Count me among the surprised who checked in on the Herald’s coverage of the debate it co-sponsored last night with UMass-Lowell, and found a virtual love-fest in its cyber-pages.
Front-runner smart, solid on big stage
By Joe Battenfeld
It was her first test, and Elizabeth Warren passed it — but not with straight-A marks.Warren won the crowd over just by walking on the UMass-Lowell debate stage, and when she walked off, her front-runner standing was firmly intact…. Warren’s solid performance will ensure she stays at the top of the Democratic pack.
***
Elizabeth Warren doesn’t miss beat in Herald debate
By Hillary Chabot
A polished, front-running Elizabeth Warren emerged from the first U.S. Senate primary debate and high-profile political test largely unscathed last night, as she and the five other Democratic candidates focused their fire on the Republican incumbent Scott Brown.***
Elizabeth Warren scores well with panel
Undergrads, profs also like Khazei, DeFranco
By Jessica Heslam
Sorry, Scott Brown.If UMass-Lowell junior Mary-Kate Hazel was heading to the polls today, Democrat Elizabeth Warren would get her vote for U.S. Senate. That was the sentiment among a half-dozen college students — and a trio of professors — who gave Warren high marks for her performance in last night’s U.S. Senate UMass-Lowell/Boston Herald debate.
***
Debate music to Elizabeth Warren’s ears
By Howie Carr
… Elizabeth Warren acted like she’d already won the primary, and she probably has, considering her not-ready-for-prime-time opponents…. Even though Warren is being handed the nomination, she did come up with some of the best lines of the night, namely when asked how she paid her way through college. “I kept my clothes on,” she said.
Not that I necessarily disagree with the overall assessment reflected in those pieces (the Globe‘s observers more or less agree too, FWIW). I thought the debate was fine as far as it went, and I thought that all the candidates performed well. I’d say that, overall, Marisa DeFranco is the one who most exceeded expectations, but there were no game-changers; as I wrote in my live-blog, “[a]ll of them have had a couple of really good answers. Some have done marginally better than expectations. But nothing that happened tonight is going to substantially affect the dynamics of the race, IMHO…. So, according to the usual rules, the frontrunner wins by not losing.”
Still, I didn’t expect quite that level of adulation from the Herald scribes.
I did not particularly like the format – too many questions, too little time to answer them – and I very much hope that next time we can get away from the absurd notion that a meaningful response to anything can be crammed into 60 seconds.
That said, kudos to the Herald and to UMass-Lowell, who put on a very nicely managed debate, and who provided a real service to voters by getting all the candidates up on stage together at this early point in the race. As far as was evident from the audience, the whole thing went off without a hitch.
eb3-fka-ernie-boch-iii says
Not Ton Conroy.
But try to tell Tom Conroy that. He, like the other nobody candidates, must call out the national democratic elite for demanding that MA Dems vote for who they tell them to.
Jesus Christ, I can’t believe this. This has nothing to do with civility. It has to do with winning. Playing by the rules and winning the primary.
Unless a Dem starts pounds Warren on this then she won’t be prepared for Scott Brown’s people convincing the electorate that Warren’s a total puppet for the elite liberal establishment.
eb3-fka-ernie-boch-iii says
see the problem? I made the mistatke.
brudolf says
Both Elizabeth Warren and Martha Coakley are white women with law degrees (also true of Marisa DeFranco). They are, however, very different people and I think most of the electorate either already understands that or will. Elizabeth Warren made the choice to run because she wants to do the job. She’s nobody’s puppet and that will be crystal clear.
I’m keeping an open mind about whether Tom Conroy or Marisa DeFranco or anyone else might be a better candidate, but none of them will convince me by playing cards from Scott Brown’s deck.
SomervilleTom says
Repeat after me:
“All women are NOT the same”
JimC says
… that Warren wins.
The Herald doesn’t want a Dem primary. They don’t want to cover it.
But mainly, I think they’re hyping their own event here.
JimC says
I’m not that familiar with Hillary Chabot, but I consider Joe Battenfeld and Jessica Heslam to be honest reporters, and not in the tank the way Howie Carr is. In short I take their reviews at face value, but with the caveat that the boss was sponsoring the event, so by definition they aren’t 100% objective about it. (For example, was it really the “Big Stage?”)
JHM says
I am not sure Blue Blazers are a class of royalty/nobility/gentry who will ever have noticed how difficult it is to suggest to anybody over the age of about twelve that maybe, just ‘maybe’, the way she discriminates between whight and ’rong could do with a tune-up.
Comrade Fka has attempted something bold and moralistical along those lines in the article called “Scott Brown Wants to Run Against Martha.” The “mistake that [even he] made” is, I take it, a total blindness to _Boston Herald_ groupies’ total blindness to the differences between General Coakley and St. Elizabeth of Warrenbuffet, the way both these distinguished comradesses blend seamlessly, for kiddie selfservatives, into some imagined “elite liberal establishment.” How they melt, as it were, into one vast an’ pullulatin’ Sea of Icky Political Spinach.
He does not quite advise the Blazers, as I shall, that “The reason you cannot find your glasses is that you are wearing them,” but, ¡Come along, ’tis of H*rv*rds and _juris doctores_ that we sing! If Blazers cannot work out that they themselves must look like only so much arugula or sargasso to a small band of misguided malcontents, then ¿Who can?
*
But seriously, to mention the _Herald_’s great Hero under the rubric of “Carr in the tank” put this keyboard in mind of a South British poet:
Happy days.
JimC says
— The novelist P.G. Wodehouse
dcsohl says
Nope. Even after three readings I really have no idea what you’re saying. You still don’t make any sense.
laurenceglavin says
That front-page headline is what the Chicopee Herald gets by firing their former in-house music critic Ellen Pfeiffer. She might have advised them that when praise is bestowed on a FEMALE, the cry is “BRAVA”.