"Elizabeth Warren’s politics rooted in academia" by Stephanie Ebbert and Michael Levenson | Globe Staff, August 19, 2012
Elizabeth Warren was off-putting — but also as a climber with sharp elbows. And while Warren aligned herself with economic underdogs in her research, she was not viewed as a champion of women or minorities at the law schools where she taught. Silent on the race and gender wars that divided campuses in the 1980s and 1990s, she was never a liberal crusader.
She was a registered Republican as recently as 1996....
As Warren’s career took root her marriage was unraveling. The Oklahoma teenager Jim Warren had married had turned into a hard-charging professor whose priorities, she said, did not include having a home-cooked dinner on the table each night. The couple separated in 1979 and divorced in 1980....
Six months later, she married Bruce Mann, a legal historian at the University of Connecticut. The two had met at a law conference and it was “instant togetherness,” one former colleague recalled....
In 1983, she was recruited by the University of Texas Law School at Austin — a more prestigious school, where she began the work that would define her academic and political careers and transform her from a little-known professor into a prominent voice on consumer protection and bankruptcy issues.
The catalyst was her introduction to Jay Westbrook, a Texas bankruptcy professor with whom she would write some of her most influential books. Congress had rewritten the bankruptcy code in 1978, and she and Westbrook wanted to know how the code was affecting average families.
Eschewing high-minded theory for ground-level analysis, they worked with Teresa Sullivan, a sociologist with a background in statistics, to examine who was filing for bankruptcy and why. Backed by a National Science Foundation grant, they pored through district court records and interviewed bankruptcy judges and debtors.
Their findings upended conventional notions, showing that people who filed for bankruptcy weren’t necessarily lazy or profligate, but were often middle-class workers whose finances were sunk by a single catastrophic event, like a heart attack, divorce, or layoff.
“The answers were unsettling,” said Keith M. Lundin, a bankruptcy judge in Tennessee, who gave Warren access to his court records. “They got answers that were inconsistent with the model that the bankers and the creditors were selling us on.”
And they have never forgotten or forgiven her.
Warren was at the vanguard of a burgeoning school of legal thought, the empiricist movement, which held that bankruptcy and other aspects of the law can be understood only through an examination of their impact on peoples’ lives, not just with theoretical principles.
She established herself as a singular voice in the movement in 1987 when she challenged Douglas G. Baird, a University of Chicago Law School professor and defender of the theoretical model, to a debate.
The two traded drafts of their papers — his rooted in theory, hers in case studies — and submitted them jointly for publication in the prestigious University of Chicago Law Review.
Warren’s paper panned the “law and economics” school that Baird represented, saying it was for being seductively oversimplified, an abstract theory with no grounding in reality....
That's the Globe reporting on the economy.
When Warren arrived at Penn, she was a rising star on a campus whose reputation had dimmed. Having lost professors and prestige, the school was trying to recruit superstars and Warren, by now a nationally recognized bankruptcy scholar, was the first coup. With her came her husband, Mann, a well-regarded legal historian, and a mission to recruit additional serious scholars.
To some on the faculty, improving Penn’s reputation meant diluting the influence of liberal ideologues who they believed were coming to dominate the law school. At the time, a number of professors at Penn and elsewhere were focused on critical legal studies, a discipline that views the law through the lens of social justice, race and gender.
Warren quickly rose to become head of Penn’s appointments committee, a position that put her at the center of that struggle....
At the same time she was fighting within the administration to recruit prominent academics, Warren stayed publicly silent on one of the most polarizing issues of her first year at Penn — the denial of tenure to a popular feminist legal philosopher, which inspired petitions and protests by law school students.
Supporters of Drucilla Cornell argued she had been snubbed because of her gender and feminist views. Her detractors dismissed her research as thin.
