Brown/Warren Debate and Ditch

October 1, 2012

Scott Brown (R-Clearly I’m Not) and Elizabeth Warren (D- Oh Yes He Is) have their much anticipated second U.S. Senate debate tonight. And since the debate is sponsored by UMass-Lowell and the Boston Herald, it’s also much hyperventilated in the feisty local tabloid, which devotes ten – count ’em, ten – pages to the bakeoff, including Page One (via the Newseum’s Today’s Front Pages):

Beyond the obligatory tale of the tape (which the hardsearching staff can’t find on the Herald’s website,) their are five – count ’em, five – thumbsucking columns. Chinstrokers Row comprises Joe Battenfeld, Jessica Heslam, Holly Robichaud, Kimberly Atkins and Andy Hiller of WHDH-TV, which will broadcast the debate.

PLUS . . . an editorial AND an op-ed by our BU colleague Tobe Berkovitz.

Whew!

As for the Boston Globe, they have exactly zero – count ’em, zero – mentions of the debate.

We’ll check back in when it’s the Globe’s turn to sponsor a debate.

 

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Native Americans Whomp ‘Em in Massachusetts Senate Race

September 28, 2012

Elizabeth Warren’s soi disant Native American heritage has drawn fire not just from incumbent Sen. Scott Brown, but also from Native Americans.

Except it’s hard to know that from the Boston Globe coverage.

Cherokee chief rips Brown campaign

The principal chief of the Cherokee Nation denounced Senator Scott Brown’s campaign staffers on Wednesday for what he called offensive and racist behavior against Native Americans, and he called on Brown to apologize.

A day earlier, Democrats released a video filmed outside a Brown campaign event showing Republican staff members, including an aide in Brown’s Senate office, performing tomahawk chops and shouting war whoops amid a crowd of boisterous supporters of both candidates.

The gestures appeared to mock Elizabeth Warren’s professed Native American ancestry.

“The conduct of these individuals goes far beyond what is appropriate and proper in political discourse,” the chief, Bill John Baker, said in a statement. “The use of stereotypical ‘war whoop chants’ and ‘tomahawk chops’ are offensive and downright racist. It is those types of actions that perpetuate negative stereotypes and continue to minimize and degrade all native peoples.”

But . . .

Buried deep in the piece was this:

[Sen. Brown’s] campaign also released a comment from a member of the Pequot tribe calling Warren a fraud for her undocumented claims of Native American ancestry.

Cut to . . . the Boston Herald’s coverage:

Native Americans rip Scott and Liz

U.S. Sen. Scott Brown delivered his “one and only warning” to staffers about their behavior after a video captured tomahawk-chopping supporters, but while a top Cherokee official demanded Brown apologize, other Native Americans said they’re still waiting for Elizabeth Warren to admit she’s no Cherokee.

“For the most part, I saw it as stupid behavior,” Twila Barnes said of the clip featuring Brown supporters doing war whoops and toma-hawk chops. “But Elizabeth Warren has stolen our entire identity. If she had been a real Cherokee, they wouldn’t have behaved like that. They were doing it because she’s fake.”

Fake heritage, fake issue, fake outrage – take your pick.

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Brown Rally Goes Chop Chop To Globe Front Page

September 26, 2012

Yesterday’s rally shenanigans by staffers of Sen. Scott Brown (Whomp ’em) went straight to the front page 0f today’s Boston Globe.

Republican aides shown doing war chants

Warren decries actions outside Brown event

In a tough new ad and in his attacks at last week’s debate, Senator Scott Brown has stoked questions about Elizabeth Warren’s professed Native American ancestry. But the difficulty of seizing on the controversy without crossing into uncomfortable racial territory became apparent Tuesday with the release of a video showing Republican staff members, including an aide in Brown’s Senate office, performing tomahawk chops and war whoops outside one of his campaign events.

Brown said such behavior is “not something I condone,” but declined to apologize.

