Coakley/Brown, Women, Politics, etc.

What I'm thinking this morning is that Coakley's failure, especially in light of the semi-controversial brain-hurt from Clay Shirky, really demonstrates how good a politician Hillary Clinton turned out to be. Okay, she didn't make it all the way to president, but she did manage to win a senate seat in a state whose electorate, contrary to popular belief, is not entirely made up of the mythical Manhattan liberal elite. (Manhattan's real elite is not all that liberal anyway. Viz, Mayor Bloomberg, (R-Finance).)

I am not sure yet whether I think this, but it could be that both these women failed when they approached a race like Margaret from Dennis-the-Menace: "Hey! I did my homework. I'm smarter than you. It's my turn!" Except this is not a mistake made only by women -- it's also the campaign strategy that relegated Bob Dole to hawking Viagra.

So: One lesson from Coakley/Brown: "It's my turn" = still a sucky campaign strategy.

The thing that scares me this morning, and that I hadn't thought through last night, is that the Republicans did find a way to exploit voter resentment and cast themselves as some kind of party of anti-establishment change. I still think they harnessed a particular Massachusetts kink on the issue, because Massachusetts is so often a one-party state and has been one for so long that it is relatively easy here to portray Republicans as outsiders with respect to the Democratic machine. That's how you get Mitt Romney as governor. But there are, alas, clear national ramifications which I just plain did not want to credit last night. Because although the tactics will have to be tailored to the individual states and individual seats, in fact, yes, there is enough resentment abroad in the land, and Republicans can find candidates who will play as "outsiders" to tap it. I don't know if the Democrats need to do more to give people less to resent or if they need to ally themselves with resentment. I mean, I would prefer that the Dems start kicking ass, taking names, and pushing through some legislation that did some actual good. But even so, it bears noting that somehow the Bush administration was particularly good at blaming "government" even while they were the government. Maybe it's time to figure out how they did that.

So, second lesson: Republicans will continue to push their identity as the party of resentment.

Third lesson is the lesson Howard Dean tried to teach the party: Take no state for granted.

Fourth lesson  may be that the Republicans are better liars than we are, and we need to find candidates who make honesty look better than Martha Coakley managed to do. It may be true that if you are the kind of devout Catholic -- or the kind of devout Protestant, for that matter -- who can't bear to give emergency contraception to rape victims then perhaps you should not work in that part of the emergency room, but it made a lousy and unnecessarily polarizing sound bite. One of the great things about Obama as a speaker is that he speaks in carefully considered complete sentences, with the result being that he is hard to take fully out of context. He structures those sentences so that at the very least the sound-bite nearly has to contain the whole thing. He needs to spend his next vacation teaching public speaking at Young Legislators Camp (TM).

And I think the inevitable fifth lesson is that progressives are way tired of being played. There is always the danger of losing us again to a Ralph-Nader-like candidate, who may read as a mere "spoiler" to the Dem establishment, but gives us the relief of honestly voting for the policies we actually want. We wouldn't be squabbling about whether the health insurance reform bill that can be passed is worth passing if it were a stronger bill, with a real public option, etc. Compromise wears everybody down, and that whole world-weary pragmatism thing seems particularly stale coming from Mr. Change-You-Can-Believe-In. He's got the most vicious enforcer in Democratic politics today, Rahm Emanuel, and he's using him to shut up liberals? What a waste. If you want us to come out in the freezing rain, you have to give us something more than party affiliation once in a while. (See lessons 1 and 3 above.)

OK. Now I'm going to go focus on my personal life. Or at least, crawl back under the bed for a few more days.