In recent interviews, students who had advocated for Cornell said Warren was among the influential voices who had actively opposed her, aligning herself with the administrative establishment. Several female law students from that era said they considered Warren “mainstream” and “conservative.” Cornell ultimately sued the law school for gender discrimination and won a settlement.
And she distanced herself from Occupy.
At the time, Warren was one of only three women with tenure on the faculty.
“She was not a rabble-rouser,” said Alix James, the chief executive of a Pennsylvania manufacturing company who graduated from Penn Law in 1988.
“I appreciated that about Professor Warren,” James said. “She didn’t wear a feminist badge. She just got the job done.”
That can only help her.
Warren told the Globe that she did not work against Cornell. But she refused to say how she voted when the faculty had to decide whether to grant Cornell tenure.
Warren argued that she wanted to devote her energy to bankruptcy research and avoided campus crusades over minorities and women.
“I just wasn’t involved,” she said. “I’m not saying they weren’t important. They were. There were people who were pouring lots of blood, sweat, and tears into them. But not enough people were pouring blood, sweat, and tears into this issue,” she said, referring to bankruptcy studies.
Wow, a politician who is a compassionate person that connects with average people.
Her determination to stay focused on her career led her to sidestep another liberal cause in the early 1990s. Warren had agreed to speak on a panel in Colorado, a state that academics were boycotting to protest a 1992 referendum opposing gay rights, not the politically correct thing to do....
Uh-oh.
In some ways, her reluctance to join the liberal professors in protest was not surprising. Warren was a registered Republican from 1991 to 1996, according to voter registration records in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. Her husband was registered as an independent there.
In an interview, Warren refused to say if she voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984, or detail any of her voting history.
Asked why she become a Democrat in 1996, Warren hesitated.
“I felt like the parties were moving and the conversation was moving,” she said. “I felt like I had stayed in the same place and the world had shifted around me.”
*********************
She told the Globe in 2009 that she found Harvard to be a “hostile environment” for women. But in a recent interview, Warren downplayed that concern....
It would be more than a decade before the Wall Street crisis would bring Warren to national notice and make her something close to a household name....
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Yeah, I'm a lot more concerned about the last few years myself.
"Warren’s star rose in D.C. battles; Oversight role won allies and enemies" by Glen Johnson | Globe Staff, July 29, 2012
WASHINGTON — Timothy Geithner knew he had to keep his opening statement short. The chairwoman, Elizabeth Warren, had interrupted the Treasury secretary repeatedly the first time he testified, chiding him for going on so long.
Oh, now she's getting me hard.
So, during Geithner’s second appearance before her congressional oversight panel, which was charged with monitoring his agency’s use of $700 billion in economic recovery funds, the secretary proudly noted that he had finished his opening in just six minutes.
Warren leaned into her microphone. “And 19 seconds,” she said.
For many who heard the exchange, this response — only partly tongue-in-cheek — captured the essence of Warren’s nearly three-year tenure in Washington.
Sharp-tongued, sharp-witted, exacting, unyielding, and fearless, the Harvard Law School professor quickly made an impression with the top echelon of political power. She earned a bold reputation that helped catapult her into the nation’s most high-profile Senate race this year, a campaign against Republican Scott Brown, but also laid the groundwork for some of her opponents’ most persistent attacks against her.
Warren’s verbal fencing matches with Geithner and other Washington heavies — the plainspoken watchdog taking on the power elite during the depths of the recession — soon became must-see TV. She emerged a media darling, with comic Jon Stewart proclaiming on-air that he “wanted to make out with her” after she made a guest appearance on his show in January 2010.
“What stood out to me was an unstinting sense of advocacy,” said David Axelrod, a top White House adviser when Warren was in Washington. “She really had a very strong identification with the struggles of everyday people.”
But the same unrelenting attitude, which often eschewed the clubby ways of Washington politics, also stirred a growing disenchantment in some quarters with Warren. She needled. She wouldn’t compromise. Republicans, already hostile to her anti-Wall Street rhetoric, chafed at what they considered her authoritarian leadership style.
