The Boston Herald broke the story April 27 that Harvard touted Warren’s Indian ancestry, and it’s been downhill since for the Senate hopeful. A genealogist has suggested Warren is 1/32 Native American, although the campaign has not provided documents backing her claim. Warren spoke in one interview of grandparents with “high-cheekbones.”

Joe Trippi, the prominent Democratic consultant, said the response to the initial stories raised questions in the nation’s capital about the campaign’s readiness to deal with a dangerous foe.

“There is a question about why they weren’t prepared,” Trippi said. “This happening in May is a wake-up call. They have to be ready for a much tougher fight than they envisioned.”

Warren should have expected such attacks: Brown’s chief strategist, Eric Fehrnstrom, is famous for confrontational tactics. “It’s great to be out there trying to make a case for working people, but the other side is not going to let you do that — Fehrnstrom doesn’t work that way,” Trippi said. “He’s going to try and make it into a knife fight. You have to be ready to make the process case and fight back.”

There’s a growing concern that Warren’s campaign has been too passive in its clashes with Brown, indeed that they’ve been too one-sided.

Dan Payne, a veteran Democratic consultant based in Boston, said the non-handling of the Native American question is part of a larger problem that has plagued the presumptive Democratic nominee.

“There are a finite number of weeks a candidate has to beat a popular incumbent,” Payne said. “If you spend a week on your Indian heritage and a week on tax returns, you’re not making the case against the incumbent. That’s the problem. The Warren camp has been made the incumbent and Brown has been made the challenger. It’s been a role reversal.”

Democrats don’t like to use the “C” word — Coakley. But Payne said, like Coakley, who didn’t understand she needed to shake hands outside a chilly Fenway Park, Warren doesn’t seem to know what to do with Brown.

For instance, Brown got free media showing he hit a half-court basketball shot – even though he needed several tries. The shot builds on his regular guy image, which neutralizes Warren’s arguments she stands up for the regular guy, Payne said. Yet, you never heard Warren ever smack him down.

“So far, Warren has shown an inability to deal with Brown’s use of symbols,” Payne said.

Warren’s chief strategist is Doug Rubin, who masterminded Gov. Deval Patrick’s two improbable victories – both based on positive campaigning and avoiding negative attacks. Fehrnstrom, meanwhile, gets out of bed thinking how to attack, said Payne.

Even before Warren entered the race, Fehrnstrom anonymously tweeted as Crazy Khazei, lobbing broadsides aimed at her while disguised as a loony version of another Democratic rival, Alan Khazei – until he was unmasked.

“It’s been very mean and it’s only going to get meaner,” said Michael Shea, a Democratic consultant. “They’ve raised $30 million and it’s not going toward positive ads, and it’s only just begun.”

There’s no doubt the Senate race is going to be nasty. It’s had a negative tone from Day One, when Brown – in response to a joke Warren made about him paying for college by posing nude – quipped on a radio show he was glad the 52-year-old hadn’t done the same.

The Native American story may appear an isolated one but it’s part of Brown’s strategy to craft a narrative about the first-time candidate, said Peter Ubertaccio, chairman of the department of political scientist at Stonehill College.

“You do that by raising questions about who she said she is and hold up who is in tune with average voters and is more like average voters,” Ubertaccio said.

In a statement, Warren’s campaign said:

Elizabeth has been straightforward and open about her heritage while the people who recruited her have made it clear it was because of her extraordinary skill as a teacher and a groundbreaking scholar. Scott Brown has been peddling nasty insinuations to distract from his million-dollar tax returns and multi-million dollar Wall Street fundraising. We’re getting back to the issues that really matter in this election, like how to level the playing field for middle class families.”

Democrats aren’t giving up on Warren.

Washington has tried to bolster Warren, Payne said. For instance, the president is signaling his support by appearing in an ad with Warren running on television stations statewide.

Trippi noted that while the Republicans drag out the story about her native roots, Warren’s campaign continues to show positive signs – and it’s only May.

“[Brown] scored,” Trippi said. “But she’s raising money, she has a very strong message, and the people know she’s fighting for the working people of Massachusetts.”

But Brown isn’t giving up either.

“Scott Brown takes this very seriously,” the Democratic insider cautioned. “This is control of the United States Senate. This is big stuff.”

