It has nothing to do with healthcare or baseball players. It has to do with people being frightened and angry. It has to do with a general sense that more of the same (in this case voting in another Democrat) gets us nowhere. Something that should be understood about Massachusetts is that our state legislature is mighty arrogant and they have no concern about waving that in our faces. This was a Massachusetts message and for the most part it was to put the state legislators on notice as they have become fairly openly despised. To tell you the truth as Brown gave his victory speech I bet some of the people that voted for him wondered what the hell they had just done as he pretty much sounded a lot like he was reading from the Bush/Cheney playbook.

If Republicans take anything from the Brown victory I hope it is the fact that he ran a clean muckfree campaign and he let the Democrats sling the shit this time. Here in Massachusetts that really backfired for the Democrats because if anybody had bothered to ask it would have been pretty damn easy to discover the last thing voters in this state wanted to deal with was more mudslinging.

Here were the big things:

1. Coakley seemed to think she did not need to go out amongst the people and campaign. Brown was out there nonstop and so were his people and supporters. She seemed to lack any kind of advertising, Brown's signs were everywhere.

2. Coakley lost the debate big which led to pure panic and the arrival of the DNC and even our president. The DNC turned the campaign into a total shitstorm of Rovian proportions which made Coakley look ugly and desperate. She reeked like a loser, Brown looked and acted like he already won.

3. Brown and his campaign stayed on a positive message and he constantly soft peddled the fact he was a Republican. He referred to himself constantly as an independent and intentionally stayed away from making remarks or taking positions that might make him seem Republican. He did a great job with this and I don't know how but even managed to get people to overlook that Mitt Romney was crouching behind him all the time.

4. In general it pissed off a lot of Massachusetts voters that this Senate seat seemed to be taken for granted by the Democrats and when you have a general public that feels they have been constantly taken advantage of by these politicians...well...things were ripe for a voter revolt. If you want a message it was an anti-incumbent message that was being sent.

Obama beat Clinton because she looked ugly and vicious and in this election Brown won because the Democrats made Coakley look ugly and vicious. Obama beat McCain in part because the McCain campaign turned ugly and vicious. I hope this is a message that is sinking in because people don't want to have to sift through this shit anymore.