Wow. Now she is a dictator, not the fascist economic system controlled by banks.
When panel member Richard Neiman, a Democrat, surprisingly broke ranks to vote with the Republicans on a staffing matter, Warren telephoned him to complain. At the next meeting, the panel re-voted and Neiman reversed course.
The champion of transparency at the Treasury also initially sidestepped requests to release her panel’s meeting minutes and transcripts, fueling one of Brown’s campaign attacks against her. “I thought her leadership was lacking,” said Representative Kevin Brady, a Texas Republican who called for Warren’s resignation. “At the end, ultimately, I determined her focus was about her, not about the oversight.”
Increasingly, top officials within the Treasury Department, whose actions she had been assigned to oversee, believed that the longtime academic was too idealistic to clearly see the reality of the economic challenges they confronted.
That means she was out$ide allowable discourse.
And in the end, even some of the same Democrats who are now publicly championing Warren’s candidacy inadvertently or deliberately bolstered some of the Republican criticisms of her.
Because BOTH PARTIES WORK for the BANKERS!
“I know she will be a great representative for the people of Massachusetts,” former Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut, now chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, said in a statement to the Globe recently.
But in May 2011, during an interview with the influential Capitol Hill newspaper Politico, Dodd helped undercut Warren’s hopes of running a new federal consumer agency. He had worked with Warren as he and Representative Barney Frank coauthored the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory act, but he expressed concern that the consumer panel post created by the legislation might not be filled because of GOP opposition to her.
What an absolute s*** scum is Dodd. I mean, flies light on shit.
Related: Senate Sends Along Financial Fraud Bill
It's a complete failure seeing as we are in an even worse situation than 5 years ago. Quite a career-capper.
“It would be deeply unfortunate if the head of this agency is not filled because of ego, because of people who believe they are so important that their value exceeds the idea,” Dodd said, though the former senator denied it was a shot at her.
Warren says such criticisms were unavoidable, given her charge.
“It was my job to push for more accountability both for government and for the Wall Street banks,” she said during an interview.
Could you just wrap it up?
In the fall of 2008, the Bush administration was scrambling to respond to the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. Weakness in the housing market had triggered a dive in the stock market, bankruptcy at Lehman Brothers, and demands to stave off the same fate at mega-insurer AIG, famously branded “too big to fail.”
In October 2008, Congress approved Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s request for $700 billion in funding for what became know as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Amid concerns about such an epic blank check, the House and Senate approved several layers of oversight.
One was a special inspector general, a position filled by Neil Barofsky, a New York attorney who released “Bailout,” a book about his experience, on Tuesday.
Related: Barofsky: Geithner Said Housing Policies Were "Foaming The Runway For The Banks"
Also see: Sunday Globe Special: Foreclosure F*** Over
But they were really trying to keep you in your home even though the bank needed them to balance their bottom line with real assets, not those worthless pieces of paper they were getting from you every month.
Another was the Congressional Oversight Panel, whose five members would be picked by congressional leaders.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid chose Warren, who had chops not just as a Harvard professor on bankruptcy law, but also as a leading voice on the plight of the middle-class, through “The Two-Income Trap” and “All Your Worth,” books she coauthored with daughter Amelia Warren Tyagi.
“I thought we needed somebody that was very serious, and not only serious, but had the capacity to understand very big issues, and she had that,” Reid told the Globe.
The panel members voted among themselves to pick their chairman, and the three Democrats backed Warren.
The law professor started the part-time job in early December 2008 and by Dec. 10 — working without offices and virtually no support staff — had produced a report running 37 pages and posing 10 questions to the Treasury Department. A month later, in her second report, Warren’s bluntness and zeal were evident as the panel assessed the response to the requests made in its inaugural report.
“While the letter provided responses to some of the panel’s questions and shed light on Treasury’s decision-making process, it did not provide complete answers to several of the questions and failed to address a number of the questions at all,” the report said.
