Seems to me that Alan Khazei is going down a dangerous path. Here’s a fundraising email I just received.
As you have undoubtedly heard, Elizabeth Warren threw her hat into the ring last week. Her entrance into this race was certainly no surprise – she has been courted by Democratic Party elites in Washington for some time now, and she is clearly their candidate for United States Senate in Massachusetts.
I am not. Washington insiders really don’t understand our grassroots, citizen-led campaign to defeat Scott Brown and his failed policies. That’s okay. Washington insiders are wrong on a lot of things, and they’re going to be wrong on this one.
What they’ve failed to notice is that we’re the campaign that’s independent of corporate lobbyists and political action committees. We’re the campaign led by real citizens, with over a thousand grassroots supporters helping us raise over $1 million and even more turned out to volunteer….
Please give what you can to support the hard work and shoe-leather it’s going to take to reclaim this Senate seat by going to www.alankhazei.com/contribute.
I cannot do this alone; we can only do this if we run together. Together we can make a real difference. Thank you so much.
Hmm. Warren is the candidate of the DC Democratic party elites; I am the candidate of the people; please help me; we can do this if we work together. Now compare that with this appeal from the Scott Brown campaign – I received this email about a month ago.
As you have probably heard, the Washington insiders have stepped up their efforts to convince liberal Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren to enter the U.S. Senate race in Massachusetts against Scott Brown.
Over the last few months, Warren has been wooed by powerful D.C. political players like Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer and David Axelrod, and rumors of her candidacy have intensified over the last few days on left wing blogs [hey, that’s us! 🙂 -ed.] and other progressive sites. Locally, she has hired special interest lobbyist Doug Rubin to assist in putting her campaign together.
In fact, it was reported today that the D.C.-based Progressive Change Campaign Committee has already raised $100,000 on behalf of Professor Warren because she shares their far left wing agenda for America – higher taxes, bigger government and more spending.
This is why we need your help to fight back for Scott: http://www.scottbrown.com/help-scott-fight-back
The Democratic political establishment is going to pull out all the stops next year, doing whatever it takes to win back a seat that they think belongs to them by right but which we know actually belongs to the people. They are so obsessed with winning this seat back that Washington elitists are trying to push aside local Democrat candidates in favor of a liberal Harvard professor from Oklahoma….
The Washington insiders and power players are going to pull out all the stops. We are going to need your help to fight back against the political machine….
Scott can’t do it alone, but he can win with good people like you in his corner.
Sound familar? Warren is the candidate of the DC Democratic party elites; I am the candidate of the people; please help me; we can do this if we work together. If you take out the references in the Brown email to “liberal” and “far left” and the references in the Khazei email to “defeat[ing] Scott Brown and his failed policies,” the two emails are nearly interchangeable. The wording is so close that I had to keep double-checking to make sure I was copying and pasting from the right email.
IMHO, this fundraising pitch is a big mistake by Team Khazei for a couple of reasons. First, Khazei must know as well as anyone what Elizabeth Warren’s track record is, and it is assuredly not doing the bidding of corporate lobbyists and DC insiders. She is perhaps most famous for royally pissing off Treasury Secretary and noted DC insider Tim Geithner during the TARP hearings, and for getting a consumer protection agency passed into law despite the vociferous objections of a small army of corporate lobbyists. Aside from that, she has spent most of her career outside of Washington, studying and advocating for the financial well-being of the middle class. So this is an attack that is not likely to stick; instead, it makes Khazei look petty.
Second, should Khazei win the primary, he is going to need the support of national Democrats to beat Brown. Fact is, Brown is going to be hard for anybody to beat, and among other things, a lot of money is going to be needed. Crass, but true. If Khazei runs too hard against the very crowd that he needs to bankroll a successful run against Brown, they’re not going to be there for him a year from now. He should make the case to voters and donors on his own merits, not on a trumped-up attack against Warren.
Does Khazei really want to be copying plays out of Scott Brown’s playbook? Come on, Alan – walk this one back.
