You’re starting to hear murmurs that nominating Martha Coakley was a major mistake on the part of Massachusetts Democrats, that a veteran legislator like Michael Capuano would, in retrospect, have been a stronger general-election candidate. Well, maybe. But perhaps Capuano gave the most prescient warning of the trouble Coakley would experience:
[Rep. John] Larson asked Capuano, who finished in second place, to share the wisdom he learned on the campaign trail.
Capuano took to the microphone, looked out at his colleagues and condensed what he’d learned into two words. “You’re screwed,” he told his friends in the House, according to one attendee. The room’s silence was broken only by soft, nervous laughter.
Capuano confirmed the gist of the message — “I’m not sure of the exact wording,” he told HuffPost, chuckling — and said that he doubted his wisdom was anything they didn’t already know.
“I think I was just confirming stuff they already knew,” he said. “I focused on two things: the war in Afghanistan and jobs.”
Everywhere Capuano went in his state, he said, he was bombarded with demands that the government do more to create jobs. He was also greeted by deep skepticism about Obama’s escalation of the eight-year-old war in Afghanistan.
Now, this is Michael Capuano, representing the old district of JFK and Tip O’Neill for the past ten years, running in a Democratic primary. He should be doing well among voters who want government to do more to create jobs. And yet he’s telling other lawmakers, representing much less Democratic and much less liberal districts, that they’re . . . eh, you know, in trouble.
The mood in the country – with almost half of Americans calling Obama’s presidency a failure so far – might just be creating an environment where any candidate associated with “the establishment” – be it Washington or Beacon Hill – is in serious trouble. Coakley’s biggest mistake might be that she’s running way too much of a cookie-cutter campaign when the electorate is mad as hell and wanting something dramatically different . . .