And that’s all there is. It is our standard-bearer Attorney General Martha Coakley vs. Charlie Baker in November. Very best of luck to her.
Let us say this: For all that we have moped and complained about 2010, she has returned a vastly better candidate: More friendly, more focused, more polished. Her organization was the best, and she had loyal, experienced volunteers doing the right kind of groundwork from day one. She has Doug Rubin, the best in the business running her campaign. He’s a winner and it should make Democrats sleep a little easier knowing he’s on the team.
As we mentioned, we still feel that she has room to grow as a visionary leader, as the one to appeal to our shared values, to show us how we can play to our considerable strengths. She’s no Deval Patrick in that respect — but nobody is. We can be assured of steady, persistent, well-informed, progressive leadership. To many folks in Massachusetts right now, that will be most reassuring.
Here’s to victory on November 4th!
petr says
–zZZzz… huh.. *wha*
I watched Charlie Bakers victor– .. zzZZzz… *wha*… huh… Where was I… Oh yeah, Charl– .. zzZZzz…
.. zzZZzz…
Seriously… Charlie Baker could bottle his enthusiasm and sell it as the antidote to 5-hour energy… call it five hour– zzZZZzz..
*wha* *yawn*
Hey.. There’s Deval!! On fire. You go Deval. I’m awake now.
Oh, BTW, Steve Grossman concession speech: best speech of this entire season so far. Wish I heard it earlier.
doubleman says
This speech.
What have we done?
doubleman says
She delivered the “equal pay for equal work” line like it was a joke.
I’ve never seen her this bad. Painful.
Christopher says
I’m listening right now and she’s both hitting progressive themes and distinguishing herself from Baker. She just challenged him to a People’s Pledge.
jconway says
And a sign that she recognizes her opponents got more votes than her, ran to her left on key economic questions, and had equally passionate bases of support. If she continues to hit these themes-about helping people that are struggling, taking on corporations, and getting the state back to work-than she has an opening to distance herself from the incumbent, the legislature, and her executive opponent. As moderate as he is, his economic policies still come down to bashing that 47% like Romney did to benefit the 1%. If Coakley can show she stands up for the 99%, she can win. If she focuses on gay rights, women’s rights, and tepid reforms she will lose. So far she seems to recognize this.
doubleman says
I thought it was an incredibly bad speech. Very poor delivery, incredibly awkward, and rambling trying to hit oddly specific policies and mixing in also incredibly specific attacks on Baker. Still no motivating vision.
She landed points in a way that seemed like she was joking. “LGBTQ rights. Yay!!!”
jotaemei says
Everything you say about Martha Coakley, @petr and @JMGreene will swing by and downvote. lolololol
doubleman says
@JMGreene has been doing that all season on almost every comment.
petr says
… before: Martha Coakley is neither specific or enthusiastic.
… After: Martha Coakley is too specific and her enthusiasm is actively painful.
Why don’t you do yourself a favor and give yourself a time out? Sounds like you need it…
jotaemei says
Was this it?
http://www.c-span.org/video/?291485-1/martha-coakley-concession-speech
đŸ˜‰
bluewatch says
But I found it.
Marisa DeFranco lost again!!
Yay.
Kosta Demos says
You are too, too kind.
The apparatchiks have their horse, and their horse is as energetic and inspiring as a crumpled paper towel. But who cares? If (if!) she wins, the ancien regime proprietaire can rest assured of at least four years of having their ample bottoms enthusiastically swabbed.
Huzzah!
ramuel-m-raagas says
Here is our Treasurer
after telephoning her on her victory.
andrews says
She underperformed almost everyone’s expectations. Her organization started out with a massive lead and enjoyed continual structural advantages (like being the only woman in a three-person field in which your two opponents are both older Jewish men from the same town, both running to your left), and her lead virtually evaporated. Given another week or two, I think Grossman would have taken it. A win is a win, but Coakley basically played out the clock. She’ll need to make some major strategic changes to beat Baker. I did not vote for her, but I will do my best to help her through the general.
jotaemei says
through Evan Falchuk in the general. haha
David says
I doubt it. IMHO Grossman started closing the gap because it was the last week; people started paying attention; and a bunch of undecideds broke Grossman’s way. If the primary cycle were a couple of weeks longer, the same thing would have happened a couple of weeks later. IMHO.
johntmay says
Berwick would have won.
