I’m thinking that going on the attack now, esp with trivial & easily refuted charges, could be counterproductive, in the sense of raising her profile without delivering a knock out blow. This kind of petty stuff might have been better held back until the final throes of the campaign when she’ll be too busy to counter all the bs. But then I’m not Karl Rove & no one asked me my opinion.

They are attacking a woman who keeps rocks in her pockets and wants to see blood and teeth on the floor.

Good luck with that Kleptocrats.

And how irrelevant is Politico making itself, reallY? I cannot remeber the last time I bothered to wander over there.

Ms. Warren is gonna beat Brown’s corpotate-lovin ass sooo bad!

Did they buy any muffins? For how much, and were they blueberry muffins or plain?

Good one.

My first reply was just a comment, cCAHN. Here’s the reply:

I think they are hoping to deliver the quick knockout – knowing that she’s gonna be hell/impossible to beat, otherwise.

Aha. But they won’t do a knockout blow with these kinds of petty attacks.

On edit: There might need to be a senate investigation of the muffin scandal that rmwarnic refers to. Put Ken Starr in charge. Collect all Warren’s blue dresses./s

I hope Ms. Warren and her supporters circle the wagons because the amount of money from the Kochs and Wall Street banksters, and the smears from their handmaidens in the fawning corporate media, will be absolutely obscene in the coming weeks and months. I think it’s a badge of honor for her that they despise her so much.

Warren for Senate in 2012!

Yep. That’s one IMPORTANT senate seat.

Elizabeth Warren is no Caroline Kennedy.

This is Massachusetts we don’t like that style of politics, the rightwing smear machine will be counter-productive, what plays in Peoria is banned in Boston.

I forget the Brown campaign. Did he go negative on Coakley, or was she just such as wash out that he didn’t need to?

Hey Elizabeth, how about this campaign slogan

“Name one good thing the Right Wing has ever done.”

That’s certainly true – but I’m not sure what you meant by your comment. One could also say that Brown is no Ted Kennedy.

If I lived in Massachusetts I’d volunteer to be a foot soldier in her campaign. But, alas, I live in the Southwest and can only support her via my membership in the 101st Keyboard Brigade. *g*

Elizabeth Warren seems to be a good exemplar of speaking truth to power.

Rove’s a one-trick pony. Any Democrat running for office who doesn’t know that trick doesn’t deserve the nomination. I don’t think this applies to Ms Warren.

Caroline Kennedy is wimp who folded the first time she got a negative statement used against her in her very brief & aborted “run” for senate from NY.

They were blueberry muffins stuffed with caviar, served with champagne. (Actually, yuck!)

Coakley ran a lousy campaign, including an ill timed holiday vacation that may have given the voters the impression that she was taking them for granted. Can’t demonstrate causality, but one of Coakley’s larger drops in the polls followed her decision to support the Obama Health Insurance Industry Bailout including the provisions reducing women’s reproductive rights, which she’d earlier said she wouldn’t do.

Indeed. What did they DO with those muffins???

Hey, thanks for the clarification!

She’s the perfect example that truthful information and guts attracks many, many people to you very quickly and you can then be elected to any office you want to occupy. Of course, after the Obama tragedy, a verifiable track record will be required. Let’s hope Barry hasn’t completely destroyed the country or the Democratic party by the time Elizabeth decides to occupy the White House.

HUGE fan of Warren’s — until she announced for the Senate — at which time the key question became: Will she endorse Obama?

That’s the determining factor. If she endorses someone whose policies are the exact opposite of those she claims to support, well, I guess we’ll know where she really stands.

And don’t tell me that she’ll have to just to protect herself during the campaign. I heard that same claim about Zero’s FISA flip-flop. “Just a necessary campaign tactic. Don’t worry, once in office he’ll fix it.”

I think I read that the DSCC will be supporting her; not a good sign.

I heard too much of this kind of logic when people called Bernie Sanders a traitor for his health care vote. Every politician makes compromises. If you’d like to be a very lonely voice in the wilderness proclaiming your ideological purity, be happy. Just don’t expect to have an impact.

