Where is the professor?
There was a great story on Boston’s WBUR the other day about how U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren has been avoiding her two remaining Democratic primary opponents by blowing off appearances with them at debates and forums.
As the frontrunner, Warren’s strategy is to ignore her underfunded primary challengers and focus on the November match with Sen. Scott Brown, the Republican incumbent.
However the ‘BUR piece also went on to note that Warren has also been a no-show at a number of Democratic town committee events. The money quote is from Maynard DTC Chair Maura Flynn who says “Warren is sending the message that “she’s too good for everybody. This is the feeling that I get. This is very elitist to me to when I hear that she’s too busy.” Bingo!
The narrative that Brown has been pushing is that Professor Warren is a Harvard elitist, who knows a lot about navigating the ivory towers of academe but not so much about Joe Shmoe. And Warren has been pushing back with her big paid media effort including her intro TV bio spot that showed her growing up “on the ragged edge of the middle class” in the Sooner State.
But Warren has been saying and doing things that reinforce all of the negative things that the Brown campaign is doing to try and define her in the early stages of the race.
Last fall, Warren failed to participate in a U.S. Senate Rural Issues Forum (full disclosure: I helped organize the event) in Chesterfield and then blew off a similar event up in the North Quabbin region of central Massachusetts. Then on October 17, 2011, Warren was quoted in an Associated Pressstory as saying she was pledging to seek the “hick vote,” and that “I think I’m a new category, the elite hick.” The state Republican Party pounced on the gaffe saying that the rookie candidate’s statements revealed a “prism into Warren’s elitist and arrogant worldview.”
Warren’s scheduling pattern has been heavy on visits to what the Boston Herald’s Howie Carr sarcastically calls “People’s Republics” communities – liberal enclaves and college towns such as Amherst, Brookline, Cambridge, Northampton, and Williamstown. While it may make sense to spend time in these localities for fundraising, they are not going to provide the winning margins to defeat Mr. Barn Jacket because these are Democratic base communities.
Last November, Chris Matthews from Hardball was in Springfield to give a lecture and was asked by a local TV reporter for his take on Brown-Warren. Matthew said “if she runs a bread and butter campaign, she will win but if she runs as a Boston elitist she’ll lose.” So far it has been more Chablis and brie than water roll and buttah from the professor.
Brown on the other hand has been stepping up his game connecting with the Bay State’s everyman in the Commonwealth’s hinterlands, something he had down pretty good in the 2010 special election. During the fall cranberry harvest, Brown graced the front page of the Herald one October day in a full body wader with Ocean Spray’s logo as he stood in a flooded bog surrounded by the crimson berries. The message was clear, your junior senator is aware of a major industry in southeastern Mass and Cape Cod. This winter, Brown has also stopped at the Wachusett Mountain ski area in Princeton to highlight a key driver of seasonal tourism in rural Massachusetts, the ski industry.
Warren’s strategy could end up hurting her in the long run. So far, her issues mantra has been somewhat Johnny One-Note, with a focus on consumer protection and banking regulation. But there are other matters that one must deal with on the senatorial plate and failing to get around the state from its dairy farms to its dying mill towns could wind up biting you at the ballot box.
Take the issue of trade. On her website, Warren has some boilerplate about fair trade, pledging that as senator, she “will look hard at any trade agreement to determine how it would impact jobs here in Massachusetts.” Brown just voted for three “free” trade deals that were negotiated by George W. Bush and rubber-stamped by Obama with Korea (a known currency manipulator), Colombia (where they murder labor leaders) and Panama (a tax haven and narco-trafficking mecca). The U.S. International Trade Commission estimates that the Korea deal alone will cost Massachusetts more than 66,000 jobs, mostly in the electronics and metals sectors. Has Warren visited places like Brookfield Wire Company in West Brookfield whose employees jobs could be put at risk from Brown’s vote?
Where is Warren on the Trans-Pacific Partnership that Obama wants to put before the Senate? If this “NAFTA of the Pacific” is passed, you can kiss the jobs at New Balance in Boston and Lawrence goodbye as they won’t be able to compete with footwear makers in Vietnam. And our hardscrabble dairy farmers, (those hicks that Warren wants to vote for her), will be put out of business by the flood of milk imports from Fonterra, the multi-national dairy co-op that is New Zealand’s largest company and responsible for 30% of the world’s dairy exports. Even Deval Patrick got his wingtips dirty in cow shit when he first ran for governor, earning brownie points for trekking out to Colrain and shooting the bull with some Franklin County dairy producers.
Savvy scheduling can be used to highlight major issue contrasts with Brown that Warren can hammer home with second-tier earned media outlets like small town weeklies and local radio that would be tickled to have some face time with the woman from Oklahoma. But if you can’t give Hollywood beautiful people like Alec Baldwin more than 15 minutes, how ya gonna sit through an ed board with the Ware River News.
The bottom line is that for Warren to defeat Brown, she is going to need to peel off big chunks of independents in the exurbs and not rubbing shoulders with the great unwashed in places like Douglas and Dighton, Russell and Rochester, and Wales and West Newbury could cause the professor to flunk her big test on November 6.