That’s the title of Michelle Malkin’s latest op-ed:
Coakley enjoys statewide popularity because of her successes as attorney general and Middlesex district attorney. By at least one measure, her strategy is working: A Globe poll published Sunday showed her leading her Republican rival, state Senator Scott Brown, by 15 percentage points.
For many Democrats, that is too close for comfort, in a race for the seat held for so long by a Kennedy in one of the bluest states in the land. Other polls have showed the race much tighter.
Despite that, there is a subdued, almost dispassionate quality to her public appearances, which are surprisingly few. Her voice is not hoarse from late-night rallies. Even yesterday, the day after a hard-hitting debate, she had no public campaign appearances in the state.
Coakley bristles at the suggestion that, with so little time left, in an election with such high stakes, she is being too passive.
“As opposed to standing outside Fenway Park? In the cold? Shaking hands?’’ she fires back, in an apparent reference to a Brown online video of him doing just that.
It also dovetails remarkably well with this excerpt in New York magazine from John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s Game Change:
No one in the Edwardses’ political circle felt anything less than complete sympathy for Elizabeth’s plight. And yet the romance between her and the electorate struck them as ironic nonetheless—because their own relationships with her were so unpleasant that they felt like battered spouses. The nearly universal assessment among them was that there was no one on the national stage for whom the disparity between public image and private reality was vaster or more disturbing.
With her husband, she could be intensely affectionate or brutally dismissive. At times subtly, at times blatantly, she was forever letting John know that she regarded him as her intellectual inferior. She called her spouse a “hick” in front of other people and derided his parents as rednecks. One time, when a friend asked if John had read a certain book, Elizabeth burst out laughing. “Oh, he doesn’t read books,” she said. “I’m the one who reads books.”
During the 2004 race, [John Edwards’ wife] Elizabeth badgered and berated John’s advisers around the clock. She called Nick Baldick, his campaign manager, an idiot. She accused David Axelrod, his (and later Obama’s) media consultant, of lying to her and insisted that he be stripped of the responsibility for making the campaign’s TV ads. She would stay up late scouring the Web, pulling down negative stories and blog items about her husband, forwarding them with vicious messages to the communications team. She routinely unleashed profanity-laced tirades on conference calls. “Why the f*ck do you think I’d want to go sit outside a Wal-Mart and hand out leaflets?” she snarled at the schedulers.
At the Corner, Jonah Goldberg quotes the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne, and files it in the “Liberalism is Never Wrong Dept.”
I love this from E. J. Dionne today:
If you held a contest to pick the worst thing a politician could be called at this moment, my nominee would be Wall Street Liberal.
That label has everything. I personally despise the way the noble liberal idea has been devalued, but face it: Conservatives have had great success in discrediting liberalism, to the point that most liberals dare not call themselves by their own name.
If you pay attention, this is an almost universal sentiment among liberal writers like Dionne. Liberals didn’t do anything to discredit liberalism, conservatives did! And just to be clear, Dionne doesn’t mean conservatives discredited liberalism by pointing out its very real flaws and mistakes. No, no. Conservatives have made liberalism into a dirty word, unfairly, by deploying evil hitmen like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove.
It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the fact that liberals did the damage themselves, because liberalism is never wrong.
Liberalism’s inherent salt-of-the-earth modesty is what keeps it so sane and grounded in reality.
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