"Hillary has brains, she has guts, she has thick skin and steady hands, but most of all she has a good heart..."

Said Elizabeth Warren, adopting the literary trope of listing bodily organs as she tried out in the role of VP candidate alongside Hillary Clinton at Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal today. How many people would you think an event like that would draw in a city that size? It was only 2,600. Isn't that weird?

Trump took a shot at Warren today:

"She said she's 5 percent Native American. She was unable to prove it. She used the fact that she was Native American to advance her career.... Elizabeth Warren is a total fraud. I know it. Other people who work with her know it. Elizabeth Warren is a total fraud. She made up her heritage which I think is racist... I think she's a racist actually, because what she did was very racist."

Racist racist racist... say it 3 times and it might make it true. Trump will never get his opponents to stop calling him racist, so you can understand why he's going the no, you're racist route. It's kind of interesting the way he's doing it here, because it's a very different kind of racism charge. He's accused of racial hostility, but he's accusing Warren of being a racial huckster.

Meanwhile, ex-Senator Scott Brown — who may himself be auditioning for the VP role on the Trump side — said "She’s not Native American, she’s not 1/32nd, she has no Native American background, except for what her family told her" and why doesn't she "take a DNA test" and release the results?

The strangest part of the Scott Adams prediction that Trump will pick Scott Brown as his VP.

It's the name Brown:

As silly as this sounds, it makes him seem less white. Science tells us that people are more influenced by names than common sense would suggest. For example, people with so-called “lower class” names such as Justin are less likely to get job interviews.... And my guess is that people named Trump are more likely to be associated with winning (trumping). By this same line of thinking, Brown would take some of the white off of Trump. That could help in the general election. And yes, I am totally serious. People trained in persuasion would likely agree.

I assume that bit about "Justin" is a joke. Ah, maybe the whole thing is a joke. Except the part about Scott Brown being a very handsome man. Surprised Adams made no mention of the most famous case of a presidential candidate making handsomeness the key factor — George H.W. Bush picking Dan Quayle. Opinion from 1988:

"Do people even know who he is? Wow. He will do anything to show his body."

Said Claire McCaskill about Scott Brown.

"It was so surreal, all of the women in the Senate used to talk about how he would figure out some way, every time he had a conversation, to work in something about his body. Like, 'I was on the treadmill in the gym this morning and I saw you on MSNBC,' or 'You know, I was running at lunch today and' — and he did it to all of us! We all compared notes."

"It was not supposed to end this way for Scott Brown..."

"... emailing strangers pictures of his pecs and waxing poetic about diet supplements."

Predict an upset.

There are many ways to have fun watching the election returns, and one way it to place some bets. I've told you about the bet Meade and I have about the Wisconsin gubernatorial election, but yesterday I came up with another topic for betting. Predict an upset. This led to some boring discussion of what counts as an upset, and I came up with the boring idea that it's an upset if a candidate with a predicted 58% chance of winning loses. By this standard, in the Senate races, there can be no upset in Kansas, but all the other races have a predicted winner whose loss would be an upset.

So pick an upset to bet on. I picked Scott Brown to beat Jeanne Shaheen in New Hampshire, and Meade picked Thom Tillis to beat Kay Hagan in North Carolina.

Can anyone explain the profound loserosity of Martha Coakley?

The Democratic Party's candidate for governor in the famously liberal state of Massachusetts weirdly lost a Senate race to a Republican in 2010, and now she's not just losing to her Republican opponent, she's 9 points behind in the new Boston Globe poll. Is this lady poison? Come on! It's just plain mean to be so rejecting of this poor woman. What's going on?

Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, 2 new polls came out yesterday, one putting the Democrat Mary Burke a point ahead and the other putting the Republican Scott Walker a point ahead. That's a good way to make everybody feel respected. Good work, Wisconsin. Everybody is a winner. Of course, in the end, one or the other candidate must win. But it's basically a crap shoot, right? It means nothing. Just a tie, out here in the land of peace, love and understanding.

Unlike Massachusetts, where there's some mysterious anti-Coakleyism raging. That poor woman...

"Scott Brown won his primary."

"Now he wants to be the first multi-state senator in 135 years."

"So yes, according to the Senate, Scott Brown isn’t a 'lobbyist.' But I submit to anyone else in the world..."

