It’s been a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week for the beleaguered Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren. So naturally it’s time for me to beat up on her some more.
First off, Warren’s recently-released tax returns inadvertently revealed how she really feels about taxes. Warren and incumbent Scott Brown both released four years of tax returns in response to a request from the Boston Globe. For most of the period, the earnings of Warren and her husband outstripped the earnings of Brown and his wife by nearly 3 to 1. Yet, even though the Warrens were earning in the neighborhood of $900k a year, they declined to pay the special optional Massachusetts income rate of 5.85%, choosing instead to pay the mandatory rate of 5.3%. So much for all of Warren’s yammering about the “social contract” that obligates the wealthy to “pay their fair share.” When asked about this apparent discrepancy between her words and her deeds, Warren replied, “I paid my taxes, and I did not make a charitable contribution to the state.” So there, rubes.
But please don’t think for a minute that Elizabeth Warren doesn’t care about you. She’s out there, every day, “working for middle class families.” That annual income just shy of a cool million? And those stocks and mutual funds she and her husband own, worth somewhere between five and fifteen million? Or that special interest-free loan from Harvard? Irrelevant. Being “middle class” isn’t about a number. “It’s about a place in your heart.” (Cue touching scene with Sally Field passing the communion wine.)
But those darn establishment tools just won’t leave poor Lizzie alone. When reporters for the Boston Herald dug into the paper trail connected to Warren’s teaching career at Harvard, they discovered that the school used Warren as a promotional token for “diversity,” claiming that Warren was “Native American” and the first Native American hire for the prestigious Harvard Law School. But it was all just a big misunderstanding, insisted Warren. All she wanted was a free faculty luncheon, which she never got. Ingrates.
Anyway, she really was part Cherokee. Really. “Family lore” said so, and we all know that family lore is never wrong. Well, that and her grandfather’s “high cheekbones,” an obviously tell-tale sign of Native American heritage that any enlightened believer in phrenology would immediately recognize. Ignoramuses.
Finally, after her staff was forced to do some digging, Warren’s campaign announced that she was, in fact, a documented 1/32 Cherokee. Paleface indeed.
Or, after this past week, Red Face. Very, very red faced.
Elizabeth Scalia, The Anchoress, has a theory about Warren and about the Massachusetts Democrats:
For the second election in a row, Massachusetts Dems have been so sloppily careless about who should fill “Ted Kennedy’s seat” — or they have felt so mindlessly entitled to it — that they have decided to run an overly-insulated inept, elitist, out-of-touch, rhetorically ungifted political hack who cannot speak beyond cliches and slogans and has no interest in courting the blue-collar side of the party.
Such nakedly royal disdain. No need to intellectually engage with anyone outside of their class or enclave, and no need to even hang around with the union guys or the low-wage workers.
Warren suffers from an affliction common to wealthy, successful elitists who fancy themselves advocates for the poor and downtrodden. It’s a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, whereby leisure class debutantes and country club dandies invest so much emotional energy trying to empathize with the less fortunate, that they start actually believing that they themselves are less fortunate. So hob-nobbing with the hoi polloi is unnecessary, because these highly educated, very compassionate people already know all there is to know.
Don’t believe me? Just ask Elizabeth Warren.
(Cover image sourced here.)