This is how bad things have gotten: President Obama hasn’t called her in almost two years!

If there were ever a Republican for President Obama to work with, it was Maine Senator Olympia Snowe. She was one of just three Republicans in the entire Congress to vote for his economic stimulus plan in 2009 and even tried to work with him on health care, but in an interview with ABC’s senior political correspondent Jonathan Karl, Snowe makes a remarkable revelation: She hasn’t hasn’t spoken to President Obama in nearly two years.

Snowe said that if she had to grade the President on his willingness to work with Republicans, he would “be close to failing on that point.” In fact, Snowe, who was first elected to Congress in 1976, claims that her meetings with President Obama have been less frequent than with any other president.

That’s so weird, that President Obama stopped talking to her around two years ago. I wonder what happened? That wizard probably got him, and now he hates bipartisanship. That is the only explanation I can think of for why Olympia Snowe — a Republican the president could definitely try to work with! — hasn’t heard from Obama for around two years.

I mean, Snowe “even tried to work with him on health care.” Hey, that was around two years ago, actually! How hard did she try, again? If I recall correctly, she intentionally delayed the process for months before finally voting against a plan she’d previously voted for, never making a single substantive criticism of the policy of the bill in the fear that her criticism would then be addressed by Democrats and she’d be forced to come up with a new reason to oppose the bill, because it turns out she didn’t actually want to vote for healthcare reform, and she would not have supported any plan to expand coverage to all Americans, no matter how it worked.

So this is the problem. In the popular imagination, and in Barack Obama’s naive pre-2010 fantasies, “bipartisanship” means “working together to accomplish things.” In reality, in the Senate, it means “indulging moderates, forever.” For Olympia Snowe, the act of calling Olympia Snowe is more important than the act of … passing legislation to solve problems.

Snowe is now endorsing Scott Brown, saying Massachusetts residents should vote for him because he is another true believer in independent, party line-crossing bipartisanship. He even supports the Violence Against Women Act! (Why should Massachusetts residents vote for a Republican who is willing to cross party lines sometimes to vote for bills that every Democrat supports, instead of just voting for a Democrat whose support you won’t have to just sort of guess at until he comes out and says it? Because “bipartisanship,” that’s why.) (And the fact that Brown supported allowing employers to deny contraception coverage — a measure Snowe opposed — while his opponents shared Snowe’s position on the issue also doesn’t matter, because being a Republican who sometimes bucks the party line to do the right thing is more Honorable than being a Democrat whose party line is already the right thing.)

Would Olympia Snowe have voted for cap-and-trade if the president had called her more often? Or would she have done exactly what she did during the healthcare reform process, and strung Democrats along for months before voting against it for nakedly political reasons? (She was beginning to play the exact same game as she had before, saying she would maybe bring herself to support a “scaled-back” version of the legislation as long as other Republicans also promised to do so.)

Would Olympia Snowe have supported the “scaled-back,” less ambitious alternative to comprehensive immigration reform that was the DREAM Act, which would have allowed people who came to the U.S. as children and served in the military or went to college to seek citizenship legally? No, she would not have, because if the act had passed, “millions of illegal immigrants could attempt to become legal residents….”

So instead of cap-and-trade, we got nothing. Instead of the DREAM Act, we got nothing. If healthcare reform had failed, we’d have nothing. If Snowe’s stated goal was to maintain the status quo, because she doesn’t care about immigration and doesn’t believe in climate change, then she’d be totally doing a very good job. But she claims to care about climate change and want to do something about immigration, which leads me to believe that she’s horrible at being a senator. It is the incompetent political maneuvering of “moderates” like Snowe, and not “partisanship,” that leads directly to Senate inaction. If what she needed, in order to be swayed to the side of passing legislation to address problems, was for the president to make a much bigger public show of courting her, then she’s a bizarre and repulsive specimen. Being against everything because people aren’t paying you enough attention is so much worse than being against everything on principle.

The trick in the gimmick became clear this week when Brown announced that he was holding up his end of the pledge, agreeing to pay half the costs of an ad from a group called Coalition of Americans for Political Equality (CAPE PAC) and asking it to pull its Google ads promoting him. The group’s website is now offline. Jeff Loyd, a Tea Party activist from Arizona who chairs the PAC, confirmed that his group spent all of $673.99 in pro-Brown online advertising with Google.