Mark L. Bail says
candidate peaks. Grossman was building momentum. I almost considered voting for him, but had pledge to Berwick who lost to Coakley in my small town by 2/10’s of a point.
Recent polling on Healey turned out to be prescient.
bean says
She didn’t underperform expectations, unless the expectation was that she’d get every undecided voter – not a very realistic expectation.
fenway49 says
Getting the percentage predicted means that she got essentially none of the undecided, not merely that she failed to win them all. Grossman and Berwick each beat the Herald poll by 6, Coakley by 0. The two opponents split the undecideds.
johntmay says
I did not see a single Coakley sign on any lawns in my Metro West town. There were no Coakley signs at the polls yesterday according to people I spoke with and what I saw. If she wants to win, she’ll have to do a lot more than this.
kate says
I appreciate your passion for your candidates. Thanks for your efforts. The Coakley campaign focused on voter contact. We will need to do more than we did in the primary. We will need more volunteers. We’ll need everyone. We can do this together!
SomervilleTom says
The pre-season is wrapped up, and now the candidates are playing for keeps. Here’s my prediction for how the season will run:
– Ms. Coakley will talk about “equal pay for women” and buffer zones.
– Mr. Baker will talk about “corrupt one-party government”.
Neither will talk about public transportation, income/wealth concentration, militarization of police or government surveillance. Neither will talk about creating a sustainable financial future for the Commonwealth.
I will vote for neither candidate.
I predict that Ms. Coakley’s campaign will resonate with those who already support her. I predict that Mr. Baker’s campaign will resonate with struggling people and families across the state. I predict the GOP will make sure that Massachusetts voters will learn to associate Martha Coakley with the overly long list of current and former Democratic government officials who are also convicted felons and unindicted co-conspirators.
I predict that Mr. Baker will defeat Ms. Coakley by five percentage points, with another 5-10% voting for none-of-the-above.
judy-meredith says
Please …take a few deep breaths, suppress the anger and disappointment. and get to work to keep Charlie out of the corner office. Or are you really going to sit on your hands and look forward to saying I told you so?
SomervilleTom says
I don’t think Charlie Baker in the corner office will be any worse then Martha Coakley in the corner office. I won’t vote for either one and I won’t work for either one.
I may join CMD in taking a breather from politics between now and then. I really do feel that my party has been taken over by those who, for whatever motivation, WILL NOT face the several real and immediate crises that threaten all of us.
The party I have loyally and faithfully supported for forty years here in Massachusetts has, from my vantage point, completely lost any sense of direction, priorities, values, and even common sense. I feel that my party has abandoned me and people like me.
Breathe as deeply as you like, I’ll do the same. I’ll be back on the front lines after this election, focused on much more local affairs for awhile.
This election is, from my vantage point, about as compelling as a baseball game between two teams I don’t care about.
centralmassdad says
It is going to a long, aggravating, and depressing next two months.
I also predict that the race will be decided by one of the candidates doing something foolish (but which has nothing to do with anything) in an unguarded moment, in mid to late October.
I may just read novels and watch Netflix until the middle of November.
JimC says
I know you too well (online) to try to convince you to vote for Coakley. So I’ll just say this once: the election is bigger than Coakley vs. Baker.
It’s about what they’ll say about Massachusetts if he wins, and how the national media will say “Dems can’t even win in Massachusetts!”
It’s about them getting the corner office again; last time, it was 16 years.
So please think about the aftershocks before you go into the booth. I’ll shut up now.
centralmassdad says
should play any role whatsoever in the decision.
If that is what is at stake, the stakes are very low indeed.
JimC says
The stakes are really high. That was one thing I mentioned.
But I’m not going to spend all day convincing you, if you don’t already think so.
centralmassdad says
Maybe I should switch to Firefox.
But fair enough, it is true enough that I am not convince-able in this election, and that your energy is probably better spent elsewhere.