“The apologies that need to be made and the offensiveness here is the fact that Professor Warren took advantage of a claim, to be somebody, a Native American, and used that for an advantage, a tactical advantage,” Brown said.

Pretty lame. But there was no ‘splainin’ from Brown in the Herald, which dismissed the story with a page 4 squib:

Warren on tomahawk chop video: Cut it out!

Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren says she was “appalled” at a video that appeared to show supporters of U.S. Sen. Scott Brown — including at least one staffer — performing war whoops and tomahawk chops, saying if one of her campaign workers did such a thing there would be “serious consequences.”

Asked whether she was appalled as an American Indian, Warren told reporters: “I am appalled as an American.”

“I think everyone knew what he was up to,” said Warren, who has been dogged by a growing scandal over her unsupported claims of Cherokee heritage and her professional claims of minority status.

This isn’t going to get any prettier, folks.

 

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Debate and Switch

September 24, 2012

Both local dailies front-page debate stories today as campaign season shifts into high(er) gear.

Via the Newseum’s Today’s Front Pages:

 

 

 

The Globe piece is pretty straightforward:

First debate called critical for Mitt Romney

Higher stakes than for Obama

After months of sniping from a distance, President Obama and Mitt Romney are nearing the unsparing crucible of one-on-one debates that could alter the dynamics of the presidential campaign.

For Romney, particularly, the stakes are enormous.

After a month of missteps and missed opportunities — from his convention speech, to his reaction after the US ambassador’s death in Libya, to a video in which he described nearly half the country as government-dependent “victims” — Romney faces three debates in the national spotlight, beginning Oct. 3 in Denver, that could bolster or bury his chances.

“Unquestionably, he has to do well in the first debate,” said Rob Gray, a Republican strategist who was a senior adviser in Romney’s successful 2002 campaign for Massachusetts governor. “There’s more on the line for him, whereas Obama has proven before that he can handle it.”

The Herald, on the other hand, has three – count ’em, three – columnists on debate patrol. Start with Joe Battenfeld’s cover story:

A glimpse inside Mitt’s strategy

He’s not Mitt Romney, but he got to play one in debate practice. And he says the real Mitt needs to resurrect his personable performance from 10 years ago to beat President Obama in their upcoming face-to-face showdowns.

Jeffrey Robbins, a Boston attorney who played the role of Romney as Democrat Shannon O’Brien prepared for the debates in the 2002 Massachusetts governor’s race, divulged for the first time key details of the Democrats’ strategy to turn Romney into “Gordon Gekko” — a strategy that ultimately failed then.

Robbins predicts Obama’s debate plan will come right out of the playbook 10 years ago, when Democratic gubernatorial nominee O’Brien tried to reinforce Romney’s image as a greedy, out-of-touch businessman.

Bit of a stretch there, eh?

Next up is Holly Robichaud’s piece giving advice to Romney.

Like Brown, Mitt must pack a punch in his debate

Last week it was great to see an aggressive U.S. Sen. Scott Brown take on Lizzy Warren. After months of her endless whining commercials, Brown called her out on multiple issues — including her fake American Indian status, helping Travelers Insurance avoid paying poisoned asbestos workers and her whopping $350,000 salary for teaching one class at Harvard University.

Brown had the right combination of talking directly to voters and discrediting Fauxahontas. He showed how a candidate can remain likable, but still deliver a solid punch.

Our former Gov. Mitt Romney would do well to take a page out of this playbook. President Obama is not going to be forced out of the White House if Romney keeps playing defense. It is time to put points on the board.

Finally, Kimberly Atkins weighs in:

Wisdom of pols’ rules is debatable

WASHINGTON — The debate season is in full swing, and with it we are seeing the emergence of a nifty approach by some candidates as they prepare to face their rivals face-to-face: avoidance by agreement.

The true pioneer of this debate is U.S. Rep. John Tierney who, as the Herald reported, insisted sponsors of two of four scheduled debates with GOP challenger Richard Tisei focus only on certain topics and preclude the participants from asking questions of one another.