Even working for the Obama Administration theoretically under Geitner’s supervision she created a Consumer Financial Protection Agency with enough teeth that the Republicans won’t confirm anyone to run it.

Warren has a consistent track record over time. That’s the key factor.

The more air time she gets the better. She’s a class act and the perfect contrast to Palin and Bachmann.

Every politician makes compromises.

But Warren is running essentially as a “non-politician”, a truth-speaker instead of a career political hack.

And by compromise, I assume that you’ll be fine when she caves on issues like civil liberties, HCR, Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid cuts, financial reform, war appropriations, etc., because “every politician makes compromises”. Isn’t that the problem with the so-called Dems, that they compromise away the party’s traditional principles to support Zero, because he’s the head of the party and “their guy”?

Nonsense! Franklin Roosevelt made lots of compromises. The question is whether things are better or worse for your having made them. Obama didn’t compromise. He caved. There is a difference.

A non-politicians running for office is an advertising slight of hand.

I couldn’t support anyone who buys plain muffins.

Might as well as put great pork bbq on white bread and call it tasty.

Too easy.

“They keep safe from all them dark skinned thugs n vagrants who don’t love MeriKa!”

Ms. Warren has made it to the top, on her own, holder of an endowed chair at HLS, as an outsider – non-Ivy League trained woman lawyer – against all the hurdles outsider’s are made to leap. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, has been an insider since getting that scholarship to Columbia and wouldn’t dream of distressing his peers. Ms. Warren has made a living exposing some of their excesses – politely, forcefully, and with rigorous documentation. As its Senator, she would be a great asset to a long-progressive state.

The DSCC support money raisers and winners, they’ll support anyone.

Don’t make too much of that yet.

Down the line, we’ll see if she’s gone all DSCC on we the people.

For now, let her rock it out n stomp on the looonz.

Sooner or later tho she WILL have to denounce the party and Obama to maintain credibility and viability as a pol.

keeps rocks in her pockets and wants to see blood and teeth on the floor.

And a wrist rocket in her back pocket for long shots.

As always kudos to Mr. Dayen for keeping us apprised of this and all else he does . . . what a hoss.

It does rather depend on which compromises. Mr. Obama, as did Mr. Bush, with his deliberate botching of the English language, has demeaned the concept of compromise. He has gelded it in the same way that corporate consultants have gelded into nothingness the corporate apology. For Mr. Obama, “compromise” yields nothing for the side he publicly claims to fight for, but yields considerable victory for his notional opponents. Most of all, it requires of him nothing but rhetoric.

Like Mr. Bush, he fills his experience gap by giving in. While his “give” differs in many ways with Mr. Bush’s, Obama’s resembles it in the ways and the extent to which he allows Congress whatever lard it asks for, and allows the direct and indirect gutting of laws and regulations and oversight that any lobbyist in the room is paid to dislike. That is, except a consumer or environmental lobbyist, but then they are never allowed in the same room as the other guys.

Ms. Warren, on the other hand, seems to stick to her issues the way a Republican lobbyist sticks by the champagne, caviar and hostesses at a GOP picnic. If she’s stymied in one direction, she hits out at another, the way one would expect of a woman who has survived more than one insidious campaign launched in an Ivy League faculty club lounge. She knows its not a game and that no quarter is taken. It’s just that her priorities are closer to Sherrod Brown’s than Bill Daley’s.

The very fact that DD mentions Politico makes me think that it’s time to start looking for somewhere else to spend the bulk of my time other than FDL. I’m a member, no small feat living on SSI with no COLA the past two (now almost three) years and a pension. I don’t wanna read what Politico thinks because I know the GOP moneybags are funding that site and its reporters. MSNBC anchors cite Politico, supposedly progressive pundits use it as source material, and I don’t really need to hear or read any more propaganda from the bigoted bought-and-paid for media.

Thank God.

