Massachusetts election: Where was the left?

by George J. Dance

In the wake of Republican Scott Brown's upset election victory in Massachusetts for Ted Kennedy's former Senate seat, Toronto Star columnist and blogger David Olive asked a pertinent question: Where were the progressives? Tea Party activists were all over the state (from reports I've read), providing the cadre -- the "boots on the ground" -- instrumental in Brown's win. Where were their counterparts in Coakley's campaign?

Olive points out that the Obama's progressive troops have been "AWOL" for some time: 

Vander Heuvel ... should be admonishing fellow progressives. Where were they during the Tea Party mania of August, when the tide of public opinion began to turn decisively against change. Progressives embraced Obama, or change, or both. Yet when a gaggle of liberatarians [sic] with posters depicting their champion - yes, there [sic] one best chance in a generation for significant progressive change - showed up on the Mall or at the local rec centre, where was the army of progressives with their own signs, slogans and expressions of popular will? AWOL is where.

Just hours later, at the Huffington Post, Frank Schaeffer cranked up the rhetoric a notch, blaming the entire loss on "Lefty Obama-Haters."

It is probably unfair to blame loss of liberal or progressive support for the Democrats' Masschusetts defeat – others have been arguing that what hurt them most was loss of support among white working males and seniors – but it is fair to wonder what has been happening to the President's support on the left.

Here's a Nolan Chart article I recently published on the subject:

The Left abandons Obama
http://www.nolanchart.com/article7277.html