The panel also began holding field hearings, the first on Dec. 16, 2008, in Clark County, Nev., which includes Las Vegas and has had a nation-leading mortgage foreclosure rate.
In language that now permeates her Senate campaign, Warren said: “Addressing the financial crisis can’t be just about Wall Street, or even just about Main Street, it has to be about the 30,000 homeowners in Clark County alone that have lost their homes this year and the families that are struggling all over the country.”
Warren makes him ‘squirm’
The committee’s most visible moments were its Capitol Hill hearings, which Warren led. And none of those hearings attracted more attention than when Geithner testified, as he first did on April 21, 2009.
Warren’s voice was raspy from a cold, but she forged ahead, telling the secretary in her opening statement that his department should take actions that made sense, that he shouldn’t be afraid of facts, and that decisions creating short-term pain were fine. Geithner was diplomatic in response, thanking Warren and the other panelists for their “very thoughtful opening statements.”
Yet as he continued on about the “complicated questions” facing his department, Warren grew impatient.
“Mr. Secretary, could I ask you just to wrap up?” she said.
Geithner replied, “Yes, but this is very important for me to do, because you have asked me to lay out broad strategy.”
After a few more minutes, Geithner reacted to Warren’s continued impatience by flipping forward — pages at a time — through his prepared testimony.
Warren interrupted him again. “Mr. Secretary, I appreciate how many pages you are turning there,” she said. “But if we could wrap up, I know we want some questions, too.”
During Q&A, Warren complained that banks receiving TARP money had not been forced to make leadership changes, and were reimbursed for their losses dollar-for-dollar, while US automakers endured management changes and the companies had to accept what she termed “big haircuts” by getting reimbursed for just part of their losses.
Geithner insisted “they are different challenges. They require different solutions.”
Warren refused to yield, cutting the secretary off again.
“I am sorry. I just want to make sure I am following. You are saying that there have been changes in management at the financial institutions that received TARP funds?” she said.
Geithner would appear before the panel three more times, including the September 2009 hearing at which Warren suggested his 6 minute, 19 second opening statement was still too long.
“Elizabeth Warren makes Timmy Geithner Squirm,” was the headline atop one video of that hearing that went viral on YouTube.
That right there is a good enough reason to vote for her.
“I tried to make it a more democratic process,” Warren told the Globe. “This wasn’t about the battle of the nerves; it was about letting people in on what was at stake, and what kinds of decisions were being made in their name.”
After Geithner had another rough outing in December 2010, he decided to cut back on his schedule of appearances before the panel.
“It won’t be the same without you,” Warren pleaded to Geithner during a subsequent phone call, according to a former Treasury aide who was briefed on the conversation.
“I know,” the secretary replied with a chuckle.
Geithner would not return for another seven months, until June 2010. By then, Warren was about finished with the panel herself after 24 reports and 21 public hearings.
Under attack from the GOP
At the same time the panel was conducting its business, Congress was writing legislation designed to prevent a future financial mess, a massive bill that came to be known as the Dodd-Frank Act.
And we now know that was a toothless fraud.
Warren had long advocated for a federal agency that looked after the consumer, an idea she put forth in a 2007 Democracy Journal article. President Obama, a fan of her work, was insistent that just such an agency be included in the final bill. And, while still leading the oversight panel, Warren worked on the side with Frank — her fellow Massachusetts Democrat — to draft politically palatable language about the proposed agency.
Obama signed Dodd-Frank into law and, on Sept. 17, 2010, appeared with Warren in the Rose Garden to announce that he had asked her to join his administration to start what would be known as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
“Elizabeth understands what I strongly believe: that a strong, growing economy begins with a strong and thriving middle class,” Obama said. “And that means every American has to get a fair shake in their financial dealings.”