"... a former Senator joining a 'law and lobbying firm' to help with Wall St’s 'business and governmental affairs' is to make him a lobbyist. Because to anyone else in the world, when you sell your influence to affect 'business and governmental affairs,' you are a lobbyist."

Professor Lessig stands by his use of the word "lobbyist" in response to a stern demand from Scott Brown's campaign manager that he retract his statement. 

"Do I have the best credentials? Probably not. ‘Cause, you know, whatever."

So said Scott Brown, who — look at him, people! — puts the face in self-effacement. What can he do but admit to the short-comings of his residency in New Hampshire, which he'd like to represent in the U.S. Senate? But no other Republican was going to oust the Democratic incumbent Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, so if New Hampshirites want to contribute to tipping the Senate to a GOP majority, they'll have to accept a man with a lot of Massachusetts in him.

Brown moved to New Hampshire last December, but he moved into what had been their vacation house (since 1993). And he was born in New Hampshire, unlike Shaheen, who was born in Missouri, which makes it possible for Brown to say — jokingly? — “Sen. Shaheen is not from here, but apparently it’s a problem with me?” Shaheen has been a New Hampshire resident since 1973.

Massachusetts is closer to NH than Missouri is, but in the closeness there's "a complicated relationship":

They share a state line, professional sports teams and a major media market, but there are traces of resentment among some New Hampshire natives. Thousands of Massachusetts residents moved into New Hampshire in recent years, drawn by lower taxes and cheaper real estate. The migration helped give Democrats a slight voter registration advantage, although the state is considered far more balanced politically than solidly Democratic Massachusetts.

How does that cut for Scott Brown? He comes from Massachusetts, but he's a Republican, and other migrants from Massachusetts have tipped New Hampshire toward Democrats. Resentment toward Democrats from Massachusetts should translate into a vote for Brown, if the longtime New Hampshirites resist the liberalism of the newcomers. And Brown can also try to win the votes of those transplanted Massachusettans, who could see him as their guy.

Brown chuckled when 39-year-old Christine Kalinowski told him she was from “Southie,” or South Boston. She said she moved to New Hampshire just a few months ago, like him.

“I voted for him before,” she said, “and I’d definitely vote for him again.”

There's that dynamic. I suspect the newer residents from Massachusetts think they are the cool kids, and they will like seeing themselves in the gorgeous face of Mr. Brown.

I started thinking about Brown this morning because I was reading a Gail Collins column in the NYT called "The Season of the Twitch," referring to this being the "the season where center stage goes to whoever screws up the most" (and the Donovan song title). Brown's supposed screw up was that quote I put in the post title. Collins calls attention to that, I think, to dilute a truly damaging screw up by a Democrat, Bruce Braley, who was on track to win the Senate race in Iowa, until he got caught on video telling "a bunch of trial lawyers at a Texas fund-raiser that if they didn’t contribute to his campaign, Republicans might take control of the Senate and there would be 'a farmer from Iowa who never went to law school' running the Judiciary Committee."

Having begun with Brown and buried Braley in paragraph 12, Collins scampers back to the topic of Brown, declaring "New Hampshire’s still my favorite." She doesn't explain why, so I'm going to assume it's because it's a Republican screw up. Anyway, thanks to Collins for drawing my attention to this great — and totally not a screw up — ad by Joni Ernst, a Republican who's running for the Senate in Iowa, stating that she "grew up castrating hogs on an Iowa farm":



Ernst and Braley are running for the seat that Tom Harkin is vacating. Grassley is the other Iowa Senator. Braley attacked him as part of an argument for maintaining Democratic control of the Senate. Grassley is 80 years old and has served in Congress since 1975. He does have a family farm, operated by his son. His biography also shows him to have worked as a sheet metal shearer/assembly line worker for more than 10 years, and he has "PhD work" in political science. There's no reason to disparage Grassley for being a farmer. I see more reason to question whether he should be listing his occupation as "farmer," and certainly he deserves attack for hanging around Congress too long. But Grassley is not up for reelection this year. Braley is trying to say it's ridiculous for this man to chair the Judiciary Committee. The question for voters on this score is whether it's less ridiculous than having Patrick Leahy chairing the committee, which is what you get with a Democratic majority. Leahy is only 73, but like Grassley, he's been camped out in Congress since 1975.

