The special election for Ted Kennedy's old Senate seat is Tuesday, and I think I speak for a good many Bay Staters when I say it's not a moment too soon. What started out as a quiet little vote has blossomed into a full-on race, with a level of national attention not often seen in Massachusetts. If the "quality" of third-party ads is the same elsewhere as what we've been subjected to the past couple of weeks, then I feel very lucky that we are most often an afterthought.

The fact that this is a race can mostly be laid at the feet of the Democratic candidate, Martha Coakley. She's run an incredibly underwhelming campaign; due to its short duration, she's mostly skipped public campaign events, preferring to meet local Democratic leaders, who she counted on to spread the word. She combined this with the typical front-runner tactic of not engaging her opponents - at least until the polls made it clear she needed to. She's been running ads, been in a debate or two, and has made public appearances with important supporters (including Vicki Kennedy, and Presidents Clinton and Obama).

This has all been in the hopes of stopping the apparent momentum of the Republican candidate, state senator Scott Brown. His campaign hasn't been particularly spectacular - he wants to change Washington and end business as usual, surprise - but he has been able to tap into a disdain with government (federal and state) with this fairly generic message. He's also been positioning himself as more of an independent thinker, which I don't buy. I think he's taking a page from the Mitt Romney playbook by moving more towards the center and ignoring places where he didn't (for example, he's countered questions about support of reproductive rights by forgetting about an amendment he wrote and sending his daughters out as proxies on the issue).

(UPDATE: The folks at fivethirtyeight.com have a post up calling Brown a liberal Republican. They're probably right. So maybe I just don't like the way he's handled that one issue during the campaign.)

There is a third candidate - Joseph Kennedy (no relation), a libertarian running as an independent. He benefited from Coakley's demand that all candidates on the ballot be in any debate, but is unlikely to draw many votes, and certainly not as many as Coakley would like.

In trying to sort out who to vote for, one of the things that most bothers me is that I know very little about what Scott Brown has done or stands for, outside of the most general notions. He's said very little about his time in the state senate, and the only thing I really know about possible Senate plans is that he wants to be the 41st vote against health care reform. I think his campaign is best summed up in his ad refuting negative ads about him - it debuted the same day as the negative ads, and makes no specific reference to them. As much as I don't like negative advertising, it makes me more curious when the response is something that seems like it was taped in Decemeber.

Conversely, I feel like I have a decent handle on Coakley's past and what she'd do in Washington. While that knowledge is certainly what's turning some people against her, it's something. And while I'm not 100 percent in tune with her positions, I'm certainly closer to her than Brown, so Blogalicious endorses Martha Coakley for the US Senate. If nothing else, it gives us two years to find someone we'd really like.