Tom Moroney of Bloomberg BusinessWeek wrote about Elizabeth Warren's "war of imagery" on Sen. Scott Brown. He started by noting the way Democrats still think they own the Senate seat. "Vengeance colors the race as well, with Brown viewed by Democrats as a usurper when he became the first Republican elected to the Senate from Massachusetts since Edward Brooke won re-election in 1972."
“People were in a state of clinical depression,” Philip Johnston, a former state Democratic Party chairman, said of the reaction to Brown’s win. “Uppers and alcohol were the only ways we could deal with it.” But Warren is behind in the polls, and is trying to cast moderate Brown as an "extremist," which is pretty hard to do:
Moroney reported that based on rankings by the National Journal, Brown was the third “most liberal” Senate Republican last year, trailing only Maine’s Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, who decided against seeking re-election in November.He doesn't have to "cast himself as a moderate," as Moroney suggests:
Recent polls suggest Warren has work to do, assuming she wins her party’s nomination for the seat. Brown’s strategy, casting himself as a moderate who, in his own words, “can work across the aisle,” has helped him. The incumbent, who faces no Republican opponent, leads the Democrat two-to-one among the state’s largest voting bloc, its 2 million independents.
Among all voters, Warren trailed with 40 percent to Brown’s 49 percent in the Suffolk survey. The breakdown in the Western New England poll of 527 registered voters was 49 percent for Brown, 41 percent for Warren....
Warren’s entry drew wide attention, chasing several other prominent Democrats out of the primary campaign. She has appeared on cable television’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” and “The Daily Show,” where host Jon Stewart flirted with her. A video clip went viral on the Web last year, depicting her making remarks to supporters upbraiding wealthy Americans who forget that taxpayers helped them to succeed.
All that has made her “a national cult hero for liberals,” said Rothenberg, the publisher of the Rothenberg Political Report newsletter.
“She has the spirit of Ted Kennedy,” said Barbara Lee, a philanthropist in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and an early Warren supporter. “Her goal is to make a difference.”
It should be hard for Warren to claim she's not a liberal elitist. Almost 15 percent of what Warren raised from major metropolitan areas in 2011 came from Los Angeles-Long Beach or San Francisco, according to Center for Responsive Politics data. The fundraising trips to California helped her net more than $200,000 from entertainment-world celebrities, AP said.
Barbra Streisand, Ron Howard, Vidal Sassoon, Garry Shandling and Jeffrey Katzenberg, chief executive officer of Dreamworks Animation SKG, are some of the names. Warren also received $2,500 from George Soros, the Hungarian libertine/socialist billionaire.
Brown, who got about $15,000 from entertainment figures, pulled in more than $880,000 from the financial industry, including people tied to Fidelity Investments and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) as well as venture capital and private equity firms, AP said. Warren got about $175,000 from financial-industry sources.