Ignoring what the other side says via its most widely read venues is folly. In the past these smears were done on paper and at gatherings most people didn’t have access to. Now everybody can see what they’re doing. Do you think for a nanosecond that the fascists aren’t paying close attention to DKos, or the Lake, for that matter?

He also was pulled into the orbit of Zbigniew Brzezinski while at Columbia who we can probably thank for grooming Barry for CFR approval like he did with Carter for David Rockefeller back in ’75.

We should probably be thankful Barry made the cut or we’d have ended up with Deval Patrick. No matter what, the puppetmasters wanted a black man in office so Social Security could be eviscerated.

Carter started deregulation; Bubba killed welfare and pushed NAFTRA and GATT;, and Barry’s gonna kill Social Security paid-for benefits.

“Warren has a consistent track record over time…”

Right. She has a consistent track record of letting Obama use her for a liberal dog yummy, to try to keep us on the reservation. For a couple of months, I could shine it on, but when it went on and on, it got nauseating.

And, Beachpopulist’ nailed it. Either she dumps Obama, or the voters will make her a political footnote.

Brown is going to hang Mr. “Centrist” around her neck like a turd-lei. If she doesn’t separate herself from him, she doesn’t have a chance.

Now that she’s out in the real world, instead of hiding out in Obama’s little doggy-run, she better be coming up with some red meat for the voters, and some of it she needs to flay off Obama’s ass, or Brown will flay it off hers.

Sorry, SD, I don’t argue with keeping up with the enemy but way too often MSNBC uses Politico as if it was the NYT. For some folks, if they see Politico mentioned by a mouthpiece like Maddow or Schultz without a disclaimer that the GOP funds politico, those listeners won’t realize it’s an astroturf news outfit.

Sorry, that’s a bad analogy. The Times is every bit as bad as any partisan outlet out there.

“sooner or later she will have to denounce the party and Obama…”

Certainly, Obama. IF she does that, she can help us re-take the party and use it the way it should be used.

Did I mention, the sooner the better?

If she waits until Obama’s numbers get into the low 30′s (or worse) she’ll look like just another unprincipled democratic hack, and Obama, Inc., has used up all the voter-slack for those.

My view is that Warren shouldn’t run as the candidate of Middle Class Massachusetts. I think she should run as the candidate for Massachusetts. Period. In a general elections, the frame ‘class’ could be toxic. Most Americans, I think, don’t want to hear about ‘class’. They still would like to think we are a class-less society. Warren’s policy positions are good for everybody, including rich folks. That’s how she should frame them and that’s how she should run.

And here I had thought a Harvard prof would necessarily belong to a bookish, comtemplative order.

So far so good, but did she throw rocks at her students, too?

I’m not sure about her policy positions. Haven’t heard them yet.

Is SS off limits? If so, she should say that. In fact, she should have said it when she declared. Of course, since Obama put it on the table (at least for a while…) she’ll have to go against the grain on that one.

Is she agin raising the age for Medicare? Obama still has that on the table for the GOP. She needs to speak out on that.

BeachPopulist had a pretty good checklist. Where does she stand on funding and continuing Obama’s wars? She hasn’t needed to talk about that before, but now she does.

How will she vote on the issues affecting Israel? Will she support a return to the 1967 borders? More ordinance for Israel?

I think it’s past time that we stopped embargoing everything Cuban, and let those people sink or swim, themselves. Is she ready for that?

And while I’m at it, it’s WAY past time to close the prison at Gitmo; I don’t care if they put those people in portables on the White House lawn.

How say you, Liz?

More than anything else she should think about what went awry in Coakley’s campaign, which wasn’t apparent until it was way too late. Too many comfy assumptions did her in.

Warren’s originally from Oklahoma and I think she embodies sort of combination of prairie populism of the Will Rogers variety and the toughness that comes from a hard scrabble existence.

And I hope she goes on to kick the corporate-loving ass of so-called democrats too.

“Too many comfy assumptions did her in…”

Particularly the comfy assumption that she could get elected, even in blue Mass, without putting some serious distance between herself and Barack Obama.

And Warren needs to think about that, more than anything else.