Peter Porcupine says
You are doing your best to imply that ‘corporate lobbyists and DC insiders’ and ‘Democratic Party elites in Washington’ and synonyms, when they clearly are not.
Here I thought she held no elective office, yet she is responsible for “getting a consumer protection agency passed into law despite the vociferous objections of a small army of corporate lobbyists”?
Scott Brown had more to do with that than she did – he voted for the bill, at some political risk to himself, not just sideline quarterbacking.
David says
That will surely go down as one of the most absurd statements in the history of BMG. Yes, yes, Scott voted for the bill, bravo. It never would have contained a consumer protection agency were it not for Warren’s efforts. The historical record is pretty clear on that point.
So, yes, she is indeed “responsible” for the consumer protection agency.
Bob Neer says
I like that line for a Brown campaign slogan. I think you dismiss Porcupine’s perspicacity too quickly.
David says
I certainly don’t deny that certain “DC insiders and Democratic party elites” wanted Warren to run. And I’m not implying that there isn’t some overlap there – of course there is. Chuck Schumer, Patty Murray and the gang wanted Warren to run because they think she can beat Brown, and their job is to hold the Senate in 2012. Simple as that.
ramuel-m-raagas says
With a borderline super-majority from 2009-2010, the Sanders and Democrat Senate Caucus got some bills passed. Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s leadership gave them the Affordable Care Act to pass. With the ex-Democrat Joe L. from a neighbor state, however, unduly retaining committee chairmanships, a public option for health care never came to be. The job of Senators Schumer and Murray is to get laws passed which best serve our country. Schumer can promote strong ideas, like a tax hike for those raking in a million or more . It’s his job to fight for it to be passed as law for our president to sign. A simple majority gets derailed by Republicans such as Coburn of Oklahoma. Coburn destroys the safety of American air travel. Like Waleed al-Shehri, Coburn went to flight school.
I don’t ever see the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee trying to secure a formal senate super-majority (comprised all of enrolled Democrats, with Sanders as a safety member colleague) to serve from January 2013 onwards, nor do I see a commitment to party discipline at hand.
I don’t have the resources or talents to simultaneously push for several United States senate seats to be won by us Democrats. I don’t have the money to chip in for Baldwin in Wisconsin, but I am glad that dailykos has for quite a while now been sharing a landscape view of our American politics. Dailykos gives a sweeping view of contests across our country, but after I put in a tiny post for a Massachusetts U.S. Senate candidate, I have not really seen our field of eight there.
Anyway, sweet dreams to everybody!
johnk says
Frank-Dodd and Brown’s role is going to be discussed here a great deal. Corporate giveaways conceded to Brown on behalf of State Street and Liberty Mutual with tax payers taking on the risk in order to get his vote will be a topic you will find here. Brown had an opportunity with this vote and he used it to put up a For Sale sign at his office instead of working for the middle class.
tpsmyth01 says
I hope and expect Tom Menino and Deval Patrick’s ties to those very same institutions and their support or lack thereof for Elizabeth Warren will also be discussed.
Christopher says
Sure if either publicly endorses I’m sure it will be commented on, but we don’t do equal opportunity bashing just for the heck of it. We look at the bigger picture.
tpsmyth01 says
It’s not so much what Menino and Patrick say publically(there will almost certainly endorse whoever is the nominee) its how much “machine” support they give behind the scenes. I could definately see Menino preferring someone like Khazei whom I suspect Menino would see as being more familiar and willing to play ball with City Hall.
I do think the ties between the local MA Democratic Party and the major financial institutions here in Boston and general conservative drift the local MA Democratic party seems to be undergoing have a strong possibility of becoming an issue in this Senate race and I will be curious to see how Warren handles them.
Tim
johnk says
what are you talking about.
fenway49 says
has thrown Warren under the bus in the press.