Of course, this conveniently will allow Tierney to avoid an issue both Tisei and national Republicans have focused on: his in-laws’ gambling ring and his wife’s federal tax-evasion conviction.

Atkins goes on to relate other debate-related kerfuffles before offering some free advice to candidates, such as “[Elizabeth Warren] could try to throw U.S. Sen. Scott Brown off  his well-rehearsed game by demanding that the candidates be barred from using the word ‘professor,’ thanking the moderator after each question or referring to a truck at any point.”

The hardreading staff would be all for that.

 

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Brown Sugar From Herald On New Poll

September 20, 2012

After four consecutive polls showed Elizabeth Warren leading incumbent Scott Brown in the Massachusetts U.S. Senate race, the Boston Herald finally got some news it could plaster all over Page One (via the Newseum’s Today’s Front Pages):

(Extra credit: Compare and contrast, in clear idiomatic English, the photos the Herald chose of the two.)

The Globe, for its part, ran the story Metro p. 3:

New poll shows Scott Brown leading Elizabeth Warren

A new poll shows US Senator Scott Brown with a lead over Elizabeth Warren, a break from a string of four previous polls that showed Warren leading the race.

The new University of Massachusetts Lowell/Boston Herald telephone poll of 524 voters, released Wednesday night, showed Brown leading 49 percent to 45 percent among those deemed likely to vote.

The survey was conducted from Sept. 13 to 17 and had a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points. The organization’s previous poll, taken in December, showed Warren leading by 7 percentage points.

In fairness, that’s exactly where the Globe ran this piece two days ago:

Warren ahead of Brown in 3rd poll

A third new poll has found Elizabeth Warren pulling ahead of Senator Scott Brown, giving the Democratic challenger momen tum before their first debate Thursday.

A Suffolk University/WHDH-TV survey released late Monday had Warren at 48 percent and Brown at 44 percent, within the poll’s margin of error but the opposite of a similar poll in May. That Suffolk/WHDH survey had Brown at 48 percent and Warren at 47 percent.

Pollster David Paleologos attributed the shift to Warren’s national exposure through her speech at the Democratic ­National Convention, which allowed her to share a platform with President Obama, former president Bill Clinton, and other party luminaries.

(The hardsearching staff couldn’t find yesterday’s piece, about the fourth poll, in either our dead-tree edition or the Globe’s ePaper edition.)

Probably doesn’t matter. It likely all changes after tonight’s debate.

 

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Scott Brown ‘Honorary Girl’ Edition

September 4, 2012

So John Walsh, the chairman of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, really put his foot in it yesterday, yeah?

As BostonGlobe.com reported yesterday afternoon:

Mass. Democratic chair apologizes after accusing Scott Brown of trying to be ‘honorary girl’

CHARLOTTE, N.C. – The chairman of the Massachusetts Democratic Party today apologized for saying that Senator Scott Brown tried to portray himself as “an honorary girl” by folding laundry in a TV commercial targeting women voters.

“In the excitement of getting the convention underway and getting the message out about how important it is to re-elect President Obama and elect Elizabeth Warren, I made a statement about Scott Brown that I regret,” party Chairman John Walsh said in a statement this afternoon. “I apologize for that remark.”

Walsh made his initial comment in a blistering opening statement at the first breakfast meeting of the state’s delegation to the Democratic National Convention, which kicks off [today].

Oddly, though, the piece didn’t make it into today’s print edition of the Globe.

The Herald, by contrast, splashed it all over pages two and three. Start with the news report:

Dems try to wash out ‘folding laundry’ stain

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Clothes-conscious Democratic delegates recoiled yesterday at Massachusetts Chairman John Walsh’s fumbling remark that U.S. Sen. Scott Brown was attempting to become “an honorary girl” when folding laundry in a TV commercial, saying the dig was below the belt.