As for her toughness, I just hope she’s got enough to cop to the fact that she can’t run with Obama and still get elected. The fact that yesterday, his approval numbers hit a new low should not be lost on her. He has practically no chance to turn that around, and that means that if she stays on board the Titanic while Obama keeps backing the ship up and ramming the iceberg over and over again (thank you, Jean! :o) ) she will sink with it.

She should run for President.

If she had jumped for that, I’d already have sent her $20, just for the consternation it would have caused in the White House. :o)

I used to live in Enid, myself, 1980s. It’s an entirely different world.

I’ve been wondering who was her mentor on the left out there. If there were any, I’m not aware of them. Or was she entirely a self-starter? I would suppose so.

I don’t think any reference to OK will help her campaign here in Mass (just as the converse wouldn’t fly in OK, either).

I’m hoping she’ll will soon leverage her consumer advocacy strengths. In Mass it’s very important, and it will attract support. I don’t think Brown can tap that at all.

LOL! Well, having only $10 million to play with it’s a safe bet they didn’t get anything really expensive… like pizza.

Seriously, though: what did they spend that much money on? I’ll have to look.

I don’t think any reference to OK will help her campaign here in Mass (just as the converse wouldn’t fly in OK, either).

Sure you’re right about that. I posed it more as an indication of how her roots may have impacted her point of view on life. If she didn’t have a lefty mentor I’m guessing that she learned the old fashioned way: she read. (She’s also just old enough to have been influenced by JFK, RFK, MLK, etc.)

Just as Margaret, Tejan, and others remind us about Texas, you can’t draw a blanket conclusion about folks just because they’re in or from a red state. My Dad was from Kentucky, but was always very pro-labor, pro-civil rights, etc. (Way back when, some of my ancestors were part of the Underground Railroad.)

At this point, I wouldn’t count her out if she supports Obama, though I would hope her support would be tepid if he continues on his current trajectory. I don’t expect *any* Democratic candidate to outright say they don’t support the President’s re-election and I’m assuming that Obama will be the Democratic nominee. I think one lesson learned with Obama is to be clear on what a candidate is for and what they are against, and to do so in a way that they know they will be held accountable for that, for good or bad depending on their actions. I would hope that during the campaign she makes clear what her differences are between what she believes and would support, versus the President’s policies and actions. And I think that some issues *should* be litmus tests for Democratic candidates, e.g., don’t even think of putting Social Security on the table. I think Warren could be an effective consumer advocate, perhaps even constraining Wall Street.

It’s still very early in her campaign, but I can dream, can’t I.

And there was a hooker inside who jumped out naked. I was there. I saw it. I’m Andrew Breitbart.

I think you are absolutely right, EOH, although it remains to be seen if Warren will distance herself from the Obama you describe so well in your first paragraph … it will come down, not to how she responds to being stymied, but to what “compromises” she makes for the sake of “political” expedience, her own or someone else’s …

And whether she will abide by the “suggestions” of her Democratic Party handlers.

Do miss your commenting over … “here”, btw, EOH.

DW

Elizabeth Warren is the worst enemy of criminal cabal who are ripping off this country. She is ripping their ridiculous fallacies to hell with the facts. She can’t be fooled like the rest of the country into believing that these Wall street losers are much smarter then the rest of us and that we just can’t understand why things have to be the way they are.

The banking elite have ripped us off in every conceivable way using bullshit games that bullies play on small children. Heads they win,, tails we foot the bill. How long do we have to continue to be forced to submit to these nepotistic idiots using toddler logic to steal from us everything.

It was Wall Street that killed Single Payer according to insider Wendell Potter. That’s our health and Well being and that even trumps money. These bastards are literally cannibalizing us and our kids.