Warren negotiated the title “special assistant to the president” and was also named “special adviser to the secretary of the Treasury.” As a full-time employee, she secured herself a sizable office in the department.
It was one floor below Geithner’s.
Adding a layer of palace intrigue were reports that the secretary had lobbied hard to keep Warren out of the job, given his experience with her at the Congressional Oversight Panel, an assertion that Geithner publicly denied.
Related:
"Geithner has opposed Warren’s nomination"
Why am I not surprised he's a liar?
Nonetheless, Senator Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent who caucuses with the Democrats, felt it was necessary to write to the president on her behalf, while others collected over 200,000 signatures on a petition backing her appointment. Liberals from MoveOn.org and Dr. Phil, on whose TV show she used to appear, also rallied behind her, increasing pressure on the White House.
Republicans fought just as hard on the other side to block her from the five-year term spelled out in the Dodd-Frank Act. As a party, the GOP objected not just to a new government agency, but also one that — at Warren’s insistence — was funded directly by the Federal Reserve rather than being subject to congressional appropriation.
That, in their view, stripped the agency of accountability; Warren countered that bank regulatory agencies established in the Civil War era had similar funding mechanisms.
“There was a recognition even a 100 years ago that banks can be large and powerful and wield political influence, and so the regulators who are charged with monitoring those banks were given independent funding sources,” she said in the interview.
In the end, the president found middle ground: He appointed Warren as his special adviser so she could launch the bureau, but he deferred a final decision about whether she would permanently head it.
As she continued her work, creating and staffing the agency, Republican opposition grew.
In March 2011, Warren testified before a subcommittee of House Financial Services Committee. Republicans wanted to dilute the bureau’s power before it went into full operation in July 2011, and one idea was to transfer decision-making authority from its lone director to a bipartisan committee.
Two months later, as Warren made a return appearance before the committee, members attacked her.
Representative Patrick McHenry, a Republican from North Carolina, accused her of misleading the panel during her March testimony when she denied accusations that the bureau had inserted itself into negotiations between other government authorities and mortgage servicing companies.
Then, after an hour in which he and several other Republicans tried to pin down Warren with a series of yes or no questions, McHenry sought a recess so members could attend votes on the House floor.
Warren, chafing at having exceeded what she felt was a commitment to testify for just an hour, said, “Congressman, you are causing problems. We had an agreement.”
McHenry replied, “You’re making this up,” a suggestion of lying that The New York Times said triggered gasps from the audience. “This is not the case.”
Ultimately 44 Republican senators declared they would filibuster any confirmation vote for Warren to lead the bureau, unless the Obama administration agreed to structural changes in its oversight and funding.
“I was genuinely shocked that in the wake of a staggering financial crisis, brought on by the rampant tricks in the mortgage industry, that the Republicans would move to cut the legs out from underneath the consumer agency,” Warren told the Globe.
In July 2011, Warren again stood next to the president in the Rose Garden as he nominated her top lieutenant — former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray — to be the first head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Warren had decided instead to return to Massachusetts, to take her grandchildren on a vacation to Legoland, and then to launch a Senate candidacy. Her departure note to the bureau staff sounded like a Kennedyesque campaign anthem.
“I leave this agency, but not this fight,” wrote Warren. “The issues we deal with — a middle class that has been squeezed and business models built on tricks and traps — are deeply personal to me, and they always will be.”
As he prepared to walk through a set of ornate doors and onto the US Senate floor last month, Senator John Cornyn was asked for his opinion of Warren.
The cowboy boot-wearing Texan is a member of the Senate Banking Committee, and chairman of the political committee charged with electing Brown and other Republicans to the Senate.
“Well, I would say she certainly had strong zeal for her point of view, but, obviously, I didn’t agree with a lot of the policies,” Cornyn told the Globe.
After branding it the “anti-democratic Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,” Cornyn said he was irked by its ability to run without a congressional appropriation. “It, literally, denied Congress an attempt to do the kind of oversight that we typically, under the Constitution, would do,” he said.
