Harvard Professor Plays Populist

While we've all been concentrating on the South Carolina primary results, another interesting battle is being joined way up north. It's the entrance of Harvard Professor Elizabeth Warren into the Massachusetts Democratic Senate primary, planning to run as the "common man" against incumbent Republican Scott Brown, who also ran as the candidate of the common man.

Warren wishes to regain the Democratic "Kennedy" Senate seat they lost two years ago when Republican Brown managed to re-dub it "the people's seat." Early indications are that this will turn out to be the battle of the populists. With Brown, there's unlikely to be anything new. He will likely tour the state in his pickup truck, wearing his simple outdoor jacket and telling his stories of being just plain folks.

For Warren, this is going to be a foray into fantasy. Turning the Henry Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard into an average Josephine is not going to be easy. However, Warren has already chosen her starting point. Since America is being run by the 1% super-rich, she has staked out her field of play as one of the 99% of oppressed powerless Americans. Early on, Warren grabbed every possible opportunity to support the Occupy Wall Street movement, and has continued to support the movement as it has metastasized nationwide.

Professor Warren is a self-styled "Okie." Well, she was born in Oklahoma City, so it's not entirely a lie. In one broadcast she said "I'm going for the hick vote here. I just want you to know. Maybe we could start wearing stickers that say 'Hicks for Elizabeth.' Could we do that?" There's a fine line between identifying with a group and mocking it, but Elizabeth Warren is counting on Massachusetts to see it as the former rather than the latter.

There also seems to be in Massachusetts a willingness to ignore a possible carpetbagger issue even though Warren has spent most of her life elsewhere. After Oklahoma, she has lived and taught in New Jersey, Texas and Pennsylvania. And then there's that little detail that until 1995, she was a registered Republican (of the RINO wing, of course).

One has to wonder if she will soon start campaigning in a pickup truck older than Brown's, being sure to carry at least one bail of hay in the truck bed. Warren lives in a $1.7 million dollar home, and tends to speak with the sounds of the Harvard Yard. It's a little early to see if she'll start broadening her "I"s to "ahs" and saying y'all, a la Hillary Clinton, but if she does she's likely to sound equally ridiculous. It's also hard to figure whom she is trying to identify with since Massachusetts has few farms left, and even fewer blue-collar factories. The biggest majority of the Bay State's "industry" is comprised of biotechnology, finance, insurance, and other clearly white-collar pursuits. Oh, and I almost forgot, academia.

Well, there's populism and then there's populism. Warren has chosen to identify with the blue collar worker and the rural farmer in a state that suffers from a paucity of both. That runs counter to the unfolding Obama plan to include suburban white collar workers, teachers, artists, lawyers, social workers, and psychologists in his definition of the 99% who comprise "the people." Maybe they're both counting on the voters to be mesmerized by their self-contradictory academia-babble and ignore their palpable elitism.

The "hick" candidate is a longtime academic theorizer and left wing Democratic operative. Interestingly, her legal career is also mostly academic, but her specialty is bankruptcy. She has long advocated for an agency which would tell businesses how to conduct their affairs, and was ultimately a major player in passage of the Dodd-Frank bill. After the Democratic sweep in 2008, she was appointed by Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid to the five member Congressional Oversight Panel to implement the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act.

Warren was thought to be in line for the appointment as head of the Consumer Protection Financial Bureau created by Dodd-Frank, but was considered by the President's inner circle as a better choice for a state office. Obama selected Richard Cordray instead, and sent Warren back to Massachusetts and Harvard. Warren will not run against the Obama administration's policies, but has instead chosen a different populist path for her personal campaign. It will be interesting to see which version of populism works, if either.