Elizabeth Warren (image via nytimes.com)
Amid all the hubbub over Elizabeth Warren’s purported Native American heritage, it’s easy to forget that the race will probably still come down to which candidate – Warren or incumbent senator Scott Brown – voters like better. I’d wager that the “Fauxcahontas” kerfuffle matters more to national media and conservative pundits, whose bitter hostility toward affirmative action and the “victims” it creates has been somehow surprising, than to the average Massachusetts voter. Brown has largely relied on surrogates to go after Warren’s record on her heritage, while his own campaign maintained its laser focus on the issues of class and wealth that have defined the race thus far. The spectacle of two millionaires attempting to out-Average Joe each other is nothing short of humorous, as Warren tries to backpedal from statements about “leaving teeth on the floor” and Brown stumps around the state in a pickup truck and accuses Warren of hypocrisy for not contributing more than her tax bill to government coffers. (No one seemed to wonder why, if Brown is so concerned about the national debt, he doesn’t chip in some extra cash of his own to pay it down.)
Because Brown benefits from two years as Massachusett’s junior senator, the campaign has largely been about defining Elizabeth Warren. Is she the ivory-tower, Obama-anointed socialist intent on taking down Wall Street, or is she a defender of the middle class who worked her way out of poverty to Harvard? Her image in the media is more than a split personality; it’s practically a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde phenomenon. Right-wing publications have turned her into an “Occupy” parody, denouncing her in biting language that mocks her as a “politically foaming zealot” and “a guileless, fevered Marxist.” The left, including a recent Doonesbury star turn, paints her as a liberal savior. To both sides, she is a figure to be ridiculed or lauded on a national level, while Brown – perhaps to his advantage – remains a more parochial personality. The candidates compete over who draws more donations from out of state; 64 percent of Warren’s first-quarter contributions came from beyond Massachusetts, and Brown relies on outside donors for 71 percent. Warren is not exactly working overtime to combat her reputation as a carpetbagger – a glossy mailer from her campaign recently arrived in my mailbox in Oregon – and frankly, she is reaching the point of media oversaturation. The tipping point may have been the Doonesbury appearance; even a staunch Democrat like myself, who supported Warren at the CFPB before she “made it big,” is feeling jaded by her sudden star power. Ironically, her status as a liberal icon may be doing more harm than good, as a recent profile in The Nation demonstrated.
You can’t get much further left the Nation without running into Marx and Engels. Six months after the protesters were cleared from Zuccotti Park, it still regularly updates a blog on the Occupy movement. Yet for all its full-throated defense of the working class, the Nation’s target audience is not the blue-collar factory worker but the Prius-driving, latte-sipping urban liberal that Scott Brown likes to mock. Though it claims to represent the 99 percent, its writers and readers are, if not the 1 percent, at least in the upper quartile – and sometimes it shows. The piece on Warren, as an argument for populist support, is an utter failure. Author E.J. Graff preaches to the choir, and is seemingly oblivious to how her words might come off to someone without a college degree or an Energy Star washing machine. Perhaps this is just fine, as most Nation readers have both. But if the magazine is genuinely concerned with respecting the average worker and dispelling its reputation as the organ of left-coast liberals out of touch with middle America, it should watch its mouth.
Graff describes the voters who will decide between Warren and Brown in November as if they are animals in a zoo, exotic yet primitive, perhaps prone to recklessly overturning their food dishes when agitated:
Most of the electorate is not really paying attention yet. And when they do, they are not deciding the way you and I do. Ideology and policy are not how these independents select a candidate. They’re not watching The Rachel Maddow Show or The O’Reilly Factor; they’re not reading The Nation or National Review. They’re getting dinner on the table, racing from work to pick up kids after school and following the Sox, Bruins and Pats. They pick candidates the way they pick friends: which one is honest, straightforward and sincere? Which one understands their lives?
They are not deciding the way you and I do. No, these people are far too grounded to take an interest in politics; they are the salt of the earth, putting homespun values and everyday wisdom above ideology or lofty policy speeches. They’re simpletons.