As if Congress is overseeing anything and ruling by the Constitution these days.
Frank said such criticisms highlight that Warren wasn’t an obstacle to her bureau, but was the victim of the philosophical and partisan battle that rages today on Capitol Hill.
“There are no specific criticisms of what Elizabeth has done, none that she appointed inappropriate people, none that her agency overstretched her bounds,” the congressman said.
Warren defended her tenure and denied she exercised ironfisted control over the oversight panel’s official documents, Warren said she followed federal law and the examples set by similar panels like the 9/11 Commission.
“And now, so far as I know, everything is public or can be made public,” she said.
Axelrod, the top Obama aide, said Republican opposition to making Warren the permanent head of the financial protection bureau put the president in a predicament from the outset: Nominate her for the permanent assignment and trigger another partisan battle on the Senate floor, or put her into the post temporarily through a so-called recess appointment while Congress was on vacation.
The latter option would have allowed Warren to head the bureau, but only until the current session of Congress expires. Then she would have been out of a job.
“Once the agency was set up, you know, both she and the president felt, ‘Better move on to other things,’” said Axelrod.
The former Treasury aides and some of those who worked with Warren on Capitol Hill say there was a sense in both the White House and the halls of Congress that Warren’s best course was to seek a seat of her own in the very Senate whose GOP minority vowed to block her nomination.
Frank, who shares billing with Dodd on the financial regulation act, disputed the complaint of some critics that Warren’s efforts were undercut by an outsized ego.
The congressman remembers bracing himself for a conversation with Warren when he planned to tell her something she wanted in Dodd-Frank couldn’t be included. To Frank’s surprise, he found Warren accepted his explanation without argument. “That was when I fell in political love with her,” the congressman told the Globe. “I didn’t have to explain reality to her. She was flexible, she was thoughtful.”
Me, too.
Frank, though, said he wishes the president had taken a hard line in the face of the Republican opposition to Warren’s permanent appointment to the consumer bureau.
“I told President Obama at a Democratic issues conference to appoint her,” the congressman said. “Either she gets confirmed, or she gets filibustered and becomes a martyr and wins the Senate election.”
Frank said the president replied, “Oh, do you think she wants to run for the Senate?”
The congressman said he replied, “Oh, yeah, I think she does.” Frank added: “I think Scott Brown wishes he had appointed her now.”
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Then, after an hour in which he and several other Republicans tried to pin down Warren with a series of yes or no questions, McHenry sought a recess so members could attend votes on the House floor.
Warren, chafing at having exceeded what she felt was a commitment to testify for just an hour, said, “Congressman, you are causing problems. We had an agreement.”
McHenry replied, “You’re making this up,” a suggestion of lying that The New York Times said triggered gasps from the audience. “This is not the case.”
Ultimately 44 Republican senators declared they would filibuster any confirmation vote for Warren to lead the bureau, unless the Obama administration agreed to structural changes in its oversight and funding.
“I was genuinely shocked that in the wake of a staggering financial crisis, brought on by the rampant tricks in the mortgage industry, that the Republicans would move to cut the legs out from underneath the consumer agency,” Warren told the Globe.
In July 2011, Warren again stood next to the president in the Rose Garden as he nominated her top lieutenant — former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray — to be the first head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Warren had decided instead to return to Massachusetts, to take her grandchildren on a vacation to Legoland, and then to launch a Senate candidacy. Her departure note to the bureau staff sounded like a Kennedyesque campaign anthem.
“I leave this agency, but not this fight,” wrote Warren. “The issues we deal with — a middle class that has been squeezed and business models built on tricks and traps — are deeply personal to me, and they always will be.”
As he prepared to walk through a set of ornate doors and onto the US Senate floor last month, Senator John Cornyn was asked for his opinion of Warren.
