As Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley continues her Joyless Pursuit of a U.S. Senate Seat, the lack-of-personality profiles just keep piling up.
Latest entry: Adrian Walker’s Boston Globe Metro column headlined “A charisma shortage.” It describes Coakley as stiff, mechanical, and devoid of sizzle.
Me, I just call Coakley bloodless.
Exhibit A: This passage from Walker’s piece:
When I asked what she thought would be most challenging in moving from attorney general to senator, Coakley’s response was mildly surprising. “I think the transition from district attorney to attorney general was a much bigger transition,’’ she said.
Mildly surprising? That’s downright dismissable out of hand, as was Coakley’s response at the start of the fix-is-in-for-Mike-Capuano Senate primary debate last month, in which Coakley claimed she first thought of running for Ted Kennedy’s vacant Senate seat right after the Big Guy died.
Puh-leeze. Coakley has been planning this run ever since Kennedy called in sick two years ago.
Martha Coakley can ignore reality all she wants. Massachusetts voters shouldn’t.
Campaign Outsider 
Just a quick reminder to all my fellow cynics when it comes to politicians: the political system as it is now construed makes it virtually impossible for anyone with integrity to operate based only upon what is right. Anyone who gets into politics – and wants to get something done – has to make concessions in order to work with the cast of dysfunctional actors that get into positions of influence and make such a mess of the world. So we can either just throw our hands up in the air and give up, or try to put into office the people that we think will do the best job of holding on to their integrity – and thank them profusely for being willing to put up with the political stench around them as they try to get something positive done. With that cynical perspective as a preface, Martha Coakley is one of the few people I have worked up the energy to actually support over the past many years. She was a classmate of mine at Williams, so I have known her long before she knew she was going into politics. It would be very hard to find anyone who knew her then who didn’t like and respect her. From where I sit, she is doing as good a job of holding on to her integrity as anyone could do in this awful age of narcissistic commentators and self-righteous bloggers, mostly people who seem to lack the capacity for self-awareness, critical thinking and complex thought. From where I sit, Martha has actually been able to hold onto ideals that inform her decision making, and a capacity to reflect on what might serve the greater good, rather than what might be politically expedient and self-serving. There are those who will only scrutinize the political concessions that the system demands and who will speak about Martha as if they really knew something about her. They don’t. Because I have known Martha for a long time, I see the price that she has to pay to get in there – in the manure pile of politics – to try to move a complicated world in a better direction. Don’t agree with her vision of that better world? Fine. Make your voice heard. We always need lots of perspectives to keep us from getting blinded by our own perceptual bias. But remember our founding fathers, when they devised this political system, held out hope that people would engage with each other based upon thought and reflection concerning what would keep our shared republic strong, rather than upon primitive and self-serving emotions. I have thought about it and I’m supporting Martha.