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Elizabeth Warren runs for Senator from Massachusetts

Dave Dayan has a great post on this at FireDogLake.  Check it out.

Here’s Warren’s announcement video:

I have to say that I’m a little bit surprised by the Eeyore comments I’m seeing around the web.  They go something like “she’s a sacrificial lamb” to “it’s the wrong year for her to jump into this”.  The last one doesn’t make any sense at all.  This is almost an open Senate seat.  Scott Brown took Kennedy’s seat when the Senator died of brain cancer a couple of years ago.  Elizabeth Warren can totally take this seat, provided she resists the standard homogenization procedure for Democrats seeking to run for office.

Snagging my comments from myiq’s Crawdad site, here’s why she can pull this off:

Can she make her case in terms easy enough for a Tea Partier to understand? Yep, I think so.
Can she separate herself from the current Obama administration screwups? Well, Tim Geithner hates her guts. That’s a plus.
Is she passionate enough? Heck, did you hear that interview she had on Planet Money with Adam Davidson?
Scott Brown might be a good senator but does he represent the people of Massachusetts as well as she would?
Her strength is that she is genuinely on the side of the middle class.

There’s some weird concern that she’s going to come off looking like an Ivy League elitist.

I don’t see her as an ivy league elitist despite her job. She’s pretty plain spoken, a strong advocate for the middle class and has demonstrated a clear understanding of the challenges it faces.
One other thing is that she won’t be running to represent Cambridge. She’s running to represent Massachusetts.
What potentially makes her candidacy so strong is that no one in congress is representing the failing middle class and in debate, she’s going to wipe the floor with Scott Brown on those issues. She can effectively argue against austerity.
I’m glad she’s running. Her candidacy could be a real plus next year.

Let’s hope that Elizabeth Warren can motivate voters to take control of their government again.  She should be passionate, define the issues and compare/contrast (see Hillary Clinton’s techniques for this), and she must propel voters to put aside their learned helplessness.  Start by pointing out that big corporations can purchase politicians and comandeer the airwaves but they do not have a vote.  Those votes are like Dorothy’s ruby slippers.  Voters have always had the means to take power away from the rich and well connected.  This is the point that Elizabeth Warren has to make.

Oh, and if Warren needs paid help on her campaign, I am available.  😉

Well, that’s not good

Hmmm, last spring, Congressional Democratic leadership (with Obama chiming in) forced Anthony Weiner to resign because he sent a picture to a woman he regularly twittered.  There she was, perfectly innocent, because no *good* woman tweets provocatively, innocently discussing “cap and trade” and the nuances of fresh-water vs salt-water economists when suddenly, without any invitation at all, he raped her virgin eyes with a digital dick.  {{eyes rolling}}  After she fainted and made an appointment with her therapist, it was discovered that Mr. Weiner had inadvertently twittered the pic to the entire known world, half of which consist of women who cannot distinguish between a picture of some dude’s naughty bits and an actual physical violation.  (Oh, please, don’t get your fricking knickers in a twist over a damn picture like you are the pink of perfection’s maidenly spinster aunt. The faux outrage generated over this picture is counterintuitively anti-feminist and downright nauseating)

So, Mr. Weiner, getting a helpful nudge, no-doubt, from a sprinkling of right wing operatives in the comment threads of lefty blogs who quickly whipped up the pearl clutching outrage, took his leadership’s advice and resigned.  Regardless of Representative Weiner’s political gifts, or lack thereof, the resignation eliminated a seat from the Democrats’ caucus, a liberal seat, no less, and deprived his district of a representative it actually still wanted.  Initially, I thought that Steny Hoyer was just trying to eliminate another liberal voice in his quest to homogenize the House Democrats into cream of student body president soup.  But now I think that the Democrats are so afraid of the media coming down on them with relentless coverage of non-issues that they would rather emasculate themselves than strut around the House floor like nothing happened, you know, the way Republicans do when one of their lot gets caught tap dancing in a bathroom stall or has his diaper changed by a high cost hooker.

But no, not our Democrats.  This crop of Democrats is dickless.  They decided that it was much more reasonable to cave to fabricated public opinion and unnecessarily risk a special election for Weiner’s seat.  And they lost it.

Didn’t see that comin’.

The formerly Democratic seat is now to be held by a Republican. From the post:

With 84 percent of the precincts counted early Wednesday, Mr. Turner was leading Mr. Weprin by 54 percent to 46 percent, according to The Associated Press.

National Republican leaders immediately trumpeted the victory as a sign of trouble for Mr. Obama’s re-election effort. “An unpopular President Obama is now a liability for Democrats nationwide,” Representative Pete Sessions of Texas, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, said in a statement.

But Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, said the district’s large concentration of Orthodox Jews made it unusual and meant the race had few national ramifications.

“In this district, there is a large number of people who went to the polls tonight who didn’t support the president to begin with and don’t support Democrats — and it’s nothing more than that,” she said in a telephone interview.

Riiiight.  So by getting rid of a well-liked liberal Democrat in this Orthodox Jewish district, the Democrats were helpfully restoring the district to its natural order- conservative and Republican.  (Oh, Debbie, you had such promise once upon a time)

But what’s this?  Multiple comments from staunch Democratic voters in that NYTimes piece are saying that the reason they voted for the Republican was to “send a message” to Obama and the Democrats that they are not happy with the direction the country and economy are taking.  They want the Obama administration and Congress to focus on jobs and not more budget cuts.  This is what the Democrats should be afraid of.  They have decided to make all of the decisions for the voters and haven’t offered voters a choice.  There’s no difference between the parties on policy these days and the Democrats seem determined to ram their selected candidates down the throats of voters who were OK with the guy they had before. Voters are so angry that they exercise the one choice they have left, they vote against the Democrats.  There’s no point in sending a message to the Republicans because they’re fricking nuts.  But Democrats should get the point.  Well, you would hope that after Martha Coakley and Jon Corzine and the Congressional turnover in 2010, the Democrats would have gotten the point but apparently, it’s going to take some additional bloodletting.  And this time, the voters are being vocal and specific about why they voted the way they did:

The unexpectedly tight race stirred anxiety among Democrats already worried about elections next year for president, the House and the Senate. The Turner campaign had eagerly courted disenchanted Democrats, and outside polling places around the district on Tuesday, multiple longtime Democrats confessed that despite concern about Mr. Turner’s eagerness to slash federal spending, they chose him hoping that his election would get lawmakers’ attention.

“I am a registered Democrat, I have always been a registered Democrat, I come from a family of Democrats — and I hate to say this, I voted Republican,” said Linda Goldberg, 61, after casting her ballot in Queens. “I need to send a message to the president that he’s not doing a very good job. Our economy is horrible. People are scared.”

That’s where the 2012 election season is headed.  If the Democrats continue to offer voters no choice, they are going to get creamed.  There’s always a choice.

Could we please get the plastic dry cleaning bags and sharp objects out of the Democratic Caucus room before they meet again?