I’ve been avoiding hopping on the “Martha Coakley is a terrible candidate” bandwagon since (a) I’m reasonably confident she’s going to win and (b) it reeks of somewhat lame precriminations spin. The reality, though, is that the substantive consequences for the progressive agenda of Massachusetts electing a Senate who’s sworn to oppose the main progressive ideas on health care and climate change are so dire as to render spin about the “meaning” of the election irrelevant.

Dana Goldtsein has a great column on the subject of Coakley’s weak campaign and the larger context of women’s groups needing to recruit candidates who have more of a flare for the game.

It looks like Massachusetts Attorney-General Martha Coakley has a sizable lead in the race to replace Ted Kennedy in the Senate. Among other things, this no doubt reflects the fact that she has the advantage of statewide name recognition and having run a statewide campaign for AG. Of course the flipside of that is that she has relatively little record on issues of national significance—before she was the state’s Attorney-General, she was a District Attorney and obviously the job of a prosecutor bears relatively little resemblance to the job of a United States Senator.

By contrast, her main rival, MA-8 congressman Mike Capuano, has a ten year record on national issues. Basically it’s a record of being really, really liberal. He’s member 18.5 in the 111th House, he was 30.5 in the 110th House, 40.5 in the 109th, 10 in the 108th, and 8 in the 107th—firmly on the left side of the Democratic caucus. He’s the former mayor of Somerville, a dense walkable urban area, who likes to talk about mass transit, he’s pushing from the left on Afghanistan and Iraq, he favors single payer health care but says he won’t “let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

In other words, to those who care to look it up he’s a known quantity and very much a progressive. I hope Coakley’s greater name recognition and front-runner status won’t let her coast into the senate without being made to address these kinds of issues in some detail.

Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley has become the first person to officially announce that she’ll run to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat in the United States Senate. Tim Fernholz did an informative Coakley profile this past spring, focusing on her work taking on predatory lenders.

From where I sit in Washington, DC what’s wanted in a Kennedy successor is someone who’s:

(a) progressive,
(b) effective, and
(c) like to stay in office a long time and grow up to become a powerful committee chair

On (b) the fact that Coakley’s background in public service is entirely as a prosecutor rather than a legislator is a bit less than idea. On (c) she’s 56 which makes her younger than six of the Massachusetts House members. The exceptions are Steve Lynch, who’s 54 and anti-choice, and Jim McGovern who’s only 49. Women, of course, have an edge in the longevity department, and I don’t know anything about McGovern’s record.