“Well you know, John, that’s not a good comment. Everyone folds laundry, women and men,” said Faye Morrison, a Democratic delegate from Ayer.

Then to the obligatory Howie Carr sandblasting:

Hey, Walsh: What a load

So any male who folds towels is an “honorary girl,” or so says the corpulent chairman of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, John Walsh.

“I mean,” Walsh said in between bites of a Krispy Kreme doughnut yesterday, “he spent a couple million dollars folding towels on TV to prove he’s an honorary girl. We appreciate that.”

I fold all the kitchen towels in my house, Fatso. Does that make me an honorary girl too? By the way, have you ever watched the president of the United States throw a baseball? Talk about honorary girls …

Well, today’s Herald is, even if the Globe ain’t.

 

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Rakin’ Akin Edition

August 24, 2012

Missouri Senate hopeless Todd Akin (R-Legitimate Rape) is the rift that keeps on on riving.

From yesterday’s Boston Herald:

Gail Huff touts Scott Brown’s independent spirit

Elizabeth Warren’s attempts to link Scott Brown to the rumpus over U.S. Rep. Todd Akin’s polarizing statements on rape will work to his advantage by distinguishing him from his own party’s anti-abortion platform, the U.S. senator’s wife said yesterday.

“I think it’s a gift to Scott because once again it shows that he’s an independent-minded man that’s not going to follow the doctrine or the dictation of anyone else, including his own party,” said Gail Huff, who is on leave from her television reporting job to campaign for her husband.

“He has two daughters, 24 and 21 years old. He understands better than anyone how important it is that women have the right to make their own decisions. …Here’s another example where he stood up to his party and said, ‘You know what, you’re wrong.’”

(Web video along the same lines here.)

The New York Times, which is sort of the fifth Beatle of the Boston newspaper scene, was even more lovey-dovey:

[Mr. Brown] was the first Republican senator to call on Mr. Akin to quit his race for the Senate. As Mr. Brown told a group of women here on Tuesday, he was feeling a little heady from the experience.

“Gail and I were laying in bed last night and talking a little bit, as we do every night,” he said, “and I said: ‘Honey, can you imagine? Here I am, Scott Brown from Wrentham, and I’ve got a truck that’s got 238,000 miles on it and, you know, something like this comes up and I’m the first guy in the country to even bring it up and tell the guy to step down,’ ” Mr. Brown said.

Yeah . . . except he wasn’t.

From the Boston Globe:

[Brown] spoke out less than 24 hours after Akin made his comment, under an hour after Romney condemned it during an interview with the National Review, and 15 minutes after President Obama ventured into the White House Briefing Room to declare that the American people disagreed with the Missouri congressman.

That’s par for the course for Brown (R-Papaya King), who routinely overstates his routine accomplishments.

File under: What else is new?

 

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Let the Voter-Push Rumpus Continue! Edition

August 10, 2012

The dustup over the voter registration of welfare recipients is turning into a perpetual motion machine.

Start with this morning’s papers. The Boston Globe featured this on Page One:

Only Mass. sent out voter registrations after lawsuit

Massachusetts is the only state that has agreed to send mass mailings to register welfare recipients to vote, following a series of state lawsuits brought by the liberal group Demos, which is chaired by the daughter of Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren.

Republicans say the mass mailings indicate that Massachusetts went above and beyond what was necessary to turn out likely Democratic voters for the November election.

Other states have settled Demos’s lawsuits by agreeing to less costly steps, such as better training for welfare officials or upgraded computer systems.

But Demos says it pushed Massachusetts to mail the voter registration forms to thousands of welfare recipients because the lawsuit here was filed so close to the election that simply allowing recipients to register the next time they went to a public assistance office was not practical.

The Globe also editorialized about the issue:

Mass. is justified in mailing voting forms to aid recipients

Mailing voter registration forms to people on public assistance isn’t part of a partisan plot to help Democrat Elizabeth Warren beat Republican Senator Scott Brown: It’s part of an interim settlement over a lawsuit alleging that Massachusetts consistently failed to comply with the National Voter Registration Act of 1993.

