Coakley’s Eleventh-Hour Slanders by Daniel Foster on National Review Online

But if Coakley’s advertisements reveal a penchant for misrepresentation, they are also indicative of the campaign’s broader tendency toward gaffes and indiscretions. An early version of the attack ad in question misspelled “Massachusetts.” A later ad accusing Brown of complicity in Wall Street’s “greed” and “corruption” superimposed that charge over an image of the World Trade Center.

Taken as a whole, the tenor of the eleventh-hour attacks on Brown reveals a punch-drunk campaign and a candidate who never expected a fight. And so, in place of a good-faith effort by Coakley to make her case to the voters of Massachusetts, we instead see a mélange of slanders — largely underwritten by the party establishment in Washington — from a campaign holding fast to the hope that even the most mendacious of assaults need only seem to be true until Tuesday.