Whatever. To sum up: Scott Brown is ultra-handsome, and Joni Ernst is an out-and-proud castrating woman.

Chuck Schumer says both left- and right-wing blogs are too vicious and negative but the difference is: Left-wing blogs "have less credibility and less clout."

Excerpts from his interview with TNR's Isaac Chotiner:

CS: [One] thing the Tea Party does is threaten their fellow Republicans. They actually threaten them. If you punched in—I used to do this—“Marco Rubio” when we were doing immigration reform, nine out of ten hard-right blogs were negative on him: attack after attack after attack....

[T]here are some on the far left who just have a visceral hatred of Wall Street. It’s counterproductive.

IC: ... Is this a problem for your party?

CS: You don’t want to go after them for the sake of going after them. The left-wing blogs want you to be completely and always anti–Wall Street. It’s not the right way to be.

IC: So are the left-wing blogs as bad as the Tea Party ones in this case?

CS: Left-wing blogs are the mirror image. They just have less credibility and less clout.

ADDED: Kos bites back:

Left-wing blogs had credibility when they were helping Schumer's DSCC win control of the Senate. Now that we're criticizing Wall Street? No credibility! And we're just like the Tea Party, having cost Democrats a half-dozen seats and the Senate majority in the last couple of years.

Oh, you mean we haven't pushed the Democratic Party outside of the national mainstream? Weird, then. On the other hand, it wasn't bloggers trying to save Sen. Scott Brown's hide in 2012, like good ol' Chuck:

There is a good little story. [Looks to aide] I can tell this. I went to Scott Brown and said, “If you give us the sixtieth vote for the Citizens United rollback, we won’t go after you.”

If it was up to Schumer, he would've traded an entire Senate seat for one meaningless cloture vote on a bill that would've died a quick death in the House. God knows his Wall Street benefactors would've been thrilled at that!

From my perspective, intra-party relations have never been better. It seems odd that Schumer is trying to start an internecine war at this very moment, particularly with a tough 2014 up ahead. And as the number three Democrat in the Senate, his words carry outsized weight. But it's clear that the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party is feeling the heat from its resurgent populist wing: the Warrens, Baldwins, Browns and Merkleys.

Republicans are locked in their own bloody civil war. Schumer (and his Third Way allies) may have just signaled that we may be in for some bloodshed of our own. In fact, he appears eager to lead Wall Street's counter attack.

"Mr. Pickup Truck-Driving Everyman has a home in New Hampshire..."

"... in addition to his primary home and three rental condos in Massachusetts and the timeshare in Aruba. And since the Boston media market—where Brown, of course, has had a lot of coverage, since Boston is in Massachusetts, where he's been a state and United States senator—extends into New Hampshire, residents of the state are very familiar with him."

Carpetbagging alert from Kos.

Scott Brown will not run for the Senate again.

"I was not at all certain that a third Senate campaign in less than four years, and the prospect of returning to a Congress even more partisan than the one I left, was really the best way for me to continue in public service at this time."

I'm thinking that he didn't want to hear the criticism: you just lost. Why should he win on this fluke of the other seat opening when the people just voted him down? Exactly what would you say to that?

Scott Brown will go back to the Senate, into the seat Kerry will vacate...

... unless this poll is way off.

The strongest potential opponent is Deval Patrick, and he's running 7 points behind Brown.

Won't Scott Brown end up back in the Senate...

... if John Kerry is tapped for Secretary of State?

"I’m not a student in your classroom," said Scott Brown to his lady lawprof opponent.

That happened at last night's debate.

After Warren listed the instances in which Brown voted against Democratic-backed bills, a back-and-forth ensued, as the senator tried to respond with a defense of his record. His line brought him some boos. Brown is pitching himself as the likable candidate in this race. Lines like this one could cut against that image he has carefully crafted.

That's WaPo's Sean Sullivan, spinning Brown's effective quip. Boos? I heard cheering. [ADDED: That is, a kind of "ooh!" that sounds to me like appreciation.] The worst thing to me about the clip, which you should watch for yourself, is that Brown lets it show that he's pleased that he got off the funny, telling alternative to "Let me finish" or "I didn't interrupt you, now, please don't interrupt me."

