Sure enough, Boston Globe columnist Brian McGrory has lashed out at Coakley's strategy in a column just posted, Where's Martha Coakley? :
McGrory also notes that Coakley is missing in action on the campaign trail, with no public events scheduled today. This also seems to be a pattern. Tomorrow Coakley will be attending a fundraiser; not for herself, but for Newton, MA state representative Ruth Balser.If you're a registered voter in Massachusetts, your friendly Democratic Senate candidate, Martha Coakley, is sticking her thumb in your eye.
Coakley, in exquisitely diva-like form, is refusing all invitations to debate her Republican opponent in the race, Scott Brown, unless a third-party candidate with no apparent credentials is included on the stage. She may also require a crystal bowl of orange-only M&Ms in her dressing room, but we haven't gotten that far yet. Her demands have led to an astonishing result: there will be just one -- that's one -- live televised debate in the Boston media market this general election season....
This is all part of a Coakley pattern. When she ran for attorney general, she didn't allow even the Republican candidate on a debate stage. In fact, she refused to debate at all....
In Washington, senators don't get to dodge their opponents. Right now, dodging looks like the Coakley way.
Coakley either has internal polls showing she is 30 points ahead, or she figures the "D" next to her name at the voting booth will be enough. We'll see soon enough.
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Another reason not to debate: sooner or later some of Martha's dirt could come to the surface, e.g., Fells Acres, Keith Winfield (curling iron rapist), The Big Dig tunnel collapse (shameless corruption and cronyism of the very worst kind), John Geoghan, etc. etc.
ReplyDeleteShe also raises doubts about her motivation for the job by taking a vacation in the middle of a 6 week campaign. If being a US Senator is really important to her, would she do that?
ReplyDeleteI don't know what's going on over at the Boston Globe but they are just hammering Coakley. What's happened to the dutiful little democrat water carriers I've come to be disgusted by all these years?
ReplyDeleteMartha & Scott (oh, yeah and Joe Kennedy, too) debated on a local talk radio station.
ReplyDeleteThe link for the debate is here:
http://www.969bostontalks.com/senatedebate.aspx
Martha did a very good job of confirming why she should never be elected to the Senate.
I'm headed to the local Brown office after dinner to do some calling. Momentum and enthusiasm are both on the rise!
Let me suggest another possible motivation for her not debating unless the third candidate, Joe Kennedy is included.
ReplyDeleteDuring the recent Gubernatorial campaign in New Jersey, you may recall that an "independent" named Chris Daggett was in the race, one who in the end turned out to be nothing but a stalking horse for Jon Corzine.
In the fall, several polls came out showing Daggett gaining "increasing" strength, one of which even suggested that he had broken through the 20% mark!
In fact, the state's leading daily paper, normally strongly Democrat-leaning, the Star-Ledger, heartily endorsed Mr. Daggett with a lot of fanfare.
Yet, Daggett ended up with less than 6% of the vote.
A day or two before the election, a story by Matt Friedman on "Politickernj" revealed that the Democratic State Committee had been making multiple robo-calls out to Republican voting households in a heavily Republican county (Somerset), enthusiastically urging those "R" voters to vote for Daggett.
It later turned out the calls were made to Republican households throughout the State. And the Democrat State Party Chairman flat-out lied to Friedman for several days about his state party funding the calls (even though there was a disclaimer at the end). Friedman's ultimate confirming source was an unnamed DSC staffer who finally admitted to Friedman that it was true.
Only that ONE news-gathering organization filed a written story, and AP did no follow-up, which would have appeared in papers statewide. But the story was instead quickly circulated by blogs, and heavily mentioned on talk radio shows.
Christie won by nearly 4%, while Daggett got less than 6% of the vote. But the Democrat plan was to suppress Republican voting strength, while pumping up the prospects of the "independent."
Just watch the Democrats in MA also try in some way to "manipulate" the vote!
Because of the strength Brown has with Independents, it makes sense that Coakley will only debate inf Kennedy is there. Watch the Democrats also try to fund some way to generating independent interest in Kennedy -- to draw independents away from Brown.