Harold's Left:

With the State of the Union address just a few days away, the President has a lot of figuring out to in the aftermath of the the loss of the Massachusetts senate seat formerly held by the late Teddy Kennedy. First, let's just reveal a bit in how telling this defeat is. Brown ran a splendid campaign, period. Regardless of the fact that I think he will be awful for the people of Massachusetts. He made several brilliant moves. One of them was iterating over and over that this was not "Ted Kennedy's seat", but rather "the people's seat". Which is indeed true. Second, he capitalized on a terrible candidate in Coakley. He shook hands with voters in the freezing cold while Coakley simply scoffed at the idea.

I'm certainly not here start a love fest for Scott Brown, however I think his win, along with others, shows a changing paradigm in both parties as to how candidates win elections.

This past summer I read a wonderful book called "The Last Campaign", about the last several weeks of Bobby Kennedy's presidential bid in 1968 that ended in his assassination. One of the resonating and interesting themes in the book was the tension between Kennedy and others in the Democratic establishment, as he was running against an incumbent Democratic president. Despite that, Kennedy believed that Johnson's advancement of the Vietnam War was the wrong course of action. He believed this so strongly that he ended losing his life for it. However, the pertinent lesson here was that Democratic politics (and similarly Republican politics as well) was all about who was next in line to fill a particular position. If you were VP, you ran for President. If you were Attorney General of a State you ran for Governor. When picking any position it seemed parties looked to the next person in line.

As we have seen over the last few years in politics, as the public becomes increasing inundated by the 24 hour news cycle, and a political campaigns and candidates become more savvy, "who's next" has less of an effect. We only need to look at Obama to see this. In 2004 he was a state senator in Illinois and certainly not "who's next" to be the President of the United States. Hillary Clinton was, and we all know how that turned out.

Similarly, that's what hurt us (progressives) in this election in Massachusetts. We nominated someone who was next up for a shot to be Senator, as opposed to evaluating someone who could be humble and brilliant enough to win. That's the greater lesson here for the midterms. A poor campaign that does not connect with people will not win, period. How silly was it for Coakley to just assume that she would be a shoe-in. To think that voters would just hand her the seat. The reason she lost was not a referendum on Obama. How could it have been when she had a 17-point lead in December? What was the variable that caused her lead to evaporate? Her cavalier attitude, her forwardness in taking voters for granted, and her tone deafness to the people of Massachusetts.

Moreover, the over-arching theme here is that Democrats should not just look for who is the next in line to become the nominee for a specific position. Our progressive political machine must be fluid, smart, and flexible. If someone looks like a bad fit, they probable are. Let's learn this lesson and fight in 2010.

Share this: |Digg | Twitter | Technorati | Del.icio.us | StumbleUpon | Facebook |  Edit Post