There are times when Elizabeth Warren’s rookie status as a political candidate hurt her. Last night’s debate was one of those times.
Warren made no major mistakes. (Naming the soon-to-be-retired Dick Lugar as a Republican senator she could work with was a minor slip—especially compared with Brown’s naming of Antonin Scalia as his favorite Supreme Court justice.) But she made lots of small ones: she didn’t project her voice enough for the space she was in (the UMass-Lowell hockey arena); she had too-slow-to-develop answers to questions about her Native American ancestry and her legal work for Travelers Insurance (both of which had come up in the first debate too).
And she repeatedly let Brown get away with distancing himself from the Republican Party, with his refusal to support wind energy (expanding rapidly in Massachusetts under Gov. Deval Patrick), with his claim to be a union man (he’s a member of AFTRA-SAG from his Cosmo modeling days).
Scott Brown mostly used his 20 years of political campaign experience to good advantage: speaking loudly and firmly, sticking to his talking points and pounding them home. It’s too early to tell, but he may have committed some unforced errors that will cost him—the Scalia endorsement, waffling on whether Bobby Valentine should manage the Red Sox next year (it’s not his fault David Gregory ended with yet another foolish question), and perhaps most importantly, his “zinger” aimed at Warren when he said with a pouting disdainfulness, “I’m not in your classroom”.
There are a lot of women among the 18% of likely Massachusetts voters who tell pollsters they’re undecided. And most of them don’t like it when men speak contemptuously in public about a woman’s work.
Warren did improve as the night wore on. Her answers got crisper (while Brown’s started wobbling) as the questions focused more on actual issues the next Senate will confront: the DREAM Act, the Afghanistan War, and voting for the next majority leader—which is really what this race is all about…or should be if Elizabeth Warren wants to win on Nov. 6.
Crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/