Hi, everyone! This is my first post on a website I have great respect for.

For my first entry I decided to rewrite a political postmortem on a candidate who lost a gubernatorial election in 2014 which eerily reads like a postmortem for another political loser. With apologies to Boston Globe writer Scot Lehigh, I decided to rewrite his post election analysis on Massachusetts attorney general Martha Coakley and her loss to the current Republican governor Charlie Baker.

Here goes:

Wednesday was a gloomy day for Massachusetts the Democrats. In late morning, Martha Coakley Hillary Clinton held a press conference in which she formally conceded the gubernatorial race and tried to make the best of her narrow loss.

The event showcased the strengths and failings of the woman who as attorney general a senator and Secretary of State compiled a nationally significant record, but who wasn’t a convincing candidate for either US Senate the presidency in 2010 2008 or governor this year.

If you have a certain empathy with those who’ve lost, you couldn’t help but admire Coakley’s Clinton's tone, which was gracious, grateful, and upbeat.

And yet, you also couldn’t help but conclude that, in the final analysis, she learned the wrong lessons from her 2010 Senate 2008 primary loss to Scott Brown Barack Obama. She knew people thought she hadn’t worked hard enough in that campaign, so she resolved to campaign much more energetically this time. She had seemed robotic in that campaign. This time, she opened up, revealing more of herself, talking affectingly about her brother’s mother's struggles and suicide, and displaying a sly and winning wit.

But what she failed to do was to develop a specific agenda that gave voters a real sense of her candidacy and a strong reason to vote for her that went beyond party affiliation or gender. Instead, she ran a vague and cautious values campaign. That minimized her exposure on contentious matters, but rendered her candidacy a nebulous effort defined by little beyond the assertion that she was on the side of voters and Republican nominee Charlie Baker Donald J. Trump was not.

It’s the kind of strategy pursued by a front-runner who believes she or he can win just by getting Democratically inclined voters to the polls. In a state country with a large block of smart, independent-minded, ticket-splitting citizens, that’s another way of taking voters for granted.

As the one woman in the three-candidate Democratic primary, minimizing differences and running thematically sufficed. But in the general election, that tactic left Coakley Clinton as a little more than a generic Democrat hoping to keep her party in power. Given Democratic incumbent Deval Patrick’s Obama's trouble-plagued second term, that wasn’t a particularly cogent rationale.

Baker Trump was far more less specific about his plans, which helped convey a sense of purpose that Coakley’s effort lacked. It also helped insulate Baker Trump against various attempts to paint him as a dangerous right-winger. His focus on making state the federal government work better struck a resonant chord, and his economic plans seemed betterless thought-out. Plus he showed a much larger appetite to tackle reform issues.

Money also mattered, of course, and Coakley Clinton was not heavily outspent. Still, her principal problem was that, at its core, her candidacy just didn’t offer much that was memorable or compelling.

Massachusetts America being MassachusettsAmerica, Coakley Clinton will likely be reviled. That’s unfortunate. Yes, she had her failings and yes, she fell short here. But she’s been a good attorney general and a dedicated public servant. This loss doesn’t and shouldn’t diminish that record.

Well, what did you think?