JimC says
… in a long list.
I probably should not have put it first.
You are definitely underestimating it.
jotaemei says
Then it’s even worse than I thought.
They’re already cracking up about the primary season.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8J4R7bRoSWU
And, the Globe expressed by sentiments as well that it’s not that apparent what positions Coakley and Baker disagree on.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/09/09/showing-that-raises-doubts-about-coakley/guT4eylfzH6KqFIbXzgNNM/story.html
Surely, someone can come up with some distinguishing vision or positions for Coakley in the next 2 months.
JimC says
I never said “only.”
jotaemei says
At the time, it was the only one worth stating.
jotaemei says
Much more about the reasons that people should be inspired and motivated to fight for Coakley.
SomervilleTom says
It is precisely BECAUSE this election is so important that I am so disappointed by our gubernatorial nominee.
Here are some “aftershocks” I’ll ask YOU to think about, and you tell me whether or not they are worse than raspberries from national media peanut gallery:
– Our public transportation system continues to spiral into total collapse. What do you think the national media will say if, for example, a subway or commuter trail crashes because of equipment or signal failure and several people die? How far below “safe, affordable, and convenient” will we all the system to go before shutting it down?
– The economic conditions for all but the 1% continue to deteriorate, while the wealth of that 1% continues to climb. How long before the riots of Ferguson are happening somewhere in here in MA?
– Our government continues to literally fall apart from lack of funding, while we still refuse to raise taxes on the very wealthy. We and our media whine about failed rollouts of IT systems like the unemployment system or the health-care signup system — NONE of our candidates or their campaigns are capable of or willing to connect the dots to our constantly declining (in real dollars) tax rate. Our media long ago stopped trying to explain the connection.
I think the aftershocks of another one or two terms of a do-nothing kick-the-can-down the road governor are far worse than whatever horrible nightmares you may offer about the corner office in the hands of the GOP.
JimC says
n/t
lodger says
Tom it might make you feel better to know that your skipped vote for Ms Coakley will be negated by my skipped vote for Mr Baker. If I decided to think about it I could enumerate the reasons but I’ll just leave it with “smarmy, self-serving, know-it-all”.
centralmassdad says
An exciting race in the early stages, no?
lodger says
but it’s always more rewarding when you heartily support a candidate rather than executing a “hold-your-nose” vote.
centralmassdad says
because they don’t have the power to address those things. We have a Senate President and House Speaker for the big stuff.
In any event, we are concluding two terms in which the Democrats have held absolute, unchallenged and unchecked power in the Commonwealth, which followed decades of control of the agenda-setting legislature; therefore one can conclude that these things are not the priorities of the Democratic Party, or at least the Massachusetts Democratic Party.
SomervilleTom says
With a “Democratic” Senate President and House Speaker like these, who needs Republicans?
Your last paragraph is, sadly, absolutely true.
So we seem to have landed in a place where we have a Democratic Party who has set the agenda for generations, had “absolute, unchallenged, and unchecked” power for two terms, and that has at best done nothing about the crucial issues that are destroying the foundations of our state.
When combined with the disappointingly tepid response to the Probation Department convictions, and to the long list of similar felonies committed by Democratic Party luminaries and officials, it makes for an ugly picture.
If the Massachusetts Democratic Party were one of my five children, I would be wondering what sort of newly-acquired substance abuse issue was transforming their behavior.
centralmassdad says
Our local Democratic Party is quite ideologically diverse, and includes a right wing that would be Republican in almost every other state. This has only accelerated during the local GOP’s self-immolation after Cellucci, and is perpetually reinforced by the fact that if you have any political ambition in Massachusetts, you MUST be a Democrat, without any regard whatsoever to your ideological positions.
The result is that most of our elections are shams, providing an illusion of a contest. But in every other state, where party affiliation has at least something to do with a preferred agenda, then elections establish a winning agenda that people then expect to be attempted at the very least.
For us, elections don’t produce an agenda. Here and there, there is a “progressive” Jamie Eldridge or Sonia Diaz, but there and here, there are ideological conservative Democrats to counter them, for no net gain one way or the other. The result is that the ones with real power are “centrist” in the sense of having no real agenda other than staying where they are. See, for example, any Speaker or Senate President for the last 25 years, and maybe more.