Through the mailings, Massachusetts is taking steps to do what the law requires it to do — encourage voter participation in that great American enterprise known as democracy, including through public-aid agencies. To vote, citizens first must register. Government should do all it can — and all that the law requires — to help achieve that goal.

Yeah, tell that to the Boston Herald, which once again had four – count ’em, four – bites at this apple. First up, a news report:

Welfare chief declares Elizabeth Warren ties ‘ridiculous’ 

State welfare commissioner Daniel Curley said yesterday he never communicated with Elizabeth Warren’s daughter and he rejected claims that the department’s taxpayer-funded drive to get welfare recipients registered to vote was politically motivated to help Warren.

“This gets to the ridiculous,” said Curley, who heads the Department of Transitional Assistance. “There has been no communication from DTA to any of those officials — or their daughters.”

This morning’s Herald also featured an editorial (“Just sign ’em all up”), a Jessica Heslam column (“Recipients decry voter push waste”), and a Michael Graham column :

Coincidentally, fix in

No justice in lawsuit to boost Warren

In America, the wide-eyed and innocent believe in unicorns and the Tooth Fairy.

In Massachusetts, they believe in “coincidence.”

For 10 years a Lowell woman had been getting her welfare benefits at the local office without, she claims, being asked to register to vote. She never bothered to do anything about it until now. What a “coincidence.”

Right – but isn’t that what the law- . . . never mind. Let’s just keep moving.

To the web, this afternoon, when this popped up on the Herald site:

Brown: Warren must reimburse taxpayers for welfare mailing

U.S. Sen. Scott Brown demanded challenger Elizabeth Warren cough up nearly $300,000 to reimburse taxpayers for a push undertaken by her daughter’s liberal think tank to register welfare recipients to vote.

”It’s been disturbing for a lot of people to learn that the state’s welfare department undertook an unprecedented voter registration drive at the behest of Elizabeth Warren’s daughter and the organization she represents,” wrote Brown in a statement. “It is clear that this was done to aid Elizabeth Warren’s Senate campaign. Professor Warren has more than $13 million dollars in her campaign account, and if she wants to mail every welfare recipient a voter registration form, she should do so at her own expense, not taxpayers’. She should immediately reimburse the state for the cost of this mailing and stop playing politics with the taxpayers’ money.”

The Globe posted much the same on its website.

This gambit is so ridiculous, it’s actually smart. And it ensures the perpetual motion machine won’t stop anytime soon.

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Herald Foursome Whacks Warren Edition

August 9, 2012

The Boston Herald has sunk its teeth into the EBT Voter Push story and is taking bigger bites every day. Yesterday the feisty local tabloid ran three pieces (to the Globe’s none in its print edition). Today the Herald has upped the ante to four.

The beauty of this story, of course, it that’s its a twofer for the Herald: They get to rough up the welfare layabouts while inflicting maximum collateral damage to Elizabeth Warren, the paper’s particular bête noire.

Today’s edition kicks off with Warren on the defensive:

Elizabeth Warren: Nothing fishy about my kid’s role in EBT campaign

Elizabeth Warren scoffed at U.S. Sen. Scott Brown’s charges that her daughter is leading a taxpayer-funded crusade to get welfare recipients out to vote for her mom, even as records show the Democrat scored thousands in campaign dough from the group’s bigwigs — including a former Boston Globe publisher.

“The organization that Amelia’s involved in was working on voter registration issues I believe before she ever joined,” Warren said. “And they were working in several different states, they’re working with other organizations and they were working with the commonwealth of Massachusetts before I ever became involved in the campaign.”

There’s also a backgrounder on Demos, the group organizing the campaign. And what would a pig pile be without the smooth stylings of Howie Carr?