I live in Florida and have seen some hard times in the past 10 years, but I sent $20 to elizabethwarren.com. This woman is going to need support from everyone, everywhere, as the corporations are going to be lining Scott Brown’s pockets with their gold. I believe if we can get one high profile person like her in office, perhaps others will follow. Elizabeth Warren will be representing all of America’s middle-class and deserves what support we can give to her.

i sometimes wonder just how many david dayens there are

his output is prodigious and his quality impeccable

one of the best journalists around and the primary reason i got an fdl subscription

I don’t know why a person with your political acumen wastes time with us when you could be making big bucks as a political consultant–assuming one of the 3 people (Are there that many?) who meets your standards has an opening.

Warren’s track record goes back decades before Obama. She may not have shouted loudly enough to satisfy you, but her accomplishments in structuring the consumer financial protection agency are substantive.

Why don’t you get elected to something and put all those ideas in place.

You and I, for the most part, would like to see similar policy outcomes. But there are too many true sell outs to spend time going after people doing their best in difficult circumstances. What are the chances someone you like better will be elected from MA?

The shouting may fit on occasion if rationed; however, it needs to be carefully practised. Don’t use a mirror, but use a videotape. The body language is very important, and it can’t wobble at all or the whole thing will be counterproductive. Timing is critical. Even the lighting is important — overhead, probably not the best.

There are 351 towns and cities in MA, and most aren’t belligerent. They’ll all be watching and listening all the time. Don’t wear them out.

My “political acumen” happens to be nothing but the most common of common sense.

There are two reality checks (at least) that you seem not to have grasped.

One is that the political climate 6 months from now is almost certain to be even worse for Barack Obama than it is now.

And two, that means that any democrat who wants to get elected or re-elected is going to have to separate themselves from Obama. I think that little fact transcends all consideration of character or experience, or anything else. It’s the bottom line in hanging on to enough political power to thwart the worst of the republican agenda. It’s early, but I have seen no evidence that Warren will be willing to do that.

Moreover, that she would hold still for Obama’s converting her into a shiny object for liberals, for months on end, may be a character reference for you, and a reason for you to do nip-ups about her Senate campaign, but it isn’t for me. I think I’ll wait for her to answer those specific questions (which you ignored) about which of Obama’s policies she supports or doesn’t support. At this point, I’m not so desperate for heros or heroines that I’m willing to indulge in Tinkerbelle fantasies. A little healthy skepticism is, right about now, a good thing.

(If I DO decide to run for office, I won’t ask you for any money. :o) )

“Her accomplishments in structuring the Consumer Financial Protection Agency are substantive.”

To my knowledge, no has yet been appointed to head that. If they have, they must have been placed there by Obama’s using the recess appointment mechanism…which instantly raises the question of why he wouldn’t do it for Warren, herself.

I admit I’m not conversant with the finer points of the CFPB regulatory chapter and verse, but since Obama either couldn’t or wouldn’t force an up-or-down vote for Warren, and since he didn’t use the recess appointment route to get her in, I have some doubts about just how many consumer “teeth” there are in the regulations, themselves. But, I’m willing to listen, if you’d like to point them out.

“It was Wall Street that killed single payer.”

Absolutely! They kidnapped Michelle and the kids and held them hostage until Obama, who was all set to get 100% behind single payer, understandably agreed to dump single payer AND the public option.

(He threw in blocking cheap generic drugs from being re-imported, and also told Pelosi to stuff the move by some House democrats to strip the anti-trust exemption from the health insurance robber barons, as earnest money that his word was good about taking single payer off the table…who could blame him? )

I hope she wins but am not sure what a lone voice in the criminal Democratic Party will be able to achieve.

I’ve been away from FDL for a few weeks. Tonight between tanbark and Jim I thought I’d stumbled into The Blaze by accident.
Whassup? are you guys part of Rove’s “infiltrate the left” game?
Or are you like the guys back in the ’60′s who were looking for the “perfect” and “pure” revolution?
It ain’t gonna happen. Politics is the art of the possible. What’s possible now is Obama or one of those models of Tealevangelicism from Fox.

