Elizabeth Warren is going to have problems beating Scott Brown, and I have a crazy idea that just might help her.
I'm divorced and my kids go to school in their dad's town. I have them Friday night, Saturday night and Wednesday night, so Thursday mornings I drive them to school. Their dad bought the cheapest house he could find in a wealthy Boston suburb with excellent public schools so they could get a good education. The people who live there are extremely wealthy. Driving back, I was depressed. There was a Scott Brown yard sign on every street, and none for Elizabeth Warren. And there was a certain enraging subtext reading the signs, "Scott Brown--He's for us" when stuck in front of $3 million homes. Class warfare at its most blatant.
But it didn't stop there. I drove back to my own neighborhood and parked my car in my driveway so I could take my regular public transit to work. Here too, in a working class neighborhood of Boston proper, much poorer--plenty of Scott Brown signs and no Elizabeth Warren signs. My neighborhood is part of the Democratic machine. A lot of cops live here, a lot of people who worked on the Big Dig. A lot of city workers who have residency requirements for holding their jobs; my neighborhood is one of the nicer parts of Boston proper for raising a family (as long as you send your kids to Catholic schools). Very Irish. So why do they support Scott Brown here? Why has Mayor Menino been dragging his feet on endorsing Warren? It's easy to understand why the rich want Brown, but why does the Democratic machine here want Brown?
And that's an easy thing to answer. We're the city of the Big Dig. Graft and corruption are what keeps the Democratic voting machine ticking. Elizabeth Warren is the opposite of all that--her integrity is the very core of her being. She can't change that, and she shouldn't. But her lack of the ability to do Chicago-style politics is going to keep our local machine from voting for her wholeheartedly. They are worried, and rightly so, that she might clean up the joint.
She could win without the rich, but without the Boston voting machine she's screwed. The only constituency that can help her now is her natural constituency--progressive voters, which means aging hippies and college students. Aging hippies and other progressives we have here, but not enough. She has to get the college students to represent. Everyone knows that college students are lousy at showing up at the voting booth.
Except for one thing. On the ballot in November, here in Massachusetts we have a ballot question on legalizing medical marijuana.
Here's the skinny:
http://blog.norml.org/...
“A yes vote would enact the proposed law eliminating state criminal and civil penalties related to the medical use of marijuana by patients meeting certain conditions” and that patients will be to procure cannabis “produced and distributed by new state-regulated centers or, in specific hardship cases, to grow marijuana for their own use.”
This issue is hugely popular with her natural constituency here in Boston, and it will motivate them to vote. I think if she came out strongly supporting the measure, it would both get college voters enthusiastic about voting for her, and go far to erase the carefully crafted negative image the Scott Brown campaign has been pushing of her being an uptight spinster professor.
My two cents, and maybe I'm wrong, but I really am starting to panic. She doesn't have traction here in Boston and I know she's working her butt off.