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Edited on Fri Jan-15-10 03:43 PM by smalll
I'm not from Massachussetts, so of course I really didn't know who she was until this trainwreck campaign for Teddy's seat came along.
Remember Louise Woodward? Young English nanny ("au pair") convicted for shaking a baby to death? Look up the case.
Ever heard of Gerald Amirault? Part of one of the signature daycare "ritual sex abuse" cases of the 80s/early90s? Look it up.
And before them, there were the Souzas -- grandparents suddenly made into abusive monsters because their adult progeny got into the whole "recovered memory" jag, and THEN those progeny, in league with relentless expert interrogators, kept at their own small children to get them to say that gramps and granny had molested them too.
All these people were outsiders -- a young English girl over in MA for a year or so to nanny, or just humble, simple, everyday people.
And in one role or another, it was Martha Coakley who fought to railroad them, or who fought to keep them in jail when, inevitably, these travesties of cases begin to unravel with dismissals and pardons, when everyone ELSE was willing to realize that mistakes had been made.
But then there was the case of Keith Winfield. A well-connected policeman with deep roots in his city. When he actually did brutally, sexually injure his own baby neice, it was Coakley's office that dragged its feet, delayed, and almost seemed to be doing everything they could to give Winfield a way out, or at least more time.
This time, he's a "somebody" - in the ingrown, insular power structure of Tammany-style Massachussets public servants -- this time, Coakley's not riding a witch-hunt, she's covering up.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but she doesn't seem like a very good person. And it's not like she makes up for it by being a great campaigner. I'm sure she's execellent grilling someone on the stand, or constructing the key themes of a trial-by-media, but when it comes to running for office as U.S. Senator - when it comes to being a politician -- she is FAR from a "happy warrior" --- she comes across with zero charisma. She says all the right things, about public options, and wars, and reproductive rights, etc. etc. but she recites her positions so perfunctorily, with a robotic cadence, that she really does come across as an old-fashioned party hack -- I don't really believe that she believes any of it. She'd be saying the oppposite things if she'd come up as a prosecutor somewhere at the other end of interstate 95.
So this is why this is such a trainwreck - it's not HCR, or the state of the national Democratic Party, it's not about Liebercare or Nelsoncare or sell-out conservadems or purist progressives or anything in between. I'm getting the impression that Massachussets knows Martha, at least better than most of us, and that's why this is so close.
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