In 2010, Martha Coakley was running for Senate in a special election, and she was asked by a reporter why it appeared that she was taking it easy after the primary.
Her response is a fail for the ages, “As opposed to standing outside Fenway Park? In the cold? Shaking hands?”
She lost the election ………
For what was Teddy Kennedy’s seat ………
In Massachusetts, the only state to go for McGovern in 1972 ………
Against a Republican.
Well, it appears that every single senior official in the Clinton campaign decided to do exactly what Martha Coakley did:
Everybody could see Hillary Clinton was cooked in Iowa. So when, a week-and-a-half out, the Service Employees International Union started hearing anxiety out of Michigan, union officials decided to reroute their volunteers, giving a desperate team on the ground around Detroit some hope.
They started prepping meals and organizing hotel rooms.
SEIU — which had wanted to go to Michigan from the beginning, but been ordered not to — dialed Clinton’s top campaign aides to tell them about the new plan. According to several people familiar with the call, Brooklyn was furious.
Turn that bus around, the Clinton team ordered SEIU. Those volunteers needed to stay in Iowa to fool Donald Trump into competing there, not drive to Michigan, where the Democrat’s models projected a 5-point win through the morning of Election Day.
Michigan organizers were shocked. It was the latest case of Brooklyn ignoring on-the-ground intel and pleas for help in a race that they felt slipping away at the end.
“They believed they were more experienced, which they were. They believed they were smarter, which they weren’t,” said Donnie Fowler, who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee during the final months of the campaign. “They believed they had better information, which they didn’t.”………
Nor did Brooklyn ask for help from some people who’d been expecting the call. Sanders threw himself into campaign appearances for Clinton throughout the fall, but familiar sources say the campaign never asked the Vermont senator’s campaign aides for help thinking through Michigan, Wisconsin or anywhere else where he had run strong. It was already November when the campaign finally reached out to the White House to get President Barack Obama into Michigan, a state that he’d worked hard and won by large margins in 2008 and 2012. On the Monday before Election Day, Obama added a stop in Ann Arbor, but that final weekend, the president had played golf on Saturday and made one stop in Orlando on Sunday, not having been asked to do anything else. Michigan senior adviser Steve Neuman had been asking for months to get Obama and the first lady on the ground there. People who asked for Vice President Joe Biden to come in were told that top Clinton aides weren’t clearing those trips.
………
When top aides to the Trump campaign mapped out the best-case scenarios for election night, they always fell short of 270, and Michigan was always the state that they couldn’t see a way through.
Trump’s last stop of the election was a massive rally in Michigan that went on past midnight, his campaign homing in on Trump’s chances there largely from nervousness it sensed coming out of Brooklyn.
Walking out at the end, Trump turned to his running mate, Mike Pence, almost confused: “This doesn’t feel like second place,” he said, according to a person familiar with the conversation.
The party establishment gave Coakley a 2nd chance, and she lost the governor’s race ………
In Massachusetts, the only state to go for McGovern in 1972 ………
Against a Republican.
The Democratic Party establishment did the same thing when Clinton snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in 2008 in the primary, when she just could not bring herself to apologize for voting for Bush’s war in Iraq, and they gave her another chance.
And she lost to an inverted traffic cone, aided and abetted by a Clintonite political machine that was too outlandishly incompetent to be the model for a Rowan Atkinson Britcom.
Fire them all ……… Out of a cannon ……… And into the sun.