,
throw-the-bums out message appeals to lots of the voters who put Brown
over the top. If you’re Baker, you may rue the fact that Brown has
displaced you for now as the GOP’s local superstar, but you’re
thrilled because a lot of Brown voters were looking for sensible
balance in government.
Mike Capuano: The combative congressman Coakley thrashed in the
primary got some serious love nationally in the final week of the
campaign. The chatterati were nostalgic for his fire, certain he would
have trounced Brown. He might run against Brown in 2012, though many
others are considering that prospect today, too, his former House
colleague and UMass Lowell chief Marty Meehan, for example, who has
mountains of campaign cash.
Eric Fehrnstrom: Brown’s senior strategist is now a national star and
rightly so. He read the electorate right and ran a disciplined
campaign, including super ads selling his candidate as an affable,
common-sense kind of guy. Also brilliant: He actually had the
candidate ask people for their votes.
Change: Voters love it, they told us on Tuesday. But they don’t want
to wait for it. For example, if you elect a president because you want
change, and he doesn’t transform the world in a year, it’s time to
change again, even if that means voting for the party that blocks his
every move.
Robert DeLeo: If Coakley had won, the House speaker would have
appointed her successor, a process which would have borne an uncanny
resemblance to patronage. Second, DeLeo, in choosing, would have
risked alienating supporters of either House Ways and Means Committee
chairman Charlie Murphy or Representative Peter Koutoujian, both of
whom wanted the job. He now avoids that sticky wicket.
Some of the losers:
Unions: Organized labor hasn’t gotten one of its anointed candidates
into a high-profile statewide office in forever. In addition to
Coakley, former Treasurer Shannon O’Brien and former attorney general
Scott Harshbarger were both union favorites, and they tanked.
Therese Murray: The Senate president got behind Coakley early and was
intimately involved in her campaign strategy. Coakley’s initial
allergy to the press bore a striking resemblance to Murray’s.
Women: Massachusetts still has an abysmal record of electing women to
higher office. Coakley joins the ranks of women who get past the party
faithful only to be stopped by a wider electorate, some of whom don’t
like women at all.
Conventional wisdom: Here was Tuesday’s biggest loser. Everybody wrote
Brown off, including members of his own party. Everyone thought
Coakley – running for a seat long held by Ted Kennedy and in
Massachusetts, no less – could coast. Lots of these were folks who
didn’t just believe in, but loved, the idea of Massachusetts as a
liberal enclave, as the state which sent back to Washington again and
again the senator the right hated and feared the most.
Now they wonder where they live.
Yvonne Abraham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at
[email protected].