Brown’s ostentatious willingness to be the first to trigger the enforcement mechanism against himself displays a street-smart opportunism that the Warren camp, for all her populist credentials, lacks. Far from shooting himself in the foot, the penalty amounts to $327 out of the $13 million in his campaign coffers. It was money well spent to help burnish his image as a moderate and man of the people, even as he raises more than $2 for Warren’s every $1. (Warren has raised $6 million to date.)

“Sen. Brown is a man of his word,” Brown’s campaign manager, Jim Barnett, trumpeted in a letter to CAPE PAC. “And as a result of your advertising on his behalf, he will honor the agreement by paying out of his campaign account an amount equal to 50 percent of your spending. In short,” the letter continued, “while your advertising on his behalf is clearly intended to be helpful, it is actually costing his campaign valuable resources.”

The brainchild of Harvard Professor Elizabeth Warren, the darling of the left—yet prompted by Senator Scott Brown, the Tea Party centerfold who took Ted Kennedy’s seat—the key enforcement mechanism is remarkably simple in its conception: the candidate favored in a third-party ad on TV, radio or online must make a contribution worth half of the ad’s costs to the opposing candidate’s charity of choice within three days of broadcast.

The negative air war that was predicted two years ago as a consequence of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling could very well be thwarted in this one key race. It’s the little engine that could, nationally, but if the Massachusetts experiment in self-punishment proves enforceable here, it could catch on elsewhere, sort of like the Pledge of Allegiance against dirty politics, a yardstick that blunts the worst consequences of the high court’s decision.

Or it may prove to be a campaign game changer only in a blue state like Massachusetts where an incumbent Republican is covering his left flank with a clean-money pledge. In red states where there’s a Democratic incumbent, say, the People’s Pledge is much less likely to take root.

Warren, the less-well-known newcomer who needs to do more flesh-pressing to win over undecided voters, may benefit more from the pact than Brown, who took the late great lion of the Senate’s seat in a stunning upset runoff election in 2010. It was Brown’s camp that came up with the idea, and Warren, personally, who gave it teeth, essential enforcement mechanisms being a forte that would seem to separate this woman from the boys on Capitol Hill, should she take back Brown’s Senate seat for the Democrats.

The People’s Pledge is most likely to rise or fall with her political fortunes, which is to say its potential is every bit as promising as the smart money’s long-shot favorite to be our first female president. A regular on the Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where she re-appeared last night as her apple-cheeked, all-American self, looking professorial, but without the affected demeanor, Warren comes across as the down-to-earth daughter of, as she told Stuart, “a guy who sold fencing.” Warren went on to give a little history lesson about the 1940s, when she was born, when the government went to bat for the middle class, the same government  that today goes to bat almost exclusively for the 35,000 lobbyists that swarm the halls of power

The deal, signed by both candidates, will be watched  by none more closely than the shadowy, big-money SuperPacs that have hijacked the 2012 election season. Above all else that means Karl Rove and the Koch brothers who back his billionaire front group, the American Crossroads GPS think tank, which has already sunk more than $1 million into the Brown-Warren contest.

Rove may be pleased to know that not one Boston radio or television outlet has agreed to comply—it’s business after all and, as Ronald Reagan said, the politics of America is business—though they will feel nearly irresistible pressure to do so over the next few days as both campaigns mail a co-letter asking media outlets to forgo what amounts to a nice chunk of change for the local market.

The liberal League of Conservation Voters, which just bought a $2 million ad buy against Brown, said it would honor the deal Still there was a muted response in the  blogosphere, a place normally divided over the wisdom of grotesque sums being spent on vulgar attack ads. The truce was noted widely if dispassionately. Daily Kos merely observed that the campaigns had swapped letters about the sums being spent already. The site noted that Brown had called on Warren to condemn the ads, and the Warren had responded last Friday with her idea to stand together beyond mere words. Brown accepted, the Daily Kos noted generously, even though the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had said it would become “significantly involved” in defeating his opponent.