Graff is not any less condescending toward Massachusetts conservatives, whom she paints with an equally broad brush, making sure to quote one man who “looked well off” and who delivers a line — “Elizabeth Warren is a communist” — that conveniently turns him into the stereotype of the misinformed Fox News viewer. Of the crowd at a rally for Scott Brown, Graff writes:
The men were perfectly shaved and shorn in suits or barn jackets, or they were scraggly older union white guys in work boots. The women, outnumbered by about three to one, wore pearl earrings and had Coach bags and perfectly combed hair.
These true conservatives know why they support Brown. They believe that any resentment toward the 1 percent is class warfare and whining, an attack on normal families.
Graff meets a couple whose house is in foreclosure, who speak disparagingly of powerful banks and their manipulative tactics. They live in Potterville, an area in which, according to Graff, “the banks are screwing people.” Still, they waver between the two candidates. “These two lived smack in the middle of Potterville, but they didn’t yet know they should be voting for Warren,” Graff laments. “Will they by November?” Not they didn’t know whether they would vote for Warren, but they didn’t yet know they should be voting for Warren, as if Graff is intimately familiar with the couple’s priorities. To Graff, economics should dictate the voting patterns of “these people.” It’s as if she can’t imagine why the couple would opt for Brown, why other concerns — possibly what Republicans call “moral values” — might matter.
The article ends with another grating characterization of the regular Americans that Graff regards as so different from herself and her presumed audience of well-read elites:
The ordinary Massachusetts voter—the kind who doesn’t tune in until the last minute—will have to choose between two story lines. They will talk about it this way: he’s a small-town Wrentham boy who solves problems based on facts, while she’s a leftist ideologue from Harvard. Or they will talk about it this way: he’s a lightweight with a pretty face and a truck; she’s a real person who will fight off the banks and others trying to ruin the middle class. They will assess which one is more likable and sincere.
The word “sincere” appears multiple times in Graff’s narrative; it is apparently the trait which she believes Massachusetts voters prize most greatly. Is it really so bizarre to think that the people in Massachusetts might be perfectly fine with electing someone who isn’t just like them? Why does she assume that the people she meets can’t look beyond likability and personal history? Surely these are important characteristics, but they are characteristics important to every voter. If the regular folks in Graff’s story can be stereotyped as non-political rubes, we could just as easily stereotype Nation readers as left-wing robots who would vote for anyone, from Elizabeth Warren to Warren Buffett, with a “D” after his or her name.
At times, Graff seems aware of her prejudice, and her writing leans toward the tongue-in-cheek. Describing Warren’s visit to a job training center, she at least acknowledges the piece’s gauzy, soft-lens tone:
Cue the movie music. The shining candidate stepped forth, tall and thin, with her no-fuss bob and warm blue eyes. Her kind voice and earnest enthusiasm lit up the room. She told her humble story as if it simultaneously meant nothing and everything.
Unfortunately, the hagiographic language doesn’t stop there. In fact, it continues through the entire story, until the reader has no choice but to conclude that Graff is actually, to some degree, serious. The fairy tale rolls on, punching up the repetition and short, dramatic sentences. “This was inspiration they understood,” she writes of the Jobs Corps members. Then:
She was running for Senate, she said, so that she could see that all of them, the people in that room and the rest of the American middle class, get a fair shake. So that she could keep an eye on the banks and credit card companies that try to trip folks up with “tricks and traps” and rigged mortgages. So she could bring jobs to people who were ready to work hard.
We could go further: So she could right the world’s wrongs. So she could bring justice to the downtrodden. Like Robin Hood, Elizabeth Warren would take from the rich and give to the middle-class, to the poor.
I don’t doubt that Warren is — dare I say it — sincere about her consumer advocacy. She would probably make a good senator, certainly a better one than Scott Brown, who is a reliable Republican vote despite all his talk of bipartisanship. But the Nation profile only cements in the minds of its readers the stereotype of the unwashed masses too dim-witted to vote in favor of their own interests. The magazine pretends to be the voice of the working class, but its words and attitude are elitist and off-putting. On the chance that an issue does find its way into the hands of someone wavering between Brown and Warren, I find it hard to believe that Graff, who consistently looks down her nose at anyone outside the enlightened liberal bubble, would win Warren many converts.
. . . So Well Read. . . 