EB3 can now calm down. 🙂
See Frank Phillips in the Globe.
Salient points:
After weeks of testing the political waters, Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard Law School professor and Wall Street critic, will officially announce her run for the US Senate tomorrow morning against Republican incumbent Scott Brown.
A senior campaign adviser has confirmed to the Globe that Warren will launch her candidacy by greeting voters across the state, beginning with a morning visit to a Boston MBTA station. She will then head to New Bedford, Framingham, Worcester, and Springfield, making similar appearances shaking hands and greeting voters.
Warren will not make any formal statements or speeches, but her aides will put a video on her campaign website featuring the candidate talking about the major themes she will strike as a candidate.
“The pressures on middle class families are worse than ever, but it is the big corporations that get their way in Washington,” Warren says in the video, according to partial script given to the Globe. “I want to change that. I will work my heart out to earn the trust of the people of Massachusetts.”
Check out my post from Sunday. It will be a fun campaign.
Glad she is finally making it official. Lot’s of work to do.
if she makes it to the general election.
My thinking is that Brown is in office because:
1. Candidate Change morphed into President Keep-Things-Pretty-Much-The-Same, which knocked the wind out of the sails of many Democrats and Independents. It was not clear whether Coakley would be just another Very Serious Adult or an actual Democrat once in office.
2. Republicans and many Independents were fascinated/energized by the nascent Tea Party rebels.
Little energy for the Democrat, lots of energy for the Republican.
By contrast, it’s pretty easy for Democrats and thinking Independents to get excited over Warren – she clearly has an actual point of view (the same point of view held by most Americans), and she comes complete with backbone and a (non-mealy) mouth. She’s an actual Democrat. The Republicans have little to rally behind: standard-issue Republicans may like Brown, but the Tea Party hates him. And Warren will cudgel Brown with his voting record, making him unpalatable to most non-Republicans.
The arguments have been hashed and re-hashed, but I still see no evidence that Brown won because the Massachusetts electorate was fascinated by the Tea Party or upset with President Obama. He won because Martha Coakley ran a disastrous campaign that utterly alienated voters while he remained upbeat and substance-free. I remember making phone calls for her and having registered Democrats yell at me about how angry she made them. She seemed to go out of her way to make people dislike her and simply didn’t work hard enough. All that, and she still only lost by about 4 points.
We now have a handful of candidates who could do much better than the A.G. did, and I’m very hopeful that whoever gets the nomination will run a vigorous campaign not just about why Brown has failed to lead but also why our candidate can do better.
Let’s see, liberals have been working on a liberal (oops, “progressive” ) health care system for 100 years. It was a Teddy Roosevelt plank, but failed. It didn’t make it into the New Deal. Truman tried, and failed. LBJ had the only success in getting medicare enacted, but medicare addressed only a fraction of the population. Nixon of all people was willing (and that plan would make today’s liberals jealous) but that plan was scotched by Senator Kennedy, who hoped for something better later. Later came in 1994, but Clinton’s proposals failed.
Finally, in 2009, Democrats are finally in a position to win one of their longest sought goals, but lose a key vote when Senator Kennedy dies, and by the time of the special election, it is clear that this is THE vote that makes or breaks the bill.
And yet there was “little energy for Democrats” because Coakley was a bad candidate? Democrats should have been sufficiently energized to elect your show to the Senate, if your shoe promised to vote yes on the health care bill.
If Demcrats couldn’t be energized in that special, then they can’t be energized, in the sense of being cadavers.
If you are interested in supporting Elizabeth Warren, if she chooses to run for U. S. Senate, there are things that you can be doing now, before a campaign is established.
1) Talk to people. Find out what they are thinking. Share your thoughts.
2) Make notes on people who you think might be interested in helping her candidacy.
3) If you find people who are interested in helping get e-mail addresses and contact information.
4) Begin the process of explaining to people that attending a caucus in support of Elizabeth Warren is something that they can do that will be important towards electing her.
5) Sign up on the website Elizabeth for MA
If you want be actively involved with others who are interested in helping now, please contact Matt Patton at matthewdpatton AT yahoo.com or me, Kate Donaghue at KateDonaghue AT aol.com.
Kate Donaghue, volunteer.