The cowboy boot-wearing Texan is a member of the Senate Banking Committee, and chairman of the political committee charged with electing Brown and other Republicans to the Senate.
“Well, I would say she certainly had strong zeal for her point of view, but, obviously, I didn’t agree with a lot of the policies,” Cornyn told the Globe.
After branding it the “anti-democratic Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,” Cornyn said he was irked by its ability to run without a congressional appropriation. “It, literally, denied Congress an attempt to do the kind of oversight that we typically, under the Constitution, would do,” he said.
As if Congress is overseeing anything and ruling by the Constitution these days.
Frank said such criticisms highlight that Warren wasn’t an obstacle to her bureau, but was the victim of the philosophical and partisan battle that rages today on Capitol Hill.
“There are no specific criticisms of what Elizabeth has done, none that she appointed inappropriate people, none that her agency overstretched her bounds,” the congressman said.
Warren defended her tenure and denied she exercised ironfisted control over the oversight panel’s official documents, Warren said she followed federal law and the examples set by similar panels like the 9/11 Commission.
“And now, so far as I know, everything is public or can be made public,” she said.
Axelrod, the top Obama aide, said Republican opposition to making Warren the permanent head of the financial protection bureau put the president in a predicament from the outset: Nominate her for the permanent assignment and trigger another partisan battle on the Senate floor, or put her into the post temporarily through a so-called recess appointment while Congress was on vacation.
The latter option would have allowed Warren to head the bureau, but only until the current session of Congress expires. Then she would have been out of a job.
“Once the agency was set up, you know, both she and the president felt, ‘Better move on to other things,’” said Axelrod.
The former Treasury aides and some of those who worked with Warren on Capitol Hill say there was a sense in both the White House and the halls of Congress that Warren’s best course was to seek a seat of her own in the very Senate whose GOP minority vowed to block her nomination.
Frank, who shares billing with Dodd on the financial regulation act, disputed the complaint of some critics that Warren’s efforts were undercut by an outsized ego.
The congressman remembers bracing himself for a conversation with Warren when he planned to tell her something she wanted in Dodd-Frank couldn’t be included. To Frank’s surprise, he found Warren accepted his explanation without argument. “That was when I fell in political love with her,” the congressman told the Globe. “I didn’t have to explain reality to her. She was flexible, she was thoughtful.”
Me, too.
Frank, though, said he wishes the president had taken a hard line in the face of the Republican opposition to Warren’s permanent appointment to the consumer bureau.
“I told President Obama at a Democratic issues conference to appoint her,” the congressman said. “Either she gets confirmed, or she gets filibustered and becomes a martyr and wins the Senate election.”
Frank said the president replied, “Oh, do you think she wants to run for the Senate?”
The congressman said he replied, “Oh, yeah, I think she does.” Frank added: “I think Scott Brown wishes he had appointed her now.”
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Also see: Sunday Globe Special: This is Your Life, Elizabeth Warren!
The Globe really does seem like they are gunning for her.
What does it matter? Party means nothing anymore.
"In ads, Scott Brown obscures his GOP identity" by Noah Bierman | Globe Staff, August 13, 2012
In Washington, the race between Senator Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren is a key battle in a partisan war over who controls the Senate. But in the world of Brown’s television commercials, his website, and his speeches, the senator’s political party is often barely visible.
His three newest advertisements feature Democratic endorsers, all of whom identify their own party prominently, without mentioning Brown’s Republican allegiance at all.
“I’m a Democrat, but I’m tired of all the polarization, the pettiness, and the bickering,” Ray Flynn, the former mayor of Boston, tells the camera, in a Brown ad played repeatedly during the Olympics.
In the highly polarized realm of national politics, his public coziness with Democrats is an anomaly. But in Massachusetts, it is a necessity, especially in a presidential year in a state where President Obama is expected to defeat Republican Mitt Romney by a significant margin. Democrats hold a distinct voter registration advantage in Massachusetts, more than three to one, though the majority of voters are not in a political party.
