I can't tell you just how sickening it is to me, a lifelong Kennedy fan, to watch the fate of health care reform and perhaps the entire progressive agenda go down the shit chute because his seat is being lost to a shallow right wing dirt-bag. I am keeping my fingers crossed, but when Nate Silver says you're going to lose I tend to take that to the bank. [It looks all over now with Brown holding a 90,000 vote lead.]
Coakley could not have run a worse campaign from what I can see. She was lackadaisical, standoffish, bloodless. I kept thinking of one of my favorite denunciations of Mike Dukakis as a "man who couldn't ad lib a fart after a baked bean dinner." She butchered sports analogies about local teams -- yeah, that sounds silly, but in a sports mad area it makes you seem like a phony. She went on vacation -- it was a two month campaign for fuck's sake. She snorted at the notion of going out in the cold and shaking voter's hands outside of Fenway Park.
There is no way to understate what a debacle this will be for liberals. The thing that amazes me is that there are people on the left who somehow think this won't be a total disaster -- that it will in fact galvanize the Dems to be bolder. (See this comment thread at Hullabaloo as an example of collective delusion.)
It won't. The "centrists" are going to run for the fucking hills. See e.g. Exhibits A and B and C. Say goodbye to climate change legislation and immigration and labor law reform. The House should pass the Senate version of health care and then tackle the subsidy issue through reconciliation. Something needs to be salvaged from this clusterfuck.
I have never been so bummed out to be from Massachusetts, even when they elected Willard governor.
I blame everyone.