It’s not enough that Granny Warren, the fake Indian, is raising more campaign cash from the Beautiful People and, yes, the machine, than any congressional candidate in the country. Now Brown has to contend with campaign mailings from the Department of Transitional Assistance, i.e., welfare, paid for by money extracted from the taxpayers — his voters.

Oh, yes – just for good measure, the paper tossed in an editorial:

A true voting scam

Ah, yes, we can hear the governor once again blaming the Herald for “making sure you’re angry” with yesterday’s front page story on how nearly $300,000 of your tax dollars will be spent to tell welfare recipients how to register to vote.

That the national voter registration effort is led by a left-leaning group whose board is chaired by Amelia Warren Tyagi, daughter of Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren is, well, just one of those funny political coincidences — no?

And etc.

Meanwhile, the crosstown rival Globe ran its story – an expanded version of what the paper posted yesterday afternoon on its website – front page above the fold. The broadshet also ran this chinstroker about  the Massachusetts Democratic Party’s “aggressive effort to expand upon and invigorate the grassroots organization that propelled Deval Patrick to two terms as governor after 16 consecutive years of GOP control over the Corner Office.”

We’ll see tomorrow who makes an aggressive effort to expand upon and invigorate the voter registration story. We’re laying plenty of eight-to-five it’s the Herald.

 

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Herald “Welfare Voter Push” Edition

August 8, 2012

The Boston Herald hit its favorite target – Elizabeth Warren – with a one-two punch this morning, starting with this piece:

Welfare voter push has GOP crying foul
Critics blast state’s Dems for ‘inside job’

The state has mailed out voter registration letters to nearly 500,000 welfare recipients, in a push sparked by a group led by former ACORN bigwigs that critics say is a naked bid to boost Democrats at the polls in November.

The letters, mailed last month by the state’s Department of Transitional Assistance, went out as Republican U.S. Sen. Scott Brown and Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren have been locked in a neck-and-neck race.

The welfare system’s get-out-the-vote push came in response to a suit brought by New England United for Justice (NEU4J), which is led by three former leaders of the controversial Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now. ACORN was disbanded in 2010 amid a voter fraud scandal.

Yow. Then there’s the follow-up:

Brown blasts welfare vote group chaired by Warren’s daughter

HYANNIS — An exasperated U.S. Sen. Scott Brown today said a taxpayer-funded push by a group chaired by rival Elizabeth Warren’s daughter to register welfare recipients is “outrageous.”

“It’s like another thing you shake your head about. Here we go, we have Professor Warren’s daughter leading the charge at taxpayer expense to get welfare recipients out,” said Brown, who added he will fight just as hard for the votes of those on welfare. “It’s not about getting people out to vote, it’s the fact that Professor Warren’s daughter is leading the charge at taxpayer expense, getting out the vote for her mom …I think it’s outrageous and when does it end?”

Yikes – that’s about as high as Brown’s dudgeon gets.

But wait . . . there’s more. The Herald couldn’t resist taking a whack at the group organizing the voter push, hitting the trifecta with a piece headlined, “Group fueling registration doesn’t fall far from ACORN.” (Or maybe they couldn’t resist the pun.)

Regardless, the Globe finally jumped in the pool this afternoon with a web posting:

Scott Brown criticizes efforts to register welfare recipients

US Senator Scott Brown today criticized the state’s welfare department for sending voting registration forms to 478,000 people on public assistance, saying the mass mailing was a ploy to boost the ranks of Democratic voters and benefit rival Elizabeth Warren’s campaign.

The Globe piece also featured this response from the Warren campaign:

“For Brown to claim this is some kind of plot against him is just bizarre,” said campaign manager Mindy Myers, adding that the attack on Warren’s daughter was “ridiculous.

“His entire attack is built on efforts in multiple states to enforce a law passed almost 20 years ago with bipartisan support. Even the Bush Justice Department filed suit to enforce this provision of that law,” said Myers.

And, yes, the Globe did credit the Herald for breaking the story, for those of you keeping score at home.

 

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