Charles Pierce: Warren/Brown I: Night of the Living Overpreparedness

[highplainsdem]

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/elizabeth-warren-scott-brown-debate-12910145

BOSTON — There are a few things that Scott Brown so very much would like you to know about Elizabeth Warren, his opponent in the extremely loud and increasingly not-as-close United States Senate race here in Massachusetts. He would like you to know that she is a cheapskate fake-Indian affirmative-action hire who is living high on the hog at Harvard on your kid's tuition money and she wants to take all of yours to Washington with her in her piggy bank.

Thank you. Coming up next: NCIS.

Thursday night was the first of four debates between Brown and Warren, and I was in the room, and let me tell you: This debate was nothing if not the perfect match-up of two candidates who were overprepared nearly to the point of detonation. Let us begin with Brown, who plainly was overprepared to be a belligerent dick.

Scott Brown came into this election with two great advantages. The first was that he is the incumbent U.S. senator, with all the institutional and personal gravitas that comes with the office. The second was that people in Massachusetts thought of him as a really nice guy, Mr. Happy Barncoat with his truckload of extraordinarily personable daughters. It took him about four minutes on Thursday night to throw both of those advantages across the street and into the Charles. He did not come into the debate looking like a senator. He came in looking as though he were auditioning for a fill-in slot on some AM-radio afternoon talk show. And from the start, when he began belaboring Warren with the ongoing nothingburger about her ancestry, he looked very much like a man who could land the job. After all, he didn't just assert that Warren is hiding something. He clearly implied that she'd gotten where she was through gaming the affirmative-action process and, in Massachusetts, we all know what that means. It means that your uncle Knocko couldn't get on the Essex County road crew because they had to hire a ni... oops, Bob On A Car Phone, you're next.

Brown demonstrated all the pre-requisites. He was snotty. ("Sorry I didn't vote for your boss," he sneered when Warren asked him why he hadn't voted to confirm Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court.) He was supercilious. (The constant use of "Professor," like a cudgel.) And he was crude. (There were several appeals to, "All you union guys out there," as though he couldn't fathom why men with biceps might vote for a chick from Harvard.) He was so ginned up — "She and her husband make almost three-quarters of a million dollars!" — that he spent a great deal of time simply spluttering. (At the end, he realized he hadn't yet used the phrase "intellectual founder of the radical Occupy movement," so he just rather tossed it into something about bipartisanship.) The personality on display on Thursday night was so fundamentally dissonant with the guy in the truck in the commercials that neither guy seems altogether authentic. What's left is an angry lightweight who won a freak election and who's wearing an office that's two sizes too big for him.

-snip-

Pierce also has some criticism of Warren, who he says was "overprepared to stay on message and not to rise to the bait." He admits "this was the smartest strategy for her, but she stuck to it so resolutely that she let a whole repertoire of hanging curveballs go whistling by."

But that's very minor criticism compared to his critique of Brown.

[phantom power]

1. "overprepared to be a belligerent dick"

[nichomachus]

2. +1

[Aviation Pro]

3. A lot of pundits....

...are taking their cues from holy priest of course discourse.

I speak of the one, the only his Rudeness.

And I'm stealing "belligerent dick."

[tosh]

4. Mr tosh had the same criticism of Warren...

letting those curveballs go by.

[Zorra]

5. For some reason, Brown reminds me of Frank Burns, the character from the old TV show MASH.

A weasely, whiny, egotistical ass kissing brat.

[highplainsdem]

7. Agreed. A petulant child.

[barbtries]

6. at the end of the piece

he calls brown as having achieved "at worst, a draw" in the debate. really? i didn't see it. i gather though that Warren squandered a number of opportunities to bury the knife in brown over BS he was spewing. next time she'll be less nervous and better able to listen to what brown says so she can come back at him. i assume.

[annabanana]

8. " wearing an office that's two sizes too big for him"

Brilliant characterization!

[highplainsdem]

9. Kick - Pierce will be on MSNBC shortly.