Yeah, I'm one of them now.
Related: Mischievous Massachusetts Republicans
I'm one of them, too.
With the Democratic testimonials, Brown is hoping to give Democrats interested in his candidacy a comfort level, said Joseph D. Malone, a former state treasurer and one of a small group in the GOP to win statewide constitutional office in the modern era. That’s why the ads — both on television and radio — are devoid of ideological content, instead depicting Brown as “more a friend and neighbor,” Malone said.
“Many Democrats are people who will tell you, ‘I’m a Democrat, my father was a Democrat, my mother was a Democrat.’ It’s just something they inherited,” Malone said. “He’s saying, ‘It’s OK to stray from your cultural roots to vote for this Republican.’”
Blurring party distinctions, and focusing on personality rather than politics, is a time-honored strategy for Massachusetts Republicans. In the 1960 governor's race, Republican John A. Volpe’s slogan was: “Vote the Man. Vote Volpe.”
Yeah, I'm so glad this campaign is about substantive issues.
**************
Richard R. Tisei, the Republicans’ best hope at winning a House seat this year, also released a television commercial Wednesday that does not mention his party, instead highlighting the words “independent” and “bipartisan” directly on the screen. Tisei is running against Representative John Tierney, a Salem Democrat, in a Northeastern Massachusetts district.
See: Tierney vs. Tisei
The Republican formula is an obvious contrast to the path for Warren, who needs to capitalize on Democratic turnout to defeat the popular incumbent. Her commercials, website, and speeches focus more directly on policy differences with Republicans, her anti-Wall Street populism, and her personal connection to Obama.
After Romney announced his selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate on Saturday, Brown was conspicuously silent, even as other Republicans in Congress heaped praise on the conservative Wisconsin representative. At the Globe’s request, Brown’s spokesman issued a statement that was careful not to align too closely with Ryan. “While Scott Brown has his disagreements with some of Paul Ryan’s positions, he respects the fact that he is a solutions-oriented leader interested in honest debate,” spokesman Colin Reed wrote.
Also see: Brown praises Ryan, but keeps distance
Brown needs independents and cross-over Democrats, especially white working-class voters who have been critical to Republican success at the polls in Massachusetts. To win them over, he is conveying a dual message with his ads: that he is nonpartisan, and that he is more a product of Massachusetts than he is of a political party. The sharper edge in some of his campaign statements, which often question Warren’s integrity, and the Tea Party enthusiasm that helped propel him to victory in 2010, are nowhere to be seen....
Democrats are quick to point out that Brown’s endorsers are far from loyal Democrats. Flynn, for example, has drifted away from the party, voting for President Bush in 2000....
Brown’s campaign staff is also quick to blast out e-mails whenever Warren’s fellow Democrats compliment Brown or show any hint of disparaging Warren’s campaign. Among those Brown missives was a recent New Republic article that included Democrats praising Brown’s common touch and a few who questioned Warren’s election strategy....
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Related:
Daughter of Elizabeth Warren claims center stage
Brown criticizes voter registration mailing to Mass. welfare recipients
Only Mass. sent out voter registrations after lawsuit
Mass. is justified in mailing voting forms to aid recipients
Scott Brown demands Elizabeth Warren reimburse taxpayers for voter registration mailings
Scott Brown vs. ‘the welfare vote’
Elizabeth Warren, Scott Brown pour millions into ads
Yup, back to a nothing campaign again.
Updates: Warren, Brown’s no third-party ad pledge holds
Scott Brown calls on Akin to drop out of Missouri Senate race
Romney, Ryan seek distance from Akin remarks
President Obama: Todd Akin’s rape comments ‘offensive’
Despite outcry over remark, Akin won’t abandon Senate race
I'm so sick of the s*** discourse that is passing for "debate" in AmeriKan politics and its mouthpiece media.
