THE BLAME GAME PERSISTS

All of a sudden, after the race was lost, advocacy groups are assessing the reasons. They didn't do enough but can now blithely blame Coakley for not including the Hispanics who had supported Obama and on and on the buck passing goes.

Quoting from MONICA BRADY-MYEROV Published January 21, 2010, "Janet Murguia, president of the National Council of La Raza, shifts the blame to Coakley for not engaging Hispanics who helped elect President Obama. “My sense was it was not an energized campaign and we certainly didn’t see the outreach to the Latino community that you would have expected in order to generate the support and mobilization that could have made a difference,” she said.

Immigrant advocates say if Coakley mobilized the 13 percent of registered voters in Massachusetts who are naturalized citizens or children of immigrants, it might have made a difference. There are also regrets from womens groups who say Coakley missed her chance at making history as the first female senator from Massachusetts."

"National Organization of Women President Terry O’Neill, speaking from a noisy room in the Capitol, said, Coakley didn’t use her gender in the race, and O’Neill wishes she had. “We made it very clear, from our perspective, in our advocacy that her gender mattered to us and was very much a plus,” she said." If she had used her gender more and lost, it would have been believed that she was trying to make too much of it. Despite Coakley’s attempt near the end of the race to make reproductive rights a key issue, it didn’t resonate with voters, said Cecile Richards, who heads the Planned Parenthood Federation of America."

Everyone's budget is small, especially all the non-profits, but it is clear to me that more ads, better timed, which suggests more money spent, seduced voters into thinking that there is a magic bullet out there. Just as Bush seduced voters with his back yard barbecue, Nixon with his dog, voters made the hypocrisy and lack of loyalty to their own past voting clear in the way they bit for the 'change' they see is to go backwards to more Bush years. Go figure! As the Blue Collar Comics state, there is no cure for stupidity...they certainly are right on. Will the Democrats volley back in time for the next elections? I guess there is nothing to do but to hold one's intellectual breath until then.