… But I’m not sure whether I’m wishing “campaign for the Senate” or “escape while you still can“!
Elizabeth Warren has a post up on BlueMassGroup which has stirred up the progressives, and their polar opposites:
Coming Home
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… Last week, my role setting up the consumer agency ended. My husband and I packed up the car and made it back to our home of 17 years in Massachusetts.
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I left Washington, but I don’t plan to stop fighting for middle class families. I spent years working against special interests and have the battle scars to show it – and I have no intention of stopping now. It is time for me to think hard about what role I can play next to help rebuild a middle class that has been hacked at, chipped at, and pulled at for more than a generation—and that that is under greater strain every day.
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In the weeks ahead, I want to hear from you about the challenges we face and how we get our economy growing again. I also want to hear your ideas about how we can fix what all of us – regardless of party – know is a badly broken political system. In Washington, I saw up close and personal how much influence special interests have over our law-making, and I saw just how hard it is for families to be heard. I want to hear your thoughts about how we can make sure that our voices –our families, our friends, and our neighbors — are heard again.
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We have a lot of work to do in our commonwealth and our country. We need to rebuild our economy family by family and block by block. We need to create new jobs and to fix our broken housing market. We need to make sure that there is real accountability over Wall Street and that the greed and recklessness that created the last financial crisis do not create the next one. We need to restore the hope of a secure retirement and the promise of a good education. We need to stop measuring our economy by profits and executive compensation at our largest companies and start measuring it by how many families can stand securely in the middle class.
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I am glad to be back home. And I’m looking forward to discussing with you what we can accomplish together.
Would I love to have Professor Warren as my Senator? Oh, yeah! As soon as she announces she’s in the race, I’ll donate as much as I can afford, and do whatever campaign work my lack of social skills and borderline agoraphobia permits. I’m very happy with all her hard work setting up the CFPB, and would be even happier to see her fighting for the Commonwealth in Teddy’s old seat.
There are a number of Democratic contenders already in the race, but as the NYTimes delicately phrases it, “some state and national Democratic officials say that so far, the field lacks a standout“. I try to stay politically aware, watch the local news at least five nights a week, and yet out of the seven announced candidates I can only name two — the guy who’s in danger of becoming the Massachusetts version of Harold Stassen, and the first-term mayor of a not-large city whose detractors have claimed won by playing up his close ties to Governor Deval Patrick, aka “the Masshole Obama”. Whichever Democrat ends up on the ticket gets my vote, but I’m not the only life-long Dem still waiting for a little excitement. Scotty ‘Cosmo Boy’ Brown has decided he likes the DC limelight enough to put up a real fight — he’s not the brightest bulb in the Senate chandelier, but he’s been crafty enough so far to swing “liberal” when it was essential to avoid angrying up us progressives in the eastern half of the state, without (so far) disenchanting the paleocon boneheads in his caucus. We’ll need lots of money and media attention to combat the advantages of incumbancy and the non-stop Fox-News shilling, and it’s pretty clear Warren has an advantage over the current field, be they never so well-intentioned.
The bitch-du-jour from the Right and its enablers is that, after a mere 17 years in Massachusetts, running in the Commonwealth would brand Warren as a “carpetbagger”, just like Hillary! eleventy-one! As far as I can tell, coming from outside the Massachusetts establishment is a real bonus for any woman hoping to win here. Our elected officials, bless their shrivelled little hearts, are determined to keep the ‘boys’ in the Old Boys’ Network; even among Democrats, between the old-school Catholics and the hardcore working-class dynasts, there’s a real terror of “girl cooties” in our so-called-progressive legislature. Women from either party who campaign for statewide office — Evelyn Murphy, Shannon Doherty O’Brien, Jane Swift, Martha Coakley — are notoriously bad campaigners, but a large part of their inadequacy is that good female campaigners aren’t encouraged in the crucial lower-level offices. Women who aren’t accommodationist, go-along-to-get-along doormats can’t get beyond the school-board level, and women who are sufficiently accommodating only achieve statewide office when they run for the kind of straight-ticket slots (attorney general, lt. governor) where voters are looking at party affiliation, not the individual. Wondering why Martha Coakley performed so badly against Scott Brown is like wondering why the Republicans keep producing African-American candidates like Alan Keyes or Michael Steele: that’s a feature, not a bug.
Does Warren want to get into this mishegas? That’s a different issue. I wouldn’t blame her one bit if, after further exploration, she decides that she’s better off fighting from outside Capitol Hill. She’s not young, she’s never had to campaign before, she’s already got a career that she loves and does well at, and I get the impression that she actually likes her family and would enjoy spending more time with her husband, kids & grandkids. Whatever road she chooses, I’m looking forward to following.