Coakley destroys Wu and Harding 'On the Record.'

After a full day of blowout football, and just before the Angels continue to upset the Yankees, I was able to take a look at this morning's episode of "On the Record" on WCVB's website.

This week's guest was Attorney General Martha Coakley, and she faced an onslaught from Channel 5 political reporter Janet Wu on the question of whether or not she violated FEC regulations.  Coakley was adamant throughout the interview that the complaint the Mass GOP filed with the Federal Election Commission would be thrown out, and "flat out denied" charges that her campaign did anything illegal in it's pre-September spending.

Wu continued to press, going so far as to imply that Coakley has "had to reimburse your state campaign" as a result of the FEC complaint.  In fact, what Coakley's federal campaign committee did back in September was to purchase a variety of campaign materials from her state committee (including lawn signs, bumper stickers, etc.), something that is pretty routine and, in this case, was clearly planned out from the beginning.  That doesn't mean the campaign wasn't up and running a bit early, but to suggest that Coakley has been forced to acknowledge any wrongdoing is incorrect.

The interview then turned toward Coakley's non-existent voting record, with Wu questioning how voters can judge her for the Senate since she will be down in DC "trying to figure out where you stand on the issues."  Janet apparently doesn't think much of voters in Massachusetts if she thinks they would vote for Coakley (or any candidate) if they didn't have positions on issues.

In the three episodes of this show I have watched (I skipped Christy), I have continually been struck by how the guests just run circles around the hosts, who are clearly overmatched.  Even Pagliuca, who is a neophyte in the political world, handled the Channel 5 team easily.

Coakley simply steamrolled the hosts today, operating at such a higher level than either Harding or Wu that I was reminded of the early scenes in Frost/Nixon (both the movie and the play - which I saw at the Colonial Theatre earlier this year and highly recommend), when the former President just toyed with poor David Frost.

I haven't exactly piled praise on Martha over the past 7 weeks, but I thought she was stellar in this interview.  It will be very interesting to see if she carries that performance over to tomorrow night's debate.

Some final notes on "On the Record":

1) I continue to enjoy Ted Reinstein's segments.

2) I remain unimpressed by the hosts.

3) This week's roundtable was much better than the other two I have seen.  The first (Marsh and Nassour) I felt was too partisan (and Maryanne and I discussed the segment a bit in the comments), and the second (Charley Manning and Larry DiCara) was so boring I didn't even mention it.

The roundtable today featured Marsh and Manning, and I thought the interplay was much better.  Hope they bring these two back together.