Coakley’s Titanic Ride
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When New York-23 House candidate Doug
Hoffman surged in the polls, to knock
pseudo Republican Dede Scozzafava
out of the race, the White House and the Democratic
National Committee asked AFL-CIO and SEIU officials to carpet
bomb the upstate New York district in get out the vote efforts on
behalf of their candidate, and the eventual winner of the race,
Bill Owens.
Labor did its job in New York, and last week, the White
House — Rahm Emanuel and
David Axelrod – and the DNC made a
similar request to their labor friends on behalf of Massachusetts
Senate candidate Martha
Coakley.
“We really don’t have any other formula to fall back on,”
says a DNC political consultant. “There is no grassroots
enthusiasm for Coakley up there, but we have to create the
appearance of making the effort. Labor is all we have. For a
period now, we’re just going to have take our lumps for the sins
of our leadership.”
Enthusiasm is so low for Coakley that even pulling
President Barack Obama into the
race didn’t help. When Obama appeared at Northeastern University
on Sunday night, the hall was less than two-thirds filled, and
according to state Democrat party sources, it required promises
of transportation, food, and refreshments to entice about 600 out
of town Democrats into the hall.
“There was a very large segment inside the DNC that did not
advocate for the President to get into the middle of this. We’re
looking at a Titanic level disaster here, I think,” says the DNC
consultant. “Someone on the Republican side is going to write a
very popular analysis of this race that says [GOP candidate
Scott]
Brown cracked the code to beat us.
And you know what? They might be right.”
Brown, who just a couple of months ago was 30 points down,
when he pulled a Fred Thompson, got
into a truck and traveled the state to build name ID and
grassroots support. The other key, say Brown advisers: he’s an
electable Republican in a northeastern state. Brown was not a
cookie-cutter conservative candidate who didn’t fit the mold of a
Massachusetts political candidate.
“You know what scares our people more than the fact that
they lost Ted Kennedy’s seat and
the Obama mystique may take a huge hit [today]?” says the DNC
adviser. “The fact that Democrats and the media can no longer
make the tea party types out to be irrational, inflexible
ideologues who are supporting nothing but extreme right-wing
candidates. The tea party movement supported Brown, raised
millions for him and worked for him, and he is not necessarily
their kind of guy. Brown proves the tea party movement can be
tapped politically for Republican candidates anywhere in the
country if they are basically sound on taxes and small
government. That is huge.”
