This is why the Democratic Party won’t abandon Elizabeth Warren, no matter how much embarrassment the Fauxcahontas controversy rains down on them. Warren isn’t just a Democratic rising star — she’s one of the few Democratic rising stars who can also rally the activist left. The Atlantic’s Molly Ball reports:
I went to a conference of liberal activists this week hoping to find out who the party’s activist base sees as its up-and-coming stars. But the exercise turned out to be revealing largely for how unprepared people were to answer the question. Nearly every answer I got began with a blank stare or incredulous laugh, followed by some fumbling around, followed by “Elizabeth Warren.”
Confirming the impression I’d gleaned from my conversations with activists and organizers, Warren ran away with the 2016 straw poll conducted at the Take Back the American Dream conference in Washington, winning 32 percent of the vote to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 27 percent. Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, who spoke at the conference and whose brand of gravelly-voiced populism is a perpetual hit with this crowd, was third with 16 percent; the other names on the ballot, all polling in single digits, were New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Vice President Joe Biden, and Virginia Sen. Mark Warner.
That national enthusiasm explains why Massachusetts Democrats are particularly forgiving when it comes to Warren (that, and her ability to raise money at twice the rate of Sen. Scott Brown). While the GOP has a crop of new favorites like Marco Rubio, Chris Christie and Paul Ryan, the Democratic Party lacks fresh talent, which is what makes people like Warren so valuable.
The Warren campaign hopes that by cutting off oxygen to the Cherokee controversy, the media will eventually get tired of it and drop the issue. Polls showing Warren tied with Brown seem to suggest the damage from the scandal has been minimal, though it’s hard to know how much higher Warren would have been in the polls otherwise. Even if she doesn’t win in Massachusetts, it seems unlikely that she’ll go away for long. She’s a precious commodity in the Democratic Party, and they won’t want to lose her.
Good grief – if this is true, Republicans should be ecstatic. If this is what the Dems have to offer, they are in worse shape than even I thought.
For all those lamenting the loss of Richard Lugar in his recent primary contest as a sign that bipartisanship is dead due to the extreme rightward drift of the Republican, what do they say about this field. Other than the well known names (Clinton, Biden and to a lesser degree Cuomo) the ascendant stars of the Democratic Party are all well left of the mainstream. (I'd add my own governor, tax & spend, Martin O'Malley, who has been preparing for '16 for a few years now.) nIf Obama is not re-elected, I suppose it will serve as a sort of shock to the system that could steer the Democrats back to the center. But if Obama wins a second term, Warren and Brown and O'Malley will be the future of the party. nYikes.
A politic party today is the sum of its primary voters. The "bosses" of the Democ-rat Party allowed the verminicious George McGovern to lead a commission to change the rules of the Democ-rat Party. He basically set up the system we have today and this was crowned by legislation which "opened up" both poloitical parties. n nDuring the 1950s the Stevensonian Democ-rats of academia wished for parties to be ideological. They got what they wished for–too bad they're not alive to see it!
Frauds and thieves have no appeal to anyone except partisan base voters and coattail voters. MA sees thet Obama is ahead in polls by 55-60. Warren will get thousands of coattail votes 20112 she would not in a mid term. MA is a state. n nShe is a national loser and can never escape the identity theft she let stand posing as NA.
Princess Liewatha of the Forked Tongue clan for President? PLEASE, PLEASE, DO IT, DEMS!!! she is nearly as big a fraud as Comrade Urkel.
THIS is a "rising star" of the coalition of scum, slime, filth, vermin and manure that is the Deonc-rat Party? n nGoes to a showing of how empty that Party is of any talent at all!
absolutely spot on, you will never fail to turn over the rotting putrescence of the stinking pus oozing from that is diseased, all that reeks of gangrenous infection in our society, and discover, cowering in their primordially debased foulness, the pullulating maggots of the Democ-rats!!!! n nDie Straße frei den braunen Democraten, nDie Straße frei dem Sturmabteilungsmann!
NPR celebrated Elizabeth Warren's 63rd birthday yesterday during the morning news program. Needless to say, neither Scott Brown nor any other candidate for the federal legislature, for that matter, will likely receive this kind of friendly "shout out" from friends on the "news" staff at NPR.
Interesting… One point Ms. Goodman overlooks is Warren's age — born June 22, 1949, she is 63 years old now and would be 67 years old in 2016. Yes, that is just 18 months younger than Ronald Wilson Reagan was in 1980 and we have two generations of Democrats indoctrinated with the ideology that Reagan was "too old" to be President. n nWarren represents the schism in the Democratic Party between the aging baby-boomers and their children, the spoilt brats of the Millennial Generation that I like to refer to as Gen-ME. Warren's candidacy clearly shows the schism because were it not for the MassDem leadership's doing everything possible to stifle her, a 41-year-old (and even more leftist) Marisa DeFranco would be challenging Warren in a primary and well might defeat her. n nI still say that the Senate race was Warren's consolation prize for being willing to quietly step away from the Consumer cabinet post — that it was known that she wasn't going to be confirmed by the Senate so this was the deal that was made. Never forget that Mass Governor Deval Patrick is a close personal friend of Obama — the two men are so similar that they well may be brothers. n nWarren has the ability to activate the leftist base, but I am not so sure that the same base would consider her young enough to be a viable candidate for something more than a Senate seat.
Mitt Romney will not win Massachusetts' electoral voters—but what if he lowers the margin of defeat? That could be enough to help Brown. The odds are probably slightly in his favor.