But let's talk about likeability. (Note: I prefer the spelling "likeable" to "likable," even when the candidate seems lickable.) Brown found a memorable, amusing way to cut off an interruption, which made him look good, at least to some people. The key is to look good specifically to those people who are not already strongly against him or for him. Now, the subtlety here is that the man cut off the woman, and he did it in a way that called attention to her position as a teacher, and that's a bit like calling her a schoolmarm, except that we know she's a Harvard law professor, and thus a powerful, elite sort of professor who exercises power in a setting that is traditionally male. She wields masculine power and presumes to control and channel the speech of less powerful males. That's the image of the law school classroom, as depicted — talk about memorable! — in the movie "The Paper Chase."

Now, nearly everyone watching that iconic scene — just linked — in "The Paper Chase," identifies with "Mr. Hart," the student, who resists the control of the imperious lawprof Prof. Kingsfield. And that's how Scott Brown positioned himself, making him a man of the people and her a member of the entitled elite.

Did Scott Brown staffers make anti-Indian gestures at a rally?

I'm not saying it was good or wise for them to make the "tomahawk chop" gesture while yelling in a way that the news report characterizes as an "Indian war whoop." And Scott Brown has said he doesn't condone that sort of acting out, but I just want to specify that the staffers' gesturing and noise-making doesn't count as antagonism toward Native Americans.

Someone doing the "tomahawk chop" is himself playing the role of Indian. This Indian character making a stereotypical gesture can't be read as expressing hostility toward Indians. The Indian is his hero. At a certain level of political correctness, the tomahawk chop is considered offensive to Native Americans, but somehow it's not offensive enough to have stopped Atlanta Braves fans from doing it.

Anyway, these fake Indians, the staffers, are pretending to be real Indians, miming an attack on Elizabeth Warren on the ground that she's a fake Indian. There's a lot of fakery in there, but no one is expressing the view that it's bad to be Indian. That's all I wanted to say, and I do understand how real Indians might prefer not to be represented as stereotypical characters. And maybe they'd object even more if a non-Indian got a great job from an employer who was practicing affirmative action in hiring or self-promoting by claiming diversity.

"Professor Warren claimed she was a Native American, a person of color. And as you can see, she’s not."

You can see?

NY Mayor Bloomberg endorses Massachusetts Senator Brown — over his Democratic challenger, Elizabeth Warren.

Questions:

1. Wait. I forget... Is Bloomberg a Democrat or a Republican? He's an "independent" now. He was a lifelong Democrat, until he ran for mayor (in 2001) as a Republican. He came out as an independent in 2007.

2. What does the mayor of New York have to do with Massachusetts? He was born in Massachusetts, grew up there, and went business school there.

3. Why did he pick Brown over Warren?

[T]he mayor had chosen to support Mr. Brown... for opposing a “national concealed-carry reciprocity amendment,” which would have required states to honor concealed-weapons permits issued by other states.

Concealed-carry reciprocity "would let people with gun permits from rural states like Arkansas and Kentucky carry hidden handguns in New York City," according to the mayor's spokesman.

It's not as though Warren opposes gun control, but when you "take a tough stand and buck party orthodoxy that helps the city of New York, the mayor would like to support you."

Interesting. By the way, why specify "rural states like Arkansas and Kentucky"? That has a bigot-y feeling to it. I suppose they might mean that in a system of decentralized gun regulation, what's right for a rural state is different from what a place like NYC needs/prefers. Federally imposed reciprocity undercuts the federalism values inherent in letting the states decide for themselves. But "rural states like Arkansas and Kentucky" — to my ear — sounds more like disgust for hillbillies.

"Where miracles are made. Not in Washington, D.C."

"Should President Obama have gone to Wisconsin?"

Asks WaPo's Chris Cillizza:

The majority of Democratic strategists we spoke to over the weekend, however, insisted that the combination of Obama’s personality (and that of his political team) as well as the unique dynamics in the Badger State lessened not only the likelihood of a presidential visit but also its potential efficacy.

“If a recall race becomes purely partisan, there is a strong backlash from independents,” said Steve Murphy, a leading Democratic media consultant. “Obama was smart to stay away, for both himself and Barrett.”

That's too vague. What's wrong with "Obama's personality" (and the "personality" of his "team") that  would have been bad for Barrett?