It’s called reality. We got jack squat when O’Bummer had a super majority and massive public support. Now we’re supposed to have an orgasm over the idea that Warren, who Obama and the Dems couldn’t even appoint to head the CFPB, will magically turn everything around. Obama doesn’t like Warren. The majority of Congressional Dems don’t like her. The GOP obviously doesn’t like her. She’s a direct threat to their corporate funding (both sides), which is all they really live for.

What are her views on Obama? That is what I want to hear.

Coakley was the worst candidate evah! Voters were completely turned off by her because she so obviously hated to campaign. Guess she never got the memo that if you want people to vote for you then you actually have to ASK them for their votes.
She’s a good AG. You’ve got to give her that. But Bay State voters were completely turned off by her assumption that she had been anointed as Ted Kennedy’s successor. And they were completely pissed that Democrats in Congress weren’t getting anything done. The message voters sent to Washington wasn’t that they loved Scott Brown. That was completely misinterpreted.
The message was: Do Something. And if you won’t, don’t expect us to vote for you again.

You’ve found the difference between us. I’m not looking for heroes and if I were I wouldn’t be looking among candidates for political office.

Warren has very little ego for someone with her accomplishments. I’d bet a lot that she knew what to expect when she went into the Obama Administration. She demanded, and got, direct access to the president. She didn’t change the direction of the administration. I don’t think anyone could. In return for being an Obama poster child she had a major role in shaping the agency she proposed. She was able to do things Geitner opposed.

By focusing on HER objective, she made things better in one part of government, or will have if Obama ever appoints a head for the agency. The senate wasn’t going to confirm her. I think she knew going in that the gutless one wasn’t going to give her a recess appointment. She chose the course that maximized her impact on a project she believed in deeply, going back before Obama was president. She focused on the policy changes she could shape. The price was avoiding symbolic gestures. If she’d pitched a fit, even a fit I enjoyed watching, I don’t think policy would have improved.

If you’re looking for someone who will shut the senate down by denying unanimous consent or similar actions, she is not your candidate. Suppose for a moment that Bernie Sanders had stopped the debt level increase by denying unanimous consent. Would we be better off if he MSM were pointing to one radical socialist as the cause of everything bad that’s happened to the economy since?

I hope we have a chance to talk further. The most difficult choice many of us posting on FDL will need to make is where to draw the line in terms of active support with time and the money we can scrape up; a vote; declining to vote or voting for a 3rd party candidate; (I’m not including situations where a 3rd party candidate is viable.)or voting for a Republican. I’d vote for a Republican to get Nelson out of the Democratic caucus.

Remember that you and I are discussing means, not ends. If you run for office, give my checkbook a try. I’m sure your policy choices would be closer to mine than the vast majority of candidates. It’s whether you can win that causes me to doubt.

Absolutely! They kidnapped Michelle and the kids and held them hostage until Obama, who was all set to get 100% behind single payer, understandably agreed to dump single payer AND the public option.

See!There are lots of areas where you and I can agree.

One point though. Re-importing drugs from Canada is a symbolic gesture. Most of those drugs are produced under license. Canadian producers are very limited in their ability to meet American demand. The key is to negotiate drug prices just as if our policy makers were sane.

Bile against ACA was a major player.

Of course she is a politician but she is the only one other than Saunders who seems to be on our side. Dems have not compromised so much as capitulated to Republicans, they see it as some sort of brilliant tactic if you believe their bullshit. In reality they rely on campaign contributions from the same corporations the Republicans do, so they become their advocates, not ours. It’s a sick, destructive system that has to end. If we elect more people like Warren maybe it could end. Unless she becomes corrupted too. I hope not. I’m hoping for a presidential run in 2016. AFter the sold out Obama is defeated by some horrendous Republican and people get a load of what that’s like (the same). In 2016 if the Democratic party comes to its senses, maybe we could see some viable candidate. By then of course with depression upon us and people more angry than ever maybe we could see some real change. A progressive woman in the White House, now that’s change I can believe in.

“The message was: Do Something. And if you won’t, don’t expect us to vote for you again.”

That’s the only message we can send but it might very well be enough if we stick to it. The problem is that threats to withhold votes/support are usually a bluff, and they know it.