Here we go again. Sen. Elizabeth Warren has risen in the polls to the point where her rivals are using the tired old likability attacks, even knowing that much of the coverage about it will involve questions of sexism. Former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign is also recycling a Republican talking point straight out of former Sen. Scott Brown’s (losing) campaign against Warren in 2012: that she’s an elitist Harvard professor. Is it possible to yawn and rage at the same time? Because those are the conflicting impulses I’m feeling from these attacks.
The elitism attacks are particularly rich coming from the campaign of a man who was in the United States Senate for more than three decades before becoming vice president, and whose much-touted middle-class family did not struggle any more than Warren’s family. But congrats (or something) to the Biden team for getting Politico to run a story on the elitism angle that, while it makes clear that the charges come straight out of Brown’s campaign and have been endlessly pushed by Republicans, also quotes a former Trump campaign staffer in an average-Republican-on-the-street role.
And can we contemplate the likelihood that a woman who graduated 76th out of 85 in her law school class, as Biden did, would be elected to the Senate just four years later?
Beyond elitism, both Biden and Mayor Pete Buttigieg are working hard to brand Warren as angry—a potentially devastating charge for a woman, since women are not allowed to be angry without being punished for it. According to Buttigieg, who spent the last Democratic debate launching angry attacks on competitors and then concluding those attacks with calls for unity, Warren is “so absorbed in the fighting that it is as though fighting were the purpose.” According to Biden, who once suggested he’d like to physically fight Donald Trump but also believes that, post-Trump, congressional Republicans will have an “epiphany” and clamor to work with Democrats, Warren is part of “an angry unyielding viewpoint that has crept into our politics.”
The anger attack is particularly interesting because, while Warren refers to herself as a “fighter,” she is campaigning very much in the happy warrior mode—happy warrior being a term that’s been applied to Biden himself by none other than former President Barack Obama, and that has a long pre-Biden political history.
Warren, queen of the selfie line, angry? “Nothing that she is doing seems to be telegraphing that she is angry,” said Barbara Lee Foundation spokeswoman Amanda Hunter. “It seems that those attacks are really coming from somewhere else and are more premeditated and a way to play on her gender rather than a reaction to something that she’s actually doing.” Yeah, exactly. And it’s coming from the campaigns of men who are themselves absolutely willing to trade on anger (socially acceptable in its masculine form) when they think it will get them the least bit of advantage in the primary.