Similarly, Talking Points Memo ran with a straight-up “we intend to comply” story quoting a Massachusetts Democratic Party official.
The muted response may be a consequence of the hardened skepticism about plugging the flow of SuperPac money. Sending letters to TV stations and advocacy groups asking them to curb the ads amounts to “an interesting and commendable effort,” said Paul Ryan, a lawyer for the Campaign Legal Center, which works on behalf of tighter campaign funding laws.  “But I’m not entirely convinced it will be effective.”

Ryan said that issue ads, traditionally used to dodge limits on direct candidate advocacy, may blur the lines, complicating compliance.
Though no other group has come out against the pledge, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and National Republican Senatorial Committee have not yet said if they’ll try to call off the dogs in their own parties.

All that can be said for sure is that populist politics appears ready to trump the billion-dollar campaign industry in at least one race in the cradle of liberty. But if the People’s Pledge really takes off in Massachusetts, putting your money where your SuperPac mouth is may be the only way to avoid wearing the dirty-money badge of shame. Best case scenario: In the era of Citizens United, the People’s Pledge could yet become an unavoidable rite of American politics.

There is some irony here. Brown’s comment seems to be the product of an unguarded moment on a Boston morning radio show, and, more than any other politician in Massachusetts, local radio has played a pivotal role in his rise.

Massachusetts may be a heavily Democratic state, but you’d never know it from scanning the radio dial. The Boston market has more than its share of standard-issue conservative radio hosts, and the ideology frequently bleeds over to the dominant all-sports station too. Local talk radio served as a virtual arm of Brown’s campaign when he won his Senate seat last year. He made frequent appearances on WEEI, the sports station, bantering with the hosts, playing up his regular-guy-with-a-truck image and connecting with the station’s predominantly white male listenership. When President Obama came to town for a last-minute appearance with Martha Coakley, Brown’s campaign organized a rally headlined by several prominent sports celebrities and three WEEI personalities. On that station and others, the promotion of his campaign, and the disparagement of Coakley, was relentless. Here’s how the Boston Globe’s Alex Beam described it:

On Election Day, WRKO ran 11 hours of nonstop pro-Brown agitprop from 9 a.m. on, including get-out-and-vote-for-Brown pleas. Over at its sister station, WEEI, Glenn Ordway’s afternoon sports goons taped promotional videos for Brown. You could say the same thing about WTKK, but ‘RKO and ‘EEI have actual listeners.

Since winning the election, Brown has kept up his local radio appearances, chatting casually with his friends, playing along with their drive-time antics, and sometimes letting his guard down. Here’s how Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham described one such session last July:

With all of that love and power, you can’t blame Brown for getting a big head. And as an interview he gave two of his fans on WEEI last Friday made clear, it is pretty darned big.

“So, last night I got off the plane and I’m driving through Wrentham saying, `Man, I just can’t believe I’m a United States Senator,’ ” he crowed to his adoring interlocutors. “And then Tim Geithner calls me on the phone and says, `Scott, I just wanted to go through some things that we’re working on right now . . .’ He just called me a minute ago, too . . .

So you might say that Brown’s casual put-down of Warren was a long time coming. Granted, it didn’t take place on one of the all-talk stations that double as Brown fan clubs, but rather a morning show on classic rock WZLX. Still, he was in a potentially dangerous setting — an irreverent live show with hosts who traffic in provocative hijinx and “guy” humor — where he’s come to feel a bit too comfortable. The sort cruelty embodied by Brown’s comment is heard all the time on these types of radio shows, in Boston and everywhere else, but it usually goes unnoticed. Unless it’s coming from a United States senator.

Update: A reader emails to point out that the latest Arbitron numbers show that WEEI is no longer the dominant sports station in Boston, and has been eclipsed by the new (and apparently not overtly conservative) Sports Hub.

“Hype,” though, is the key word here. Because Warren is entirely untested as a political candidate. All we know is that is that she has attracted a passionate following among national progressive activists, which should translate into a sizable, small donation-fueled campaign treasury, and that the media exposure she’s received these past two years has given her modest name recognition in Massachusetts. She has a compelling, genuinely populist story to tell voters, but whether she’s capable of telling it well and whether it will resonate are open questions.

