Notes on the Coakley Failure

First, let’s not get overly sentimental over the loss of Ted Kennedy’s former Massachusetts Senate seat to a Republican. Yes, it's sad that the sandcastle that was Camelot has been washed back into the sea because somebody couldn't remember who Curt Schilling pitched for, but we live in a democracy, not a kingship.

As for Coakley, I’ll be blunt: anyone who’s seen the red-blooded Massachusetts Congressman Michael Capuano tear into New York investment bankers would understand that Coakley should never have been promoted by Massachusetts’ Democratic leadership (and by the Obama administration) in the first place.

These rough economic times require the aggressive statesmanship of Democrats like Capuano, Marcy Kaptur, Alan Grayson and Eric Massa. The times demand the fierce moral questioning and concern for struggling Americans displayed by the nation’s C.O.P. chair, Elizabeth Warren.

Instead, we got a lackluster, mealy-mouthed candidate hand-picked by elite, so-called Democrats and blessed by the White House’s own special “pope of the smackdown”, Rahm Emanuel (who, together with the Coakley campaign manager, made a sick spectacle of themselves on election day blaming each other long before the polls had closed. Classy! And now can we fire Rahm, please?)

Yes, we lost our 60-vote “supermajority.” As Jon Stewart neatly pointed out, it wasn’t doing us any favors. And Republicans now have the critical 41^st vote in the Senate.

And here’s where it gets interesting. When you lose a traditionally Democratic state like Massachusetts, which favored Obama by 26 points in November of 2008, it’s not a wake-up call. It’s a wake-up call delivered by a bucket of ice water. (If Democratic leadership doesn’t get how they’ve turned away the base, they’re in a coma so deep that it doesn’t matter.)

But YOU can make that ice water even more "enlivening" in three simple ways:

1. Many of you emailed me this link last night in the wake of the Coakley loss. It is Credo’s effort to amplify what Howard Dean and others have been saying since last summer. That Democrats should use reconciliation to pass a robust public option. I know there have been a lot of online petitions, but the timing on this one is critical.

2. Use the Impact of the Coakley Loss TODAY.

You think our incumbents Dianne and Nancy and Barbara didn’t watch Coakley’s loss last night and feel a bead of sweat on their tender little brows? Make some calls today (today will have more impact) and tell your Democratic leadership that you will be holding them to traditional Democratic goals (don’t let them get away with calling these “progressive”), which include universal health care, real bank reform, a jobs program, equal access to education, and all sorts of things they don’t want to acknowledge to their corporate owners as actual Democratic goals. Here are some familiar names:

Dianne Feinstein: Phone: (415) 393-0707 Fax: (415) 393-0710

Barbara Boxer: http://boxer.senate.gov/en/contact/

Nancy Pelosi: http://www.house.gov/pelosi/contact/contact.html

The White House: (make sure to tell them to fire Rahm in your message) http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact

3) Stop calling yourself a progressive.

This won’t be easy, but the fact that Corporate-owned “Democrats” keep unfairly moving the goalposts to the right has been part of the problem in promoting our policies. The biggest issues facing this country can be remedied by programs that should not be described as “progressive” because they are in a tradition of solidly Democratic goals.

Please bear in mind that most Democrats don't even know what "progressivism" is - so calling our goals progressive automatically complicates those issues. (I can recite the first act of King Lear verbatim, but I had to look up "progressivism" - so just imagine how "progressive" goals sounds to Democrats with less time on their hands.) And by calling the public option “progressive”, the corporate-owned Democrats were able to cast the centrist compromise of the public option to the left of center. (Remember that even Republicans Teddy Roosevelt and Richard Nixon supported a public health insurance option at various times in their careers, so there's nothing terribly "progressive", radical or leftist about it.)

Many thanks as always for hanging in there so long.