Bob Neer says
But a good try.
karenc says
to force the use of taxpayer money (from paid back TARP money) to create the fund that will bail out a failing financial firm in the future. Before Brown demanded his price, that fund would have been created by a tax on the financial firms that would benefit from it.
JimC says
“Democratic Party elites in Washington” surprised me. I’m glad Khazei is fighting, but I didn’t expect knives this early.
johnk says
maybe he can better spend his time detailing why he’s the better candidate and what are his thoughts about the direction he believes will improve the economy.
david88 says
I don’t know about you but this seems like a pretty detailed economic plan to me: http://www.alankhazei.com/issues/economyandjobs. Just slightly more content than Warren: http://elizabethwarren.com/priorities.
Now, I know it is probably unreasonable to expect Warren to have a detailed jobs plan less than a week into the race, and maybe you can say you don’t like Khazei’s tactics, but you can’t say he hasn’t submitted anything of detail, because he has.
johnk says
Who said that?
Read what I wrote.
He can better spend his time detailed why he’s the better candidate and what are his thoughts about the direction he believes will improve the economy.
You tell me what’s wrong with that. I cringed with Progressive Change fundraising statement, now he is doubling down with another. It’s just dumb.
Enough with this BS he should be telling us why we should vote for him. You don’t think so?
kbusch says
Reading Khazei’s site, it’s all details.
That would be very nice too if the electorate only consisted of people I had hand-selected.
tedf says
I don’t understand this line of attack. My impression several months ago is that Warren inspired a genuine grass-roots “draft Warren” campaign. She is an accomplished national figure who has the capacity to fire up the base. Given what we’ve learned about the tensions between her and others in the administration, she hardly seems like the choice of the Beltway insiders. She is significantly to the left of the Obama economic team, or at least the Obama economic team as it performed up through the debt limit debate. What gives?
mski011 says
Pure & simple.
merrimackguy says
so therefore they can’t have any candidates and Khazei is by definition a big fat liar.
Mark L. Bail says
morons in the Republican Party….
Whooops!
Christopher says
Elizabeth Warren just isn’t one of them.
merrimackguy says
where the lowells speak only to the cabots, and the cabots speak only with god….
Christopher says
…but not necessarily political elites, and I contend that Elizabeth Warren is definitely not the latter. Even the former she worked her way up to from the “ragged edges of the middle class”.
SomervilleTom says
Scott Brown’s rather comfortable real estate holdings put him in a rather elite class, don’t you think?
If it’s elitism that bothers you, then the incumbent is far more bothersome than the faculty appointment of Ms. Warren, don’t you think?
Surely it isn’t intellectual prowess — especially in a woman — that is really troubling you.
merrimackguy says
I think this started as to whether Warren was the choice of the elites, and I think she is.
I also think she is an elite as well.
I on the other hand, am not an elite, at least not in MA.
SomervilleTom says
I responded to your comment titled “Really? Harvard law professors are not elites”?
If you don’t care, and you agree that Scott Brown is an elite, then what is the point of your post (other than gratuitous snark)?
hoyapaul says
It’s not like Scott Brown invented the elites vs. common man political narrative. Heck, you could say that both of them borrowed from Andrew Jackson’s campaign in 1840.
The fact is that sure Warren is an elite — just like Scott Brown, and just like Alan Khazei. None of them swing a hammer for a living or make close to minimum wage like many service workers do. So what’s important is who will actually stand up for the middle class, not posture and pretend by using a variety of gimmicks like driving a pickup truck.
Mark L. Bail says
hurt. He complains about Elizabeth Warren’s advantages, but his advantage was due to the fact that the primary race has lacked a marquee candidate. Seriously, we’ve got some pretty inexperienced people running, and though perhaps they could all be good senators, they are a black hole of name recognition.
Khazei looks like he’s got some respectable accomplishments, but does anyone beyond Rte. 495 know the guy? Has he been involved in Democratic state politics outside of throwing his hat into the last primary?
