I hope Martha Coakley will win the Massachusetts Special Election today, I really do.

As I voted for her this morning, I was struck by a feeling that she needs all of us to pull her feet out of the fire and that, to some extent, she has earned this close race through her lackluster campaign. This is not to say she won’t be a good senator – she’s been a good attorney general. She simply isn’t experienced as a politician running for election, and she appeared to somewhat take this election for granted once she’d cleared the primary.

To the Coakley campaign, Scott Brown probably appeared at first  to be an upstart without a chance. Martha Coakley’s campaign missed the mood of many Massachusetts residents – residents tired of the bad economy, worried about what health care reform will actually mean to them and impatient with the Obama administration. Brown painted Coakley as an insider and himself as some odd combination of good lookin’ cowboy and down-home neighbor. In fact, he’s more conservative than is a match for Massachusetts. Boston.com published a January 10 article citing important examples: “Last week he embraced waterboarding. Last month he expressed skepticism that climate change is being caused by humans. He has even denounced two national proposals that he supported in Massachusetts as a lawmaker – mandatory health care coverage and a cap-and-trade system to cut global warming gases.” Great.

Martha Coakley, I hope you win… despite yourself.

Sarah, can we hear you?

You’re right if you think I’m picking on Sarah Palin. I don’t like her, and I really don’t like the idea of her being one breath from the presidency.

You know it’s bad when the press threatens not to cover Palin’s events at the UN conference because access to her has been so severely limited that journalists are angry and disgusted. Essentially, Palin’s handlers are allowing only photo opportunities, no questions.

There are two big problems with this:

One, she’s running to be vice president and providing only scripted comments at planned events means that her words come from someone else and that we rarely see how she thinks on her feet… or what she really thinks when left to her own wits.

Two, the reason this is happening is that the McCain campaign doesn’t WANT us to see how she thinks… or what she knows… or, perhaps most of all, what she doesn’t know.