Martha Coakley looks set to lose the Senate election in Massachusetts, a staggering achievement, if ever there was one. This is what comes of taking an electorate for granted, not to mention accusing Curt Shiling of being a Yankees fan.
There are some lessons here for our own Dick Blumenthal. If he runs true to form, he will not take the electorate for granted. He will run hard and he’ll be omnipresent. In that sense, we don’t have to worry about him repeating Coakley’s mistakes. What remains is for him to take the inevitable attacks seriously, however specious they may be. They are already test marketing some of the lines of attack on the internet. So far, I haven’t heard of any that seem likely to get much traction, but if history tells us anything it’s that you have to take every attack seriously, and you have to respond immediately.
Finally, every opponent must be taken seriously, something Coakley obviously did not do. Last week, Lawrence O’Donnell opined, on the Olbermann show, that Brown’s past as a nude Cosmo centerfold was not proving to be a negative because O’Donnell’s home state had turned “French” and people just didn’t care. When he said that my wife remarked that if Brown had been a Democrat, that centerfold would have been all we’d hear about him. Last weekend I was with some Massachusett’s residents, people who are smart and informed. They were totally unaware of his former modeling career. We will, in other words, never know if Brown’s past could have hurt him, because the word never got out. I suppose we could choose to be proud of the Democrats for failing to raise this issue, but my own feeling is that when you’re fighting with the Republicans, it’s a mistake to stick to the Marquis of Queensbury rules. I still think that Linda McMahon will be the candidate. Simmons has no money, and Blumenthal’s entry into the race will discourage the out of staters who wanted to take down Dodd. She should not be taken lightly, and the time to go after her is now.
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