She also faces a more basic challenge: Brown, the Republican incumbent, remains quite popular with Massachusetts voters. A recent poll showed the second-year senator with a 54-25 percent favorable/unfavorable rating. That’s actually down from the numbers Brown received in Democrats’ own polling earlier this year, but it’s still enough to make him more popular than Governor Deval Patrick, Senator John Kerry and the state’s other big-name politicians. (Warren scored a 17-13 percent favorable rating in the same poll.)

Of course, Massachusetts voters also have a demonstrated aversion to the GOP: Brown is the only Republican Senate candidate since 1972 to receive more than 45 percent of the vote in the state, the House delegation has been entirely Democratic since 1996, and no GOP nominee has come within 20 points of winning it at the presidential level since 1988.

So Warren’s hopes will rest on whether voters are willing to separate their generally positive personal views of Brown from their generally negative views of his national party. Will this actually happen? This is where things get interesting.

The idea that it will is bolstered by some relatively recent Massachusetts history. Back in 1996, Republican Governor William Weld was something of a political rock star in the state. Two years earlier, he’d won a record-shattering reelection victory with 71 percent of the vote, carrying virtually every city and town in the state, and he brought enormous personal popularity to the Senate race. But Massachusetts voters were also in revolt against the national GOP in 1996, thanks to the Republican “revolution” of 1994, which firmly established the GOP as a Southern/religious-dominated party. With Bill Clinton carrying the state by 33 points over Bob Dole, Weld lost the Senate race to John Kerry by 7.5 points.

We’ve seen similar stories in other states. Think of Rhode Island’s Lincoln Chafee in 2006. A liberal, anti-Iraq Republican with a famous (within the state) name, Chafee did everything imaginable to convince his blue state electorate to overlook his party label, and he made it to Election Day with an approval rating that hovered around 60 percent. But the climate of ’06, particularly in a state like Rhode Island, was so fanatically anti-Republican that Chafee still lost to Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse by seven points. Oregon Republican Gordon Smith faced a similarly impossible situation in 2008. Despite strong personal popularity and his decision to turn on the Iraq war, he was still edged out for reelection by Jeff Merkley, a rather generic candidate whose campaign was mainly powered by the fact that he wasn’t a Republican.

When it comes to Warren, the Democratic line is that because 2012 will be a presidential election year, the Massachusetts electorate will look much different than it did in the 2010 special election in which Brown won his seat — younger, more diverse, less conservative. This, they theorize, will produce an effect similar to 1996, when the weight of Dole and the Gingrich GOP Congress was just too much for Weld to bear. And maybe it will. After all, the same new poll that gives Brown a 54-25 percent favorable rating also shows him just nine points ahead of Warren, even though most voters haven’t even heard of her yet.

But if you think Brown absolutely can’t survive in a presidential climate, just remember the example of Susan Collins. Like Brown, the Maine Republican entered her reelection race in 2008 with wide personal popularity and a target on her back. National Democrats knew they were going to carry Maine comfortably in the presidential race and began thinking about coattails. So they recruited Tom Allen, a long-serving congressman from Portland, to oppose Collins and poured serious money into the race. But it didn’t work. On the same day that Obama racked up 58 percent of the vote in Maine, Collins crushed Allen by 23 points. 40 percent of Obama’s supporters crossed over and voted for her.

Collins’ win was chalked up to her personal popularity and her efforts to separate herself from her national party and to play up her moderate credentials. Of course, Smith in Oregon, Chafee in Rhode Island and Weld in Massachusetts all had the same things going for them but lost anyway. What was the difference? Weld in ’96 was challenging a Democratic incumbent and had his governorship to fall back on, which may have factored into voters’ thinking, but Smith and Chafee were in almost the exact same situation as Collins. It’s hard to say what (if anything) Collins did right and they did wrong.

What Brown does have going for him is that the 2012 climate won’t be nearly as favorable to Democrats as it was in 2008, 2006 or 1996. Yes, Obama will win Massachusetts easily, but his margin may be narrower this time, especially if the GOP nominates former Governor Mitt Romney. The GOP label still figures to hurt Brown, but the damage may not be that severe. In the past, I’ve written skeptically about Warren’s chances, mainly because of Brown’s popularity. But it’s fair to say that it’s an open question whether he’s another Susan Collins … or another Gordon Smith.