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The President of the United States came here Sunday to make the case that voters should turn their anger away from him and Democrat Martha Coakley and back on a Republican Party that they cast off just over a year ago.
Obama attacked Brown for opposing his proposed fee on big banks, a populist strand that the White House and its allies began driving in earnest late last week.
"Martha's opponent is already walking in lockstep with Washington Republicans opposing that fee and defending the same fat cats who are being rewarded for their failure," Obama said.
But Obama and a parade of Democrats who appeared on stage before a crowd a local fire official put at 1,100 at Northeastern University's modest gymnasium spent much of their time trying to explain to the audience, and to themselves, how they had lost their grip on the public "anger" - a word that has replaced "hope" as the emotion Democrats seek to channel.
Coakley has been cast by her foe as the face of the Establishment, and the visit of the Democratic president reinforces the narrative that the "machine" is behind her.
The People of Massachusetts are angry, like they should be," said Rep. Michael Capuano, a fiery Boston liberal who lost in the Democratic primary while running a different, more combative campaign that many local Democrats now wish Coakley had run. "They need to focus that anger in the right direction" - at "the people who put us in this position," Capuano said.
Obama offered his own analysis of the voters' anger, dismissing voters' frustration with Democrats as the product of "sleight of hand."
"There were going to be some who stood on the sidelines, who were protectors of the big banks, protectors of the big insurance companies, protectors of the big drug companies who were going to say, 'You know what, we can take advantage of this crisis,'" he told the crowd. Continuing to speak in the voice of his foes, he said: "There's going to be a slight of hand here, because we're going to let Democrats take responsibility.... We're going to let them make the tough choices, and let them rescue the economy, and then we're going to tap into that anger and frustration."
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