This has always struck me as the worst of all possible outcomes, and is why I believe that the best thing that could happen for liberals in Massachusetts would be a fairly dramatic reduction in the number of Democrats in the state, both voters and elected officials, and a dramatic increase in the number of Republicans. I would say that EVEN if the increase in Republicans results in some CA or DC style gridlock. At least in CA and DC, everyone’s positions and agendas are pretty much out in the open, and I think that that is preferable to the sub rosa agendas that seem to be prevalent here, and which are private in nature.
I think that this remains a hold-over of the politics of a century ago. Boston, like every other city in the NE, had its population of immigrants excluded from the power structure, and like immigrants everywhere else, utilized politics and developed the political machine as a way to fight the existing power structure and eventually seize control of government for themselves.
Everywhere else, like, say, NYC, the children of immigrants did a little better, moved to the suburbs, and voted Republican if they were so inclined, while newer groups filled in those old neighborhoods. Thus maintaining Balance in the Force.
But here, the original battle between the immigrants, who were mostly Irish, and the establishment, who were not, kept the ethnic overtones of the civil unrest in Ireland and UK. Wealthier children of Irish immigrants did not vote Republican because Brahmins were Republican, and that would be like ethnic treason. It still lingers: when I lived in Beacon Hill 14 years ago, there was still an absurd amount of neighborhood resentment, even though Southie was clearly on the economic rise, and even though the last Brahmins were then 90 years old, and both the Athaneum and the Somerset Club had to recruit from all of the lawyers, doctors, and financial industry folks living in Charlestown and Southie in order to continue to exist.
I don’t quite know why that happened. The 19th Century establishment in NYC was every bit as WASP as it was in New England, and there were as many Irish immigrants into NY, and probably more, than there were in Boston. The Irish-English cultural hostility was as big a factor in NYC urban politics as it was in Boston when the immigration was fresh. I don’t see any particular reason that the political patterns of the succeeding generations, which are in many other ways completely indistinguishable, followed such different paths.
jconway says
I would add we also have an odd hard on for moderate populists like Weld, Cellucci, or 2000 McCain and 2010 Brown. The only state where it’s possible to reward a GOPer for sticking it to the “big government” Dems at home and the “in your bedroom Republicans” nationally. It is a potent mix when the right candidate espouses it. Romney, and to a lesser extent Baker, have had more challenges rising to that occasion. Like Saltonstall, Weld was the rare Brahmin one could picture having a shot and a wash at the Eire Pub. Cellucci obviously came from a blue collar background and could continue the trend. Romney never bothered trying, and Baker might be trying too hard.
Dad and I knew Coakley’s goose was cooked in 2010 when we had lunch at a deli in downtown Woburn on Christmas break and all the hard hats coming off a job were talking about how wicked awesome it was that Brown had a truck and was sticking it to Obama-in spite of the fact that their union backed Coakley. That kind of strange, center-right populism oddly enough enables the voters who would split their tickets between a Weld and a Bulger or a Weld and a Finneran. Keep taxes low, but also keep up old school traditions and the patronage flowing. The ouster of Charlie Fallon hopefully shows the new activism of younger generations getting involved can dismantle what is left of the machine.
centralmassdad says
The Rockefeller of Rockefeller Republicans was from NY. That particular species is being driven to extinction by the national political climate, so maybe I am too hard on Romney above. But Gov Dewey (on the headline above the grinning Truman) was also from NY. And we talked the other day about the collapse of the New Deal coalition: the Brown voters you describe were once “Reagan Democrats” and the phenomenon exists everywhere.
I am talking about something different: the well-to-do suburbanite who believes in keeping his or her town exclusive, believes in lower taxes, limited government, a reduction of the welfare state, a reduction in government red tape (ahem, salutory regulation), and thinks that trade unions are fronts for the Mafia. He or she may even be “socially conservative” with respect to the various “New Left” issues. This person comfortably pulled the “D” lever in Massachusetts for decades, and may still do so. How did that happen?
jconway says
I was saying there are a lot of white ethnic moderate conservative populists who voted for Reagan and for Weld, and would also vote for their local reps who might be catholic conservative economic patronage types like Finneran or Bulger. They wouldn’t necessarily back a Frank Sargent or a Rockefeller.
