So, Uh, What Is This Sh*t?
In the spring of 1970, Bob Dylan released Self-Portrait, far and away his strangest record, and even farther away his worst. Critic Greil Marcus led off his review in Rolling Stone with a four-word critique that, for a long while, was the thing that most fans remembered best about the record. So, having read a couple of pieces in the elite political press on Thursday about Senator Professor Warren, let me be so bold as to borrow Marcus’s succinct evaluation of Self-Portrait.
What is this shit?
Nobody said this running for president thing was going to be easy, and SPW has been introduced to that simple fact ever since she began showing signs that her anti-corruption, anti-monopoly, anti-money-power message was finally breaking through. (Remember, the same people who are all doom and gloom about her possible nomination were the ones saying she was done last spring.) Since then, she has rolled out the pricing mechanism of her version of Medicare For All, which various rivals and plutocrats have jumped on, somehow eliding the obvious fact that, as long as Mitch McConnell has a Senate majority, any Democrat’s healthcare proposal is definitionally aspirational. In which case, why not go big?
She also probably shouldn’t have said that Joe Biden belongs in “the other primary,” not because that’s “uncivil,” but because it allowed Biden to call in all the markers, financial and otherwise, that he’s piled up since entering Democratic politics shortly after the Industrial Revolution. There’s also been some sniping from the Sanders Left. They’re competing for a lot of the same voters so, yeah, this’ll happen. All of this is to be expected—become a frontrunner, wear a bullseye. That’s the way this running-for-president thing works.
But, honestly, now. Washington Post? Tiger Beat on the Potomac?
What is this shit?
First, from the Post:
Over the past few days, two of the leading male candidates in the Democratic presidential primary race — Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg — have escalated separate lines of attack as they attempt to counter the field’s most prominent woman: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is antagonistic and angry. She also is an uncompromising elitist, they argue, suggesting that if she were the nominee, it would harm the party in the must-win states in the upper Midwest. The new attacks, marking a more vigorous phase of the race, get at something far beyond her policy positions, and into one of the most fraught areas for a female candidate: Is she likable?
Pushing that argument is treacherous given that many Democrats remain upset over what they view as sexist treatment of Hillary Clinton, the party’s last nominee. Warren’s allies view the language being used against her as constructed to be particularly devastating for female candidate and beyond the policy divisions between her and her rivals.
This kind of thing makes me crazy. An opponent launches a new "line of attack." It is then described in detail, just so everybody gets the point. Then the reporters make no real value judgments as to whether the “line of attack” is a crock of beans or not—which, in this case, it plainly is.
I have known SPW for almost a decade. I don’t know one person who’s met her in person, with the possible exception of Timothy Geithner and/or Larry Summers, who ever found her angry or antagonistic. In purely human terms, her likability is obvious and authentic. Purely in terms of political utility, “likability” is, in this case, being weaponized in contravention of the observable experience of thousands of people. This is not merely a "more vigorous phase of the debate." It’s complete nonsense and it should be evaluated as such.
Buttigieg laid the groundwork by criticizing Warren’s “my way or the highway approach” and suggesting recently that she is “so absorbed in the fighting that it is as though fighting were the purpose.” Biden, launching a range of new attacks on Warren, said this week that she reflects “an angry unyielding viewpoint that has crept into our politics.”
Between the two of them, Mayor Pete as national conciliator and Joe Biden as The Republican Whisperer make up one Democratic candidate for everyone to love. Biden’s quote in particular is of a piece with his current campaign to prove that every Republican in government will regain their senses once the current president*'s hoodoo is dispersed. This is also of a piece with the theory that, despite his long experience in politics, Biden has been asleep for the last 30 years.
As for the piece in TBOTP, well, a lot of it depends on a attack plan devised in 2012 by Scott Brown, which is to say, to quote the thing is to refute it. Brown ran one of most brainless, stupid campaigns in modern history. He had two clear advantages going into the election: he was the incumbent and people really liked him. He had a compelling personal story and he sounded like everyone’s favorite soccer Dad. And then his campaign geniuses decided he should campaign like a drive-time radio host.
“Every day, the message was elitist, elitist, elitist,” an official from Brown’s 2012 campaign recalled of their strategy. On the campaign trail, Brown referred to her as “Professor” and “Professor Warren” at every opportunity. His campaign spokesperson said Warren "is firmly entrenched in the same ‘1 percent’ she rails against.” The Brown team demanded she release a full list of the corporate clients she advised with hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation. And Brown said her $300,000-plus salary at Harvard was demonstrative of loose spending at colleges that had driven up tuition rates.
And it didn’t work. I mean, it failed spectacularly. One of the reasons it failed was that SPW got around the state and met so many people that Brown looked like at best an idiot and, at worst, a liar and a bully. She won over the late mayor of Boston, Tom Menino, who was the very model of a blue-collar pol, and someone who’d largely sat out the election that put Brown in the Senate. Brown never really found his footing again. I guess it’s somewhat to his credit that he was an unconvincing bully. But he lost that election by following the game plan that TBOTP "obtained." And then there’s this.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s presidential stump speech starts off the same way. “I was born and raised in Oklahoma,” she says. She checks to see if there are any fellow “Okies” in the crowd. She describes herself as a “teacher,” the job she yearned for as a young girl when she lined up her “dollies” for instruction — “I had a reputation for being tough but fair,” she quips.
She doesn’t poll her audience for people from Massachusetts, where she is the senior senator and where she has lived for over 20 years. Nor does she refer to herself as a “professor,” instead saying that after a brief public school-teaching stint she “traded littles ones for big ones and taught in law school for most of my life.” At times on the trail, she wears a Berkshire Community College cap — supporting the small school in western Massachusetts where she gave the commencement address in 2015.
Behind the scenes, however, the detailed plans that are the centerpiece of her campaign, covering everything from a wealth tax to trade deals’ “Investor-State Dispute Settlement,” were crafted by an elite Ivy League-studded policy team, whose four members and a senior outside adviser all carry degrees from Harvard University or Yale University as of this summer.
Her policy team’s reliance on Ivy Leaguers, along with the Harvard Law School alumni she regularly consults, reflect the duality in her campaign — the fact that Warren is both an up-by-the-bootstraps success story and a privileged Ivy League professor — that opponents are starting to notice and exploit.
Seriously, what is this shit? Are we supposed to pretend that we think Biden’s policy team is made up of mechanics and farmhands from Ohio? Are we supposed to pretend that Mayor Pete is being advised by the Amish in Decatur County? The “duality” of her campaign is simply the way campaigns operate, and to act as though this is something unique to the Warren campaign is akin to finding it astounding that an aide might bring her an umbrella in the rain.
I hope I live long enough to see a campaign that is covered neither like a sporting event nor performance art. But I’m not holding my breath.
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