Are We All to Be Punished Because Martha Coakley Doesn't Know from Curt Schilling?

So there was young Martha Coakley – it is Martha, right? – studying her tuchas off in law school at B.U., unaware that not only her own political future but the passage of landmark health insurance reform legislation in this country depended on her knocking off and attending a few baseball games, for heaven's sake. (You know, in Fenway Park, where lifelong fan Ted Kennedy threw out the first pitch last season?)

Do I feel for this poor female, flailing in a world awash in testosterone and sports metaphor -- and in a race so tight that her outta-nowhere insistence that former Red Sox pitcher (and big ol' Republican) Curt Schilling was a Yankees fan might actually cost her the ballgame? Not even a little bit; a candidate so clueless that she mocks her opponent for mixing it up with actual voters when it's cold outside -- in mid-winter in Massachusetts! -- deserves to lose.

I do feel for the rest of us, though, if insurance companies wind up able to carry on firing customers mid-chemo because Coakley doesn't know from Curt Schilling (or despite the liberal pushback, from Afghanistan, either.) Even if the AG does lose to Republican state senator Scott Brown in tomorrow's special election to replace Kennedy in the U.S. Senate, Congress could still get it together and pass the thing, as our colleague Patricia Murphy outlined today. But will they be more spooked by another Democratic loss than by Teddy's reform-and-Red Sox-loving ghost?