Woe Is Martha Coakley


It’s tough to be Martha Coakley, apparently. “The political insiders, the big-money Super PACs, the old boys club—they’re all against her,” laments the narrator of her first televised ad of the gubernatorial campaign. Poor Martha. Woe is she.

It must be difficult, being her, waking up every day the underdog, fighting against these powerful forces that have her leading by a mere 30 percentage points in the primary with four weeks to go, and by double-digits in the general election. It must be so hard to face the enemies who held her last re-election vote margin slightly below a two-to-one ratio, and who somehow failed to prevent her from breezing to the Democratic nomination in every state-wide election she has entered.

Imagine the hopelessness and despair that would overtake a lesser candidate, faced with such deep-pocketed foes that her main competitor in the Democratic primary will be hard-pressed to maintain an ad campaign for the remaining four weeks, her other primary foe has yet to begin TV advertising, her general-election nemesis has yet to advertise, and the only negative advertising aimed at her to date has been a tame half-million-dollar Super PAC campaign that appears to be exiting the battlefield.

Not quite the $20 million raised by Scott Brown in 2012, as powerful moneyed interests tried to fend off Elizabeth Warren. But whatever.

I suppose the ploy here is A) graft Coakley onto the popular, populist, anti-Wall Street image of Warren, and B) position Coakley as a Beacon Hill outsider before Charlie Baker starts lumping her in as part of the Beacon Hill problem.

And this is hardly a big message push; the campaign has reportedly done a very small buy so far for this ad—in yet another sign that these alleged powerful interests don’t really have her the slightest bit worried, regardless of what the ad itself says.