And speak of insiders, didn’t this guy give his brother a job on one of his charities?
lrosen says
A huge majority of the population is inside 495. If he was actually well known in that area (as this comment implies) he’d be in excellent shape, but he’s not known that well anywhere outside hard-core politicos and non-profit circles. Why push a regional divide where there is none?
Mark L. Bail says
We get shafted on state funding for one. Historically, at the very least, equivalent agencies serving the same number of people–think courts, etc.–got less money. Do you have any idea how galling it is for us that the Big Dig takes up so much money for roads we rarely use? Our tax dollars, our transportation funds…
Democrats work for candidates our here as well. I’ve worked for candidates, for example. I’m not some sort of super campaign worker, but I know those who are. We also contribute money to campaigns.
We may not be the huge majority, but our votes count too. A candidate running for office as a grassroots candidate ought to realize that the grass grows beyond Rte. 495.
Steve Stein says
Don’t speak ill of other Democrats.
To me, the ONLY thing that matters is whether you can beat Scott Brown. Whoever convinces me that they can do that will get my vote. So speak about that – WHY should voters send you to Washington instead of Sen. Brown? What’s so bad about him? How are you going to be better?
BTW, Setti Warren has this part down pretty well – it’s the strongest part of his stump speech. Haven’t heard this from Elizabeth Warren yet (but I’ll be on the lookout for opportunities), nor have I heard it from Khazei yet.
But that’s how I’m going to decide whom to support.
Mark L. Bail says
Setti Warren went to the Hampden County Sheriff’s clambake. Big deal. These people are complete unknowns who really don’t know what they’re doing.
In the old days, someone interested in running would spend a year or two traveling the state meeting people and solidifying support. Khazei has had a couple of years to prepare for this run, where’s he been? Where’s his organization? Why hasn’t he contacted Democratic committee members or chairs? With actual political work, he could have gone far in getting votes for the convention.
Maybe things are different now. But he could have been connecting with real, live Democrats for the last two years. He’d have to be elected by Democrats before the general election, but how many has he cultivated?
Candidates can get elected by name, but most of the time, it takes a good ground game.
Steve Stein says
he’s done about 90 town events so far. Since we’ve got 351 in the Commonwealth, I think he’s behind the curve. But that’s his plan.
sabutai says
But it isn’t about Khazei. I think it’s about people picking sides and not owning up to it yet.
I’m neutral in this race so far — when Warren is ready to put forward a real platform befitting a real candidate, I’ll take her seriously. As long as she relies on great work on consumer protection and vague generalities, I’m not there. If I had to vote tomorrow, hell, I don’t know for whom I’d vote. Setti Warren, maybe.
However, anybody running against Warren is going to point off that her full political experience is outside of Washington, DC. That doesn’t mean that they’re all the same.
Christopher says
That’s exactly what makes her who she is and why so many are excited about her entry into this particular race at this particular time. She has answered questions about other issues as well, but there’s still time for her to focus I think.
sabutai says
But at some point those of us who want more than a bank cop for a Senator are going to need to know why to support her.
She may have opinions about foreign policy, energy, education, transport, etc., Chris — but right now I have no idea what they are. So why rush into her arms?
Ryan says
I liked what Khazei had to say last time around, but too much has happened since then that make me feel as if Khazei just isn’t genuine about where he stands. Now that someone who’s a real progressive and isn’t afraid to truly take on the status quo has jumped into the race, suddenly we get messages like this that just confirm that gut feeling of mine.
Alan — we netroots and grassroots types expect more. If beating Brown is the most important thing, we need a positive campaign that sticks to facts, instead of launching personality attacks.
lynne says
And I haven’t seen anything to showcase he’s gotten that more polished. Maybe a little. But there were some seriously cringe-worthy moments in the special election primary debates.
I am an E.Warren leaner right now, but I will be refraining from endorsing/volunteering until after the first debate which is in Lowell and which there is no way on god’s green earth I am going to miss. A) I might get some of those details sabutai so wants, and B) I can see how she holds her own in a debate. Then I will feel more free to make an actual decision.