Looking like the real thing

Is Scott Brown afraid of Elizabeth Warren? He should be.

Sure, we know all about Scott Brown. He defeated perhaps the weakest candidate for U.S. Senate since Jack McMullen, who ran for Senator from Vermont from his vacation home and lost the Republican primary to Fred Tuttle, a man with such a thick Vermont accent that they needed to run subtitles even when he appeared on the radio, but Brown was the beneficiary of an even worse candidate. That was, of course, Martha "What do you expect me to do, stand outside Fenway Park and ask people to vote for me?" Coakley.

Scott Brown has all the qualifications for Senate--he's posed naked in a magazine and he owns a pickup truck--but he may find Warren a bit more of a challenge.

At the beginning it was tempting to see her as merely an academic, or, as the latest dirty word in the Republicans' vocabulary, a technocrat. She is showing us, though, that she has the goods to get out there and campaign.

Exhibit A is the video of her talking about the nature of wealth and success in this country. It was great reading the transcript, but it's phenomenal when you see it.




Then we also saw pictures of her recent volunteer rally. Very impressive that she was able to motivate such a big crowd of volunteers.


Finally, just last night, she had to contend with a deranged heckler from the Tea Party who called her a "socialist whore".

Her response:

“I actually felt sorry for the guy. I really genuinely did,” Warren later told the Huffington Post. “He’s been out of work now for a year and a half. And bless his heart, I mean, he thought somehow it would help to come here and yell names.”

She also added: “I’m not angry with him, but he didn’t come up with the idea that his biggest problem was Occupy Wall Street. There’s someone else pre-packaging that poison — and that’s who makes me angry.”

As I say, she can handle herself, and I think she's a problem for Naked Scott.

What did we learn tonight?

BOSTON — Scott Brown, a little-known Republican state senator, rode an old pickup truck and a growing sense of unease among independent voters to an extraordinary upset Tuesday night when he was elected to fill the Senate seat that was long held by Edward M. Kennedy in the overwhelmingly Democratic state of Massachusetts.

So what lesson should we take from this?

First off, something we already know: a bad candidate who runs a bad campaign is likely to lose. Everywhere you turn you see how bad the Coakley campaign was: refusing to stand outside of Fenway Park and shake people's hands; not calling the Democratic mayor of Boston until last week; going on vacation three weeks before the election.

Second, not the lesson Evan Bayh wants us to learn: that Democrats have to become just like Republicans. Harry Truman said it: "Given the choice between a Republican and a Republican, the people will vote for the Republican." In other words, surrendering to them means that we win nothing, not even a meaningless vote in the whip count.

Third,can Obama finally get the point? Trying to be bipartisan and work with the R's has gotten him absolutely nothing. He keeps losing. If he is going to lose anyway, why not go down fighting for the people, instead of competing to see who can win the blandness competition?

Fourth: we thought things were bad in Congress before? You haven't seen anything yet. The Republican program in Congress consists of two items: 1. Block anything the Democrats try to do; 2. Lie about everything the Democrats do or say. # 1 just got a lot easier.

Finally: pointing out that the Republicans are lying is not enough. The fight is more than that. We have seen that people are all too receptive to Republican lies. We need to get our own story out there. The Obama story was a great story, but it's not the only great story we have as Democrats.