Few were as disappointed as Coakley herself, who felt she had let down her party and her people. But she was back at her desk the next day, and two days later she was out campaigning again, this time to keep her job as attorney general. Ten months after her crushing defeat to Scott Brown, she was reelected with 63 percent of the vote.
Coakley has spent the past two years trying to restore her reputation. She recently spoke to the Globe about her regrets on the Senate race and her efforts to become the best attorney general in the country - a goal she feels she has achieved through landmark lawsuits, settlements, and investigations involving the mortgage crisis, spiraling energy and health care costs, and public corruption.
This month the National Journal wrote: “Coakley has quietly built up an impressive record as attorney general in Massachusetts. I wonder if we will see her on the national scene again at some point.’’
“What a difference two years makes,’’ says Coakley, 58. Dressed in a stylish suit and gold jewelry, she seems relaxed and confident in her 20th-floor corner office with sweeping views of Boston. Desk-bound at work, she’ll walk up four to eight flights of stairs at a time, the better to keep in shape for the skiing that she enjoys with her husband, retired police deputy superintendent Thomas F. O’Connor Jr.
Two years ago, Coakley was far from relaxed and confident. “The thing I feel worst about is people’s perception, and the media, that somehow I felt entitled to the seat, that I hadn’t worked hard enough, that I took it for granted,’’ Coakley says. “I knew if I was going to run for reelection I had to face it head-on among constituents.’’
And they were angry constituents. Coakley showed up at Democratic caucuses and shook hands at malls, acknowledging her mistakes, chief among them underestimating the anger over the economy and the national health care bill.
