One of the more annoying...

...tweets from this election season was from a guy with the Twitter handle @matthew8787:

She may Coakley this yet.

Annoying because I think I may have suspected that @matthew8787 -- a week before the election -- was right about Hillary Clinton.

Martha Coakley, for those of you who don't follow politics closely, was the "sure thing" Democratic candidate for Ted Kennedy's old Senate seat in 2010 who lost in a stunning upset to Scott Brown, a Republican and former pinup model, in deep-blue Massachusetts. A fluke? That's what many of us thought at the time. But then four years later, in 2014, Ms. Coakley lost narrowly again, this time to Republican Charlie Baker in the race for governor of the Bay State. Even though Ms. Coakley was seen as more than well-qualified for both offices, she just couldn't connect with voters.

And the moral of the story is that some people, like Ms. Coakley -- and Al Gore, Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton -- may be highly-intelligent and capable but are just not good at running for office. (Not everyone is good at everything.)

So for all the talk of Russian hacking, the Comey letter, fake news, etc., I just think at the end of the day that Mrs. Clinton was a lousy candidate. (Like 2000, this election should have never even been close.) I'm not sure exactly what it takes -- the empathy of Bill Clinton, the ability to speak to people in simple terms they can understand like Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, or what -- but Mrs. Clinton just doesn't have it and never will. (Full disclosure: Whether it's fair or not, I could never make it in the NBA either.)

Now I remember why I was such an enthusiastic supporter of Barack Obama in 2008. And in hindsight I should have recognized it as a red flag that so many Democrats I know were so lukewarm on Hillary this year.

The second moral of the story is that Democrats should stop worrying about identity politics or how to appeal to the white working class or blah, blah, blah. Just find a smart, charismatic candidate who can speak well, inspire people and get them to vote for him or her.

Prediction: the Democratic nominee in 2020 will be someone -- like Obama in 2008 or Trump in 2016 -- who isn't on anyone's radar yet.