Gail Collins

Green: Everything is fine, and who cares if we spelled “Massachusetts” wrong in one of the ads.

Blue: Don’t forget to vote. It’s next Tuesday. You’ll remember to vote, right?

Yellow: Bill Clinton is coming for a rally. John Kerry has got to show up, too. I don’t care if he just had hip-replacement surgery.

Orange: You know, it really doesn’t matter whether you win by a million votes or one vote, just so long as you win.

The campaign has not hit red yet, although, for the Democrats, the whole world has begun to look orange with dark tints. Like a decaying pumpkin. It cannot be a good sign when the Massachusetts secretary of state has to deny rumors that he plans to stall certification of the election results until after the health care bill is passed.

Of course, it’s all about the health care bill. “As the 41st senator, I can stop it,” Scott Brown, the Republican nominee, says frequently.

We will return to our discussion of the Massachusetts special election shortly, after the following special rant about the concept of the 41st senator.

* * * * *

SPECIAL RANT

There are 100 members of the Senate. But as Brown is currently reminding us, because of the filibuster rule, it takes only 41 to stop any bill from passing.(Emphasis added)

U.S. population: 307,006,550.

Population for the 20 least-populated states: 31,434,822.

That means that in the Senate, all it takes to stop legislation is one guy plus 40 senators representing 10.2 percent of the country.

People, think about what we went through to elect a new president — a year and a half of campaigning, three dozen debates, $1.6 billion in donations. Then the voters sent a clear, unmistakable message. Which can be totally ignored because of a parliamentary rule that allows the representatives of slightly more than 10 percent of the population to call the shots.  (Emphasis added)

Why isn’t 90 percent of the country marching on the Capitol with teapots and funny hats, waving signs about the filibuster? (Emphasis added)

* * * * *

O.K., done now.

Martha Coakley, the Democratic Senate nominee, is the kind of candidate who reminds you that the state that gave birth to John Kennedy also produced Michael Dukakis. She is the attorney general, and her speaking style has been compared to that of a prosecutor delivering a summation to the jury. In civil court. In a trial that involved, say, a dispute over widget tariffs.

She is so tone deaf that she made fun of her opponent for standing outside Fenway Park shaking hands “in the cold.” A week before the election, Coakley was off the campaign trail entirely in Washington for a fund-raiser that was packed with the usual suspects. But undoubtedly it was well heated.  (Emphasis added)

Brown, her opponent, is a conservative state senator who believes in waterboarding but not necessarily global warming. When he was 22, he won an “America’s Sexiest Man” contest, the prize for which was $1,000 and a chance to pose naked in a Cosmopolitan magazine centerfold. One of his daughters — this is perhaps the best-known factoid in the campaign — came in somewhere between 13th and 16th on “American Idol.”

“For our family, especially me being on ‘Idol’ but my dad being in politics, there are always so many people who have something negative to say,” Ayla Brown told The Boston Herald this week. Her talent was singing, not sentence construction.

(This week Coakley unleashed a hard-hitting ad that charged Brown with being, um, a Republican. Brown’s hard-hitting response charged Coakley with running a negative ad. He is generally thought to have gotten the best of that round, especially given that little mishap with the spelling of the name of the state.) (Emphasis added)

Some polls show Coakley with a 15 percent lead. However, others show the race narrowing toward a tie. (“Dead heat,” announced a fund-raising e-mail message from John Kerry that seemed intended to induce panic attacks on the part of recipients.)

The surveys that show the race being too close to call do not seem as reliable as the ones that show Coakley winning handily, but the Democrats who watch these things say the absentee ballot requests are way up in traditionally Republican areas and down in the places that went hard for Obama in 2008.

The tea-party types are euphoric, pouring money in Brown’s direction. The people who voted for Barack Obama, meanwhile, are sullen and dispirited. This is, of course, partly because of the economy, but also partly because of the sense that the president is not getting anything done.

Which brings us back to the 10 percent rule. Don’t get me started again.

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