One of the things about starting a new job and moving to a new city is that you lose track of current events a bit. Even if you’re working in an office where you’re surrounded by media, and media people, at all times. Hell, especially in that case. You have to tune out most of it in order to get your work done. In my case, that work consists primarily of thinking up new ways to insult my boss.

So I haven’t really been paying much attention to the Coakley/Brown race in Massachusetts, which as you know is the most historic Senate race in the history of the universe. That’s why I panicked when Tucker pulled me into his office Friday afternoon and asked me to… go up to Massachusetts and follow the last few desperate days of the Coakley campaign. (You thought I was going to say something else, didn’t you?)

“Abb, abb, abb, I’ve never done anything like that before,” I stammered. “The last news story I covered, I was a sophomore in college! I was almost as drunk as I am right now! And it was a long time ago.”

“Oh, I know. That’s why it’s perfect,” he replied, completely straight-faced, voice perfectly calm, the abject madness just barely visible in his eyes.

I agreed, of course. Why not? It wouldn’t be any crazier than anything else that’s happened to me in the last 5 weeks.

So of course, it ended up not happening for various reasons. (Again: I’m not going. It would’ve been amazing. And, more to the point, terrifying. Which meant I knew I needed to do it. It just never came together, though.) But in my blind panic, I gave myself a Coakley crash course, and I figured I could get a blog post out of it. So here’s a quick primer for everybody who’s as ignorant about her as I was until 72 hours ago.

Here’s what I knew about this race before Friday:

1. Her name is Marcia Martha Coakley.
2. She is a woman.
3. She should win, because girls are smarter than boys.

That was my assumption, at least. But after doing a little reading, it turns out that my astute, in-depth political analysis was somewhat off the mark. Her campaign is failing harder than Hello, Larry.

A subtle hint as to Coakley’s incredible incompetence can be found in Michael C. Moynihan’s latest post at the Reason Hit & Run blog, “The Incredible Incompetence of Martha Coakley”:

Coakley’s defenders say that a poorly run campaign—and not skepticism of ObamaCare—is driving her poll numbers south. An endless string of gaffes is doubtless adding to her troubles, but there is significant evidence that health care and the prospect of massive budget deficits are more proximate causes.

Gaffes? Did somebody say gaffes? I love gaffes! Especially other people’s. Here are some of Coakley’s good ones, courtesy of the Washington Examiner:

• One of her campaign ads misspelled “Massachusetts”:


(Courtesy of Gateway Pundit) This is bad because it’s the name of the state she aspires to represent. Folks like it better when you spell the name of their home correctly, don’t they? Seems like that’s just a rule of thumb. If you want to spend other people’s money in a state that’s easy to spell, move to Ohio.

And if that seems nitpicky… What would you say if a Palin ad misspelled “Alaska”? That’s right, you’d laugh at her and call her a dummy. Well, there you go.

• An attack ad against Coakley’s opponent, Republican Scott Brown, superimposed his face over an image of the World Trade Center. This was accompanied by a voiceover accusing him of greed. Do I really need to explain why this is bad?
• She claimed there are no more terrorists in Afghanistan. But there are still terrorists in Afghanistan. Because it’s Afghanistan.
• Last week, John McCormack from The Weekly Standard was pushed to the sidewalk outside a restaurant on Capitol Hill by a Coakley supporter, right in front of Coakley. According to the Boston Herald, she blamed the incident on “GOP stalkers” and claimed that she was not “privy to the facts.” Here’s the picture:


Don’t the voters deserve to know that she’s legally blind?

• Responding to accusations that she hasn’t been campaigning hard enough, she said:
  

  “As opposed to standing outside Fenway Park? In the cold? Shaking hands?”’ she fires back, in an apparent reference to a Brown online video of him doing just that.

  Did you know that people in Boston really like baseball? Coakley didn’t, apparently. As Red Eye‘s Andy Levy quipped on Twitter:

  Waiting for Martha Coakley to make an Irish joke while wearing a Yankees cap.

• Speaking of making enemies for life with the entire population of Boston, she also said Curt Schilling is a Yankees fan. This was news to Schilling. And everybody in Boston. And everybody else who’s ever even heard of baseball. Coakley hasn’t accused Tom Brady of being a Colts fan yet, but we still have a few hours left in the campaign.

I’d list some more of her gaffes, but I want to post this sometime today. Thanks to that kind of stuff, Brown has come out of nowhere and is neck-and-neck with her. Which is astonishing, because he’s a Republican in Massachusettes. I mean Massachusetts.

P.S. Did I say neck-and-neck? Brown is actually leading. And people are excited about it.

P.P.S. Brown’s surge is a reaction against ObamaCare, says… Chris Matthews?? Maybe that’s why the White House is thinking of ways to cram it down our throats even if Brown wins.

P.P.P.S. Brownmentum? I guess that sounds kind of gross. But frankly, so does the alternative.

P.P.P.P.S. I can’t buy a truck, Mr. President. Or at least I couldn’t six weeks ago. I could barely afford a Tonka truck. Now I can afford at least three.

One last postscript, in honor of this news: