Is Coakley the blue Palin?

[sgrizzle]

When a father walked in on his son being molested, the father punched the molester and retrieved his child. Coakley's response?

"We can't have people taking the law into their own hands. The father should have waited for the police."

Her grasp on foreign policy is astute:

During a January 11 debate at the University of Massachusetts, after the moderator asked Coakley how the United States can succeed in Afghanistan, she replied that she was "not sure there is a way to succeed. If the goal was -- and the mission in Afghanistan was to go in because we believed that the Taliban was giving harbor to terrorists. We supported that. I supported that goal. They're gone. They're not there anymore."

Although she does say (kinda like Palin's claim to being "close to Russia) that visiting her sister overseas prepares her for the intracicies of dealing with international issues.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZRzsFjykGA


Also, it looks like she hired the same PR firm Dewey used..

[Red Arrow]

Nobody is expected to know how to spell words correctly anymore.  Are you trying to destroy their self-esteem?

[guido911]

Here is a video of a Coakley supporter (allegedly) admitting he was paid to attend an event:

Also, at the end of that event it is alleged that a Coakley staffer shoved down a reporter.

[we vs us]

Is Coakley the new Palin?  We won't know until she quits in the middle of her first term to do a book tour.

[guido911]

In ERs, Catholics need not apply:

[guido911]

This ad, brought to you by the likes of usruf & wevsus:

[sgrizzle]

In ERs, Catholics need not apply:

Catholics shouldn't work in emergency rooms, we should let guidance counselors know.

[guido911]

Catholics shouldn't work in emergency rooms, we should let guidance counselors know.

I've been thinking about this. Why don't we just shut down St. Francis & St. John's and all other evil Catholic medical institutions, that way we will not have to worry about conscientious refusals to provide care. 

[FOTD]

Hey, isn't that candidate a former Playgirl fold out male model?

Change has come to America....

[USRufnex]

I actually liked Paul Cellucci back when I lived in beantown.
Didn't agree with him on some issues, but found myself agreeing with him more often than the Dem.

Massachusetts Republicans and Oklahoma Democrats aren't that far apart....

Oh..... "is Coakley the blue Palin?"

Nope.

If it weren't for the ghost of Ted Kennedy, Coakley would already be toast...

[Gaspar]

I actually liked Paul Cellucci back when I lived in beantown.
Didn't agree with him on some issues, but found myself agreeing with him more often than the Dem.

Massachusetts Republicans and Oklahoma Democrats aren't that far apart....

Oh..... "is Coakley the blue Palin?"

Nope.

If it weren't for the ghost of Ted Kennedy, Coakley would already be toast...

THERE'S A TED KENNEDY GHOST?    HIDE YOUR SCOTCH!

[Gaspar]

Coakley is a smart woman, she's an Attorney General.  She knows the law and she knows politics.  Her only problem is that she is also very liberal.  This does not make her bad, it just makes her more likely to make liberal comments.

Typically in elections, liberals move further to the middle to be successful and conservatives move further to the right.  Liberals that shift their views to a more centrist tone are far more effective than their fringe counterparts.  Conversely, conservatives that embrace centrist ideas tend to alienate their base and jeopardize their integrity.  We saw this in the last election.

Coakley is attempting to run with the liberal mantle of Ted Kennedy without a centrist shift.  This opens her to speak her mind, and her mind is liberal. 

"We need to get taxes up!"  This is a standard liberal mantra, however the majority of her constituents are hurting and MA has a huge number of small business owners.  Running on a platform of raising taxes will not be helpful to any candidate during this economic cycle no matter how left-leaning the state is.  This comment is what I think sealed her fate.

"We believed that the Taliban was giving harbor to terrorists. We supported that. I supported that. They're gone. They're not there anymore." Again, this reflects a standard liberal thought process. . .  once a threat is out of sight, it is time to devote attention to social issues.  This has been a good policy for the left recently (during the Bush years), however, as seen last week with Afghanistan, it tends to backfire politically in times of more relaxed security policy. 

Ideologically she is following her heart.  She is not campaigning.  I admire her for running on principal rather than re-inventing herself for an election.  However this will not be an election a liberal can win.

[guido911]

Apparently Curt Schilling is now a Yankee fan. Huh? Gasman, is this another product of Coakley being a liberal or just plain, ol' fashion idiocy.

[we vs us]

MA is usually a very liberal state and Kennedy's old seat should be reliably blue but Coakley's tin ear and the fact that her campaign, for whatever reason, got a very late start hasn't helped her.  Couple that with a general malaise amongst democratic voters along with the standard trend away from the majority party in midterms elections and you have what's shaping up to be an unsettling squeaker for dems. 

I don't think that her ideology is a liability.  This is MA, after all.  If she was in PA, ok, I'd agree, but she's not. She's a liberal trying to represent a liberal district.  She's battling her own personal unappeal/disorganization and some macro trends, but her ideology isn't the problem.

[USRufnex]

"We need to get taxes up!"   This is a standard liberal mantra, however the majority of her constituents are hurting and MA has a huge number of small business owners.  Running on a platform of raising taxes will not be helpful to any candidate during this economic cycle no matter how left-leaning the state is.  This comment is what I think sealed her fate.

Coakley:
"We need to get people back to work. We need to get taxes up, and we'll start to chip away at that deficit, because individuals and the country, my colleague in California Jerry Brown said, we've all been spending too much money we don't have on stuff we don't need." Coakley went on to say: "[H]ow do we get you back to work, and how do we bring that deficit down? Ultimately by being more careful on how we're spending our money as a country and as individuals. We can do it. We've done it before."

Don't tell me what a "standard liberal mantra" is and isn't..... starts to remind me of circa 1999 Eddie Gaylord and The Daily Oklahoman, with their mind-numbing insistence that every national dem is a pinko-commie liberal...

"I'm always encouraging my students to read newspapers," says former Oklahoman city editor Randy Splaingard, a journalism professor at Oklahoma City University, "but I never require that they read the Oklahoman. The Constitution forbids cruel and unusual punishment."

Wall Street Journal advances distortion of Coakley's remarks on taxes to promote GOP attack
http://mediamatters.org/research/201001110020

There's more than one way to "get taxes up."  And no, she's not running on that as a "mantra."

One way is to "get taxes up" is to actually raise taxes.... another is to find ways to encourage economic development which raise tax revenues.... another way to "get taxes up" is to put people back to work....

All hail the awesome power of the out-of-context soundbite!