Shocked Democrats from Massachusetts to Washington, DC, pointed fingers at one another yesterday as they tried to find culprits for Tuesday’s staggering Senate defeat in Massachusetts.
David Plouffe, President Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, ripped losing candidate Martha Coakley and her inept team.
“I think even a mediocre campaign up there would have been successful,” he told CBS News.
But even before the polling stations closed, Coakley’s side said her poll numbers had been in free fall for weeks because of bad news associated with national Democrats, including the health-care deal-making and the fallout from the Christmas Day terror attack.
The White House tried to spin the results as an expression of outrage over continuing job losses rather than a referendum on Obama or health care.
“I think that what we saw most of all coming out of Massachusetts is there’s a tremendous amount of anger and frustration about where people are economically,” presidential spokesman Robert Gibbs told MSNBC.
But the White House was known to be angry about state Democrats’ failure to sound an alarm earlier that Brown was making a shocking surge in opinion polls.
Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, made it clear that Coakley, her pollster, Celinda Lake, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee were to blame, sources told Politico.com.
Lake acknowledged some mistakes but said administration policies hurt Coakley more. She said they undermined her case that she had spent her career as a prosecutor going after Wall Street.
“People didn’t believe it, and they didn’t vote for her because they think the Democrats in Washington are not putting up economic policies that serve Main Street and working families,” Lake said.