SALON

Thursday, Oct 27, 2011 12:23 PM UTC

Elizabeth Warren and the OWS election test

Is there any leader in the country who makes a more persuasive case for the principles behind the protests? VIDEO

By

Topics: Opening Shot,

Elizabeth Warren and the OWS election test(Credit: AP)

The Democratic nomination to oppose Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown won’t officially be awarded until September of next year, but whatever suspense there was just ended: Yet another of Elizabeth Warren’s opponents is set to drop out of the race, making the anti-Wall Street Harvard professor the all-but-certain nominee.

Alan Khazei, the City Year founder who had been the race’s front-runner before Warren’s entrance, is expected to formally withdraw today. His departure comes on the heels of two other early exits — Setti Warren, the black mayor of a very large and very white Boston suburb; and Bob Massie, a social activist who once served as the party’s nominee for lieutenant governor — leaving Warren to face only a scattering of longshot rivals in the Democratic primary.

Taken together, these three withdrawals are a testament to the surprising — and, if you’re a Brown fan, dismaying — political talent Warren has demonstrated in her six weeks as a candidate, and set the stage for perhaps the premier 2012 election test of themes behind the Occupy Wall Street movement.

When Warren began toying with a Senate race after it became clear that Senate Republicans would never permit her to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, there was reason to doubt her prospects. A career academic with no previous experience running for office and relatively little name recognition, there was no telling how she’d fare under the spotlight of a high-stakes political campaign; it was hardly inconceivable that — sort of like Rick Perry at the national level now — she’d wilt and end up falling behind her primary opponents, all of whom had been running hard for months before her emergence. And even if she got through the Democratic primary, there was the matter of Brown’s  formidable personal popularity — easily the most well-liked politician in blue state Massachusetts, polls showed. Might as well include the gruesome track record of female candidates for major office in the Bay State, too. (I will admit: I was among the skeptics.)

But now, just six weeks after announcing her candidacy, Warren has effectively cleared the Democratic field. She’s also raised some serious money: $3.15 million was the total she listed on her most recent campaign finance report (which was released nearly a month ago) — a powerful sign that a network of small-dollar donors will keep her financially competitive with Brown despite the hostility of big givers from the financial services industry to her. And polls show her already in a dead heat with Brown, even though she remains unknown to nearly 40 percent of the electorate and he remains widely-liked on a personal level. There are even hints that Warren’s quick start may be unnerving Brown, who made a crude reference to her on a Boston radio show a few weeks back, the sort of behavior that could damage his personal appeal to voters.

If there’s one overarching key to Warren’s early success, though, it’s this: She’s built her candidacy on a clear populist message aimed at economically anxious middle class voters — and she’s startlingly effective at delivering it. Democratic politicians who speak in familiar, poll-tested language about “fighting for the middle class” and “standing up to special interests” are a dime a dozen, but Warren has demonstrated a knack for illuminating the principles behind these otherwise empty terms with remarkable clarity and passion. Just consider her explanation of the social contract, which was featured in a YouTube video that almost instantly when viral:

More than anything, it was this video that truly brought Warren’s candidacy to life. Her basic story — a crusader against Wall Street’s excesses who’d been thwarted by the big banks and their bought-and-paid-for Senate allies — was always going to have appeal to Democrats. But watching her display such dazzling communication skills created new energy and urgency for many of them: We need her making this case against Brown. It’s impossible to quantify, but the social contract video is clearly a major reason Warren was able to marginalize her Democratic opponents so quickly. As Khazei told the Boston Globe yesterday: “She has struck a chord, no doubt about it.”

In a way, this sets Warren’s campaign as a perfect test of the power of the Occupy Wall Street movement’s message. She’s fully embraced OWS, and in fact is taking some heat for saying the other day that “I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do.” Republicans are promoting the quote — with plenty of assistance from the media — in an effort to make Warren seem self-aggrandizing and, as Slate’s Dave Weigel put it, “to link Warren to every Occupy-connected jerk who throws something at a cop.”

In context, of course, Warren’s claim doesn’t seem quite so boastful, and her point is taken: She’s devoted much of her academic career to exploring and explaining the middle class squeeze, and as the chairwoman of the TARP oversight panel in 2009 she pressed relentlessly for Wall Street reforms that would provide meaningful protection for consumers. And in her six weeks as a Senate candidate, she’s been more effective at expressing the animating principles of the OWS movement than just about any other political leader in the country. In other words, as Greg Sargent explained this week, both Warren and the GOP seem prepared to let the race turn on OWS:

[N]ational Republicans are placing their bet. They are wagering that the cultural instincts of the working class whites and independents who will decide this race ensure that the excesses of the protesters will make them less inclined to listen to her populist economic message, which is also directed at those voters. This is an old story in American politics, of course. Conservatives have for decades been mining the tension between blue collar whites and liberal middle class activists who resort to outsized protest tactics and occasional violence. That’s why you hear conservatives constantly referring hopefully to today’s protesters as “McGovernites.”

You might assume that this is a fight Warren can’t lose, since it’s taking place in Massachusetts — the only state where “McGovernites” outnumbered Nixon voters in 1972. But be careful. Massachusetts is often regarded as an extremely liberal state when it is really an extremely Democratic state, one that includes many Democratic-leaning blue collar voters with conservative cultural instincts. These voters were at the heart of Brown’s special election victory in 2010, when he carried working-class cities like Fitchburg, Lowell and Quincy and cleaned up in middle class bedroom communities.

And then there’s the counterpoint to the state’s ’72 support for McGovern: That same year a Vietnam veteran named John Kerry ran for an open House seat in the Lowell-based 5th District and found himself vilified by the locals as an unpatriotic carpetbagger. Kerry lost the race to Republican Paul Cronin, who was defeated two years later (by Paul Tsongas) and who remains the last Republican to win in the district.

It would be dangerous to underestimate the appeal of Brown’s guy-with-a-pickup image, and it’s just too soon to say whether the national GOP’s effort to scare swing voters away from anyone tied to OWS will succeed. Still, Warren is in a far, far better place right now than she was six weeks ago, while Brown is far, far more vulnerable than it looked like he’d be earlier this year. Which means there’s some egg on the face of anyone who said she’d be making a mistake by running.

Steve Kornacki

Steve Kornacki writes about politics for Salon. Reach him by email at SKornacki@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @SteveKornacki More Steve Kornacki.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 95 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

Alex Pareene surveys the burgeoning and bloated world of political news and opinion and explains the day's most essential story in Opening Shot, posted by 8:30 a.m. each weekday. Bookmark this page; follow @pareene on Twitter.

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: Chekhov's story mirrors Russia's own

Recommendations