RED, WHITE 'N TRUE™
THE COAKLEY, BROWN, OBAMA DRAMA
OLD ADAGES RING TRUE
by HALLI CASSER-JAYNE
Posted, January 17, 2010, 12:01 p.m.

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As P.T. Barnum supposedly once said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. Thus Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley is finding herself in one heck of a race for “Ted Kennedy's” long-held Senate seat, actually “The People’s seat” as Mrs. Kennedy was reminded by Coakley's unexpected strong challenger Republican state Senator Scott Brown. Slap, slap.

Yesterday, President Obama swept into Massachusetts in an attempt to save the day admitting that a Democratic victory is vital to moving his agenda forward, not to mention his health care bill.

Should Coakley lose, Senator Scott Brown would become the 41^st Republican Senator and give the Republican Party the filibuster power it needs to derail Obama's health care legislation.

On the eve of the Massachusetts special election, Coakley finds herself in a race some pollsters are projecting Brown to win when most Democrats thought Coakley’s election was a sure bet for the Democrats.

Of course the same pollsters and sages were certain that candidate Barack Obama, what with the backing of the late Senator Kennedy and Massachusetts junior Senator John Kerry, would beat the pants off of Hillary Clinton in the Massachusetts Democratic primary.

That didn't happen, and the reason may be the same reason Ms. Coakley is finding herself in a similar predicament with her Republican challenger that Barack Obama found himself in his battle with Hillary Clinton.

It's called backlash, a recoiling from all things David Axelrod and protégés. To wit, one purveyor of the promise of hope and change as offered in a neatly packaged African-American long on personality and short on experience created by Axelrod in his then client the first African-American Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate Deval Patrick.

Patrick, which I pointed out during the campaign and in my book, A YEAR IN MY PAJAMAS WITH PRESIDENT OBAMA, The Politics of Strange Bedfellows was Axelrod and Companies' test case for how to seat an African-American.

Axelrod's creation Patrick, as Obama did, wowed the electorate when he went toe-to-toe with a once beloved woman candidate, the former Massachusetts Attorney General under Republican Mitt Romney’s reign, Kerry Healy, a woman. Patrick won the governorship handily.

But Governor Patrick’s promises of hope and change quickly imploded, not dissimilar to the way Barack Obama has as president, when the people learned that promises of hope and change don't amount to a hill of beans if once in office the winner can't produce, his inexperience in the legislative process getting in the way of accomplishment.

Surely there are other considerations for Coakley's unexpected tough battle. The Republicans are revved up, while the Democrats seem deflated in the wake of undelivered Democratic dreams both locally and nationally.

Perhaps the people of Massachusetts are sick and tired of the Kennedy clan, or know better than others the hype of the Kennedy myth.

Coakley is a very bad campaigner while Brown seems to excel at the job. The Republican candidate is handsome and dazzling (he once posed nude for Cosmopolitan magazine), ironically, much in the way young John Kennedy was and dare one say, candidate Obama? They each offered youth and vitality and above all hope for a better day during their campaigns.

Coakley is a woman, still a problem with some of the American electorate. Even the determined Secretary of State Hillary Clinton couldn’t crack, at the end of the day, that proverbial glass ceiling. Currently there are 17 women serving in the 100-person U.S. Senate. Surely this is statistically an improvement over the past, but women have a long way to go to equal full power-sharing with men.

The bottom line in this unexpected fight in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts may be the ultimate statement by an electorate that is finally coming to terms with the reality that experience counts. As a wakeup call to the Democratic Party, the Obama/Axelrod backlash is real.

That or the electorate is still hoping for that change they can believe in, this election cycle seeking it in the cloak of a Republican.

One thing is evident. Coakley and Brown are both on the ballot. And so is Barack Obama.

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Halli Casser-Jayne is the author of A YEAR IN MY PAJAMAS WITH PRESIDENT OBAMA, The Politics of Strange Bedfellows.

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