Many blame candidate Martha Coakley herself, whose campaign they say was caught napping after last month's primary. Finger-pointing begins for Dems

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — As voters head to the polls in Massachusetts, nervous Democrats have already begun to blame one another for putting at risk the Senate seat Ted Kennedy held for more than 40 years.

Many angry Democrats blame their candidate, state Attorney General Martha Coakley, for running a sluggish campaign that let Republican Scott Brown set the contours of the race.


Some Democratic strategists lay the fault at the feet of President Barack Obama, saying he should have done more to sell the party’s agenda.

And in private conversations, Hill sources say White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel has blamed Coakley, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Democratic pollster Celinda Lake for failing to see Brown’s surge in time to stop it.

“With the legislative and political stakes so high, it’s unbelievable that the Senate committee and White House let this race get so out of hand,” said one senior Washington Democrat. “There’s a lot of blame to go around. Martha Coakley is only one of the problems here.”

Coakley is at the center of the criticism. Democrats complain that her campaign was caught napping after last month’s primary — and that Brown was able to use the pause to shape the race.

“A malaise set in, and there was a failure to take advantage of the opportunity to define yourself the next day” after the primary, said longtime Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.). “You thank people for the primary and then begin to define the next six weeks.”

Added Neal: “Going dark was not a great idea.”

Although DSCC Chairman Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) was still predicting victory Monday, even he conceded that it would have been “better” if Coakley had laid out the differences between the candidates earlier. He said Democrats have learned a crucial lesson: that even in very blue states, Democrats should expect a “volatile” environment with a “tough” electorate — and “you can’t afford not to be aggressive.”

“You have to define your opponent before they define themselves,” Menendez said. “In Brown’s case, he’s working hard to try to disguise himself.”

Menendez learned that the race was tightening about a week and a half ago, when independent pollsters returned results showing the race much tighter than Democratic polls had been portraying. He acted quickly — unleashing more than $2.5 million into the race, including $1.4 million in television ads in the past week alone, according to sources familiar with the effort.

The DSCC also dispatched senior staff to take tighter control of the Coakley campaign, bolster her get-out-the-vote efforts, improve her fundraising and enhance coordination between the White House and the campaign. As a result, the tone of her ads and her stump speech were sharpened in an attempt to define Brown in the minds of the voters as a far-right Republican out of touch with the state’s mainstream voters.

“Look, we’re never in place of a campaign; a candidate has to run their own race,” Menendez told POLITICO. “When the alarm bells went off, we sprung into action.”

Emanuel has told his confidants that those bells rang too late — and that both Menendez and Lake, who declined to be interviewed, should have been moving sooner.

But the White House itself is facing a barrage of criticism among Democrats, with many saying that Obama has let the GOP frame the issues — particularly health care — in the minds of many independent voters, including those who elected Republican governors in Virginia and New Jersey in the fall.

“We lost independents in Virginia, we lost independents in New Jersey and we’re losing independents in Massachusetts,” said one Democratic campaign strategist. “The only thing those three states have in common is Obama.”

The Democratic National Committee, which spent at least $750,000 almost exclusively on get-out-the-vote efforts, has also faced criticism for not dispatching its resources early enough.

Democrats recognize the difficulty any candidate would have had, given the political headwinds blowing against the party at the moment. Still, they argue that the race was still very much winnable and that a veteran pol such as Rep. Michael Capuano — who was trounced by Coakley in the primary — would not have let Brown define the race.

Instead, they complain that Coakley effectively ceded to her opponent the day-to-day news coverage — what political pros call “earned media” — by not taking him seriously enough until it was too late.

Coakley was so confident, noted one fuming Democrat, that she even stopped the critical task of identifying supporters on the phone following the primary — the very foundation on which she should have structured her turnout operation.

Brown, a little-known Republican state senator, used the opening to cultivate a regular-guy image, most vividly rendered in what became the campaign’s defining ad — that of the candidate driving around Massachusetts in his well-worn GMC truck.

And while Brown, who is actually an attorney and is married to a local news broadcaster, was defining his just-folks persona, Coakley was committing a series of gaffes that made her seem politically out of touch or at least tone-deaf.

Asked about why she was not spending more time with voters, Coakley jabbed at Brown for having greeted hockey fans who attended a special outdoor game between the Boston Bruins and the Philadelphia Flyers.

“As opposed to standing outside Fenway Park? In the cold? Shaking hands?” she said.

Such one-on-one interaction with voters is the lifeblood of this state’s politics, and mocking the idea of braving the cold at Boston’s iconic baseball stadium seemed bizarre given the tens of thousands of voters who did just that to see the game.

“She had a humanity deficit as a cold campaigner, but they didn’t try to warm her up — or, instead, define the race about big issues — and instead ended up with a referendum on likability,” said one Massachusetts Democratic veteran.

J.B. Poersch, executive director of the DSCC, acknowledged that Democrats didn’t do enough to portray Coakley as an “independent voice” for Massachusetts. That allowed Brown to grab the “change” mantle — and to appeal to voters upset over the direction of the country.

“We just didn’t use the primary to set her up as a change agent enough,” Poersch said.

But Poersch strongly defended the committee’s efforts, saying “we, more than anybody, represented the difference in spending.”

“We were the principal funders of her field program,” Poersch said. “And my political director was side by side with her campaign manager” doing voter turnout.

Party officials say Monday’s debate and some subsequent Coakley gaffes may have done her in.

When moderator David Gergen asked Brown about the “Kennedy seat,” the Republican shot back that it was actually “the people’s seat.” The line became a populist rallying cry for both Brown and his supporters.

Coakley, meanwhile, hurt herself at the debate by suggesting that there were not currently any terrorists in Afghanistan.

More missteps followed, each of which amplified her weaknesses: leaving the state to attend a lobbyist-packed Washington fundraiser — which became a Brown ad; suggesting Catholics with strong views on contraception shouldn’t work in emergency rooms; appearing not to know that former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling was, in fact, a player for the Red Sox.

A candidate who was not a part of the Beacon Hill boys club, had no ties to Washington and had little in the way of a relationship with the Kennedys somehow managed to be cast as the ultimate insider.

“Massachusetts isn’t insulated from the anti-incumbent sentiment nationwide, but this was a race that a competent candidate would have won without panic or palpitations,” said a Massachusetts Democratic hand.