How Elizabeth Warren Can Win

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

23 August 2012

here's been a bit of a bustling in the hedgerow over Public Policy Polling's new numbers showing Elizabeth Warren five points up the track behind incumbent Scott Brown here in the Commonwealth (God save it!). Democrats around the country are expressing some level of surprise/shock/anaphylaxis at this, despite the fact that it's still August, and that neither one of them is above 50 percent in the poll, and that there's as much good news as bad for Warren in the poll's internal numbers. She simply has to do better among Independents - although, in Massachusetts, that generally means Republicans who didn't vote in the primaries for the last few cycles - but there's also this entirely weird stat that says 53 percent of the people polled want the Democrats in control of the Senate, which is not really a plausible scenario if Warren doesn't win. We'll get to what that number could mean in a moment.

The major problem all along has been that Senator McDreamy really is a nice guy. He doesn't just come across as one. He is. He's thin-skinned as hell, as they all are, and he occasionally acts as though his fluke election was a world-historical event on a par with the elevation of Charlemagne, but his favorability is through the roof and it's going to stay there. We have been deluged here with whadda-nice-guy ads featuring superannuated putative Democratic mayors Ray Flynn of Boston and Connie Lukes of Worcester, neither of whom wields the political influence of the average deer tick, but both of whom are nice old folks who think the young man really is the cat's pajamas. As such, they're very effective ads. By comparison, Warren's commercials are perfectly adequate, but they do very little to capture the charisma that become obvious to anyone who spends 15 minutes with her in the same room.

Other curious local factors are in play as well. For example, we've got a history of voting for R's statewide, as the country is presently learning to its horror. Also, in the history of the state, we have elected a grand total of three women to statewide office, all of them to secondary positions, and none of them to the Senate. (By comparison, Arizona has had three consecutive female governors.) There remains in the old-school Massachusetts Democrats a fundamental abhorrence for candidates with ovaries. Read deeply into Alec MacGillis's piece in The New Republic from a couple of weeks ago, the one in which he quotes a whole raft of guys who were passing over the hill when I was working for the Phoenix in the late '70's. For my money, MacGillis has been as good as TNR gets during this election, and his general perception of the state of the race here is close to dead-on but, Jesus Christ, he's walking with the Undead here. Larry DiCara? Tom Birmingham? Oh, and young Jimmy Shannon! God love ya, lad, but your career is as dead as Curley, boyo. And Chris Lydon is a career foof who told Warren, as recounted by MacGillis, "You have to be an awfully nice girl to run for office and not be too strident or too depressing and not condescending about people's problems. How are you working that?" McGillis says that this condescending warning about the dangers of condescension "caught Warren off-guard," the evidence for which may well be that she didn't pick up her chair and park the fathead who delivered it into the third row. Here's the tell: Anyone who tells you that Warren is "the same candidate" as Martha Coakley, whom Brown defeated in the 2010 special election, has issues with women candidates because Warren has no more in common with the buttoned-up Coakley than she does with Rajon Rondo.

The other real problem is the genuinely stupid deal that the Warren campaign cut with the Brown campaign in which both sides agreed to keep outside money out of this campaign, thereby essentially wishing away Citizens United like children who think, if they can't see the bear, the bear can't see them. The only possible way for Warren to be sure to win is to nationalize the campaign. Here's where that odd polling data about who should control the Senate comes in. Warren's got to be able to point out that, nice guy or not, McDreamy is of the party of the crazy people, and that a Republican-controlled Senate is one step closer to the abyss, and she needs to make that charge stick. Just today, the Boston Herald, McDreamy's local fanzine, went into full high-sterics about the possibility that Todd Akin's little foray into reproductive biology might damage Brown's chances here, even though Brown himself stepped up quickly and strongly and told Akin to step out.

Later, of course, Brown declared himself a "pro-choice Republican."

"Apparently she's a little confused as to who she is running against," Brown said of Democrat Elizabeth Warren. "She is running against Scott Brown. I am a pro-choice, independent Republican who has a history of being an independent thinker."

Of course, he's nothing of the sort. Pro-choice is pro-choice. Period. You are not pro-choice if you believe in banning the medical fiction that is "partial-birth" abortion, a political term of art ginned up by the hardline anti-choice movement to great success, or if you support the Hyde Amendment. That may make you a "pro-choice Republican," but that sort of the whole point, isn't it? At least he's saying he's some sort of a Republican these days. Generally, he doesn't bring that up. It should be brought up for him. He should be made to support or stand against every bit of lunacy that's coming out of the national party with which he's aligned and then he should be asked what's left to support. You can make running from his party and being a part of it two sides of the same political attack but, to make this kind of argument forcefully enough, and given the nature of the bad bargain to which she agreed, Warren needs the dead serious involvement of the national Democratic Party. They need to treat this race like Jon Tester in Montana and, yes, McCaskill in Missouri, and they need not to listen to a bunch of superannuated coatholders who are still waiting for the call to join the cabinet of President Dukakis. Tell all your Democratic friends that they're idiots if they think otherwise.