TheNuze.com

To fill the seat vacated by the passing of Sen. Edward Kennedy after nearly fifty years of historic public service, the Democratic party managed to find an appropriately historic candidate, Martha Coakley, by relying once again on their time-honored tradition of anointing unelectably off-putting Massachusetts liberals as their standard bearers.  However, Coakley surprised even her own supporters with her nearly supernatural ability to summon the combined aloofness, ineptitude, sense of entitlement, and wholesale lack of charisma of previous Democratic champions from the Bay State like Mike Dukakis and John Kerry - and she triumphantly used it all to achieve something remarkable.  With the backing of one of the most entrenched state political machines in the country and President Obama himself personally campaigning for her on the eve of Martin Luther King Day, she was able to skillfully blow the double-digit head start that she was given by default and turn a would-be cakewalk into something truly memorable.  She never gave up, never accepted that she couldn't snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and in the end she accomplished the seemingly impossible - she managed to lose, to lose as a Massachusetts Democrat in Massachusetts itself, to lose the seat Ted Kennedy had held for nearly fifty years, and to lose it to a Republican former male centerfold whose primary qualification for being a U.S. Senator appears to be that he owns a pickup truck.  And she managed to do so in such a way as to cause the maximum amount of damage at the national level - further weakening a once-popular President on the first anniversary of his inauguration and potentially derailing the entire health care initiative that the late Senator had hoped would be part of his legacy.  Adding to the irony, the complacency that has lead to this tradition of the Democrats putting forward bafflingly ineffectual candidates is the direct result of the decades of unchallengeable political dominance enjoyed by the Kennedys.