Your other phenomenon is more intriguing, I have not seen that as much to be honest. Miceli and Dwyer come from blue collar towns that wouldn’t match that. But I guess Kathleen O’Connor Ives, Michael Rush, and Richard Moore would fit that mold a bit better.
Andrei Radulescu-Banu says
The issues that have traction in the suburbs and less in the ex-urbs and inner city are climate change, gay marriage, women rights, immigrant rights, and more generally social liberalism not necessarily related to economic issues. These are all Dem issues. That being said, these issues are a subset of what people care about, and even in the suburbs they are not predictive.
People in suburbs also care about open government, competence, keeping money out of politics, etc – issues more generally shared with the ex-urbs and the inner cities.
Also, people continue to identify by social class with a candidate even though supposedly we are a classless society – it’s more about looks, appearances, accent and less about level of financial affluence.
jconway says
CMDs point is that a lot of conservative suburbanites vote for conservative Democrats in the legislature and it befuddles him. I tend to agree. But I also think there is another subset of urban or suburban blue collar conservative Dems that needs to be addressed as well.
Your point, that the suburbs are getting gentrified and the values of the creative class should favor progressives has been born out in the past few Presidential elections. The term is now anachronistic, but these are mainly Atari Democrats (perhaps Silicon Valley Democrats or Zuckerberg Democrats makes more sense?), and a big issue I have is that they disregard labor, disregard working families, and disregard class since class can be mitigated by the meritocracy via education. An assumption that has quickly been proven to be a myth in modern times.
JimC says
But I have to say, her speech was poor. She needs to work on that.
But you know what was worse? Deval’s introduction.
JimC says
… was the best I’ve ever heard him, in a speech. Charlie has improved.
petr says
… He must have been actually comatose heretofore if he has, in fact, “improved”. Halfway through I was expecting him to wake up and scratch himself… I thought Robert DeNiro in “Awakenings” had more spark. The podium he stood at was less of a stiff than he… If he has ‘improved’ he still has a long way to come.
The only ‘oomph’ in the entire ramble was when he managed to add three extra syllables to the ‘quo’ in ‘status qua-aw-oh’
doubleman says
I’d honestly like to know.
Do you think she gave a good speech? And why?
petr says
It was impassioned and enthusiastic and real. It laid out real goals and made actual promises and it embraced to coming fight enthusiastically.
It did all the things that Coakley’s detractors said she was unable to do and/or was incapable of pulling off… and she did it well. Which is exactly why you hated it so much and were so very very quick to say it was painful: but that was the pain of your cherished beliefs being crushed underfoot to the soundtrack of your mistaken notions being broadcast to the CommonWealth.
You asked for honesty…
doubleman says
I saw the opposite. Our biases are clearly showing.
Who has said that? She has not offered a cohesive vision for running the state and still hasn’t. I have never mentioned anything about enthusiasm, so I’m not sure where that’s coming from.
I admit that she was more specific than she has ever been in the primary, but it was in a very strange way. It was specific on rambling, individual proposals, not on vision. It was also strangely specific on attacks against Baker (Tea Party claim, “bathroom bill”), not on opposing values.
The delivery was the painful part. Every major point was hit with a head nod and a smirk. It was definitely enthusiastic (again, I’ve never cited lack of that before); it was not reassuring.
Andrei Radulescu-Banu says
Only seven ‘likes’ for the main post. Not good.
petr says
Only seven ‘likes’ for the main post. Not good.
Some people invested a heaping lot of their psyche in other candidates and it is going to take some time for them to process this. Give them that time, willya..?
Christopher says
I recommend diaries to increase their visibility and generally don’t bother if they are already on the rec list or front page.
JimC says
I Recommend diaries because doing so moves them to the Recommended list (a second rec puts it there). When a diary is already front-paged, like this one, there’s no need to recommend it.