As You Can See, He’s Not Senate Material

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Here’s Scott Brown’s Staff Mocking Elizabeth Warren With The “Tomahawk Chop” (Slate)

Tori Amos somehow managed to stay totally off my radar when she started her solo career with Little Earthquakes. It was only in 1994, after Under the Pink came out (the greatest non-Björk album of all time), that I became aware of her. I quickly came to appreciate her amazing musical skills, but I admit that at first I was drawn to her more controversial material just for how it rankled some people. Although she’s had more than her share of controversies, the refrain from that first song of hers I heard — “God, sometimes you just don’t come through / Do you need a woman to look after you?” — just put a smile on my face. (You’ll have to get her early video collection DVD, Fade to Red, to see the music video, because there’s a not a good-quality version up on YouTube.)

Like the other singer-songwriters I fell in love with in the mid-nineties, I quickly absorbed everything I could about Tori Amos, buying all of her CDs — including a slew of imports, even when the imported CDs didn’t contain any music I didn’t already have — videotaping every televised performance I could, and using this thing I’d just gotten access to called the Internet to learn about her. Reading up on her biography — her father is a Methodist pastor, as were both his parents, but her maternal grandmother was Cherokee — I began to understand where her views on religion came from, and how she used (and continues to this day to use) her eclectic upbringing as a font for songwriting material. Maybe it was because of the diversity of the people I went to high school with, but I didn’t have any “But she doesn’t look like a Cherokee” reaction. Then again, this was 1994, and our culture was beginning to shift a lot in terms of how it viewed constructs like race and ethnicity.

I’m not sure of the exact date it became rude to publicly say “that person doesn’t look [insert race/ethnicity/similar identifiers]” but I’m pretty sure that date happened ages ago. More importantly, that date was probably a lot earlier for people who want to serve in Congress, especially for a constituency like the people of Massachusetts.

To be clear, despite how some on the left are trying to frame this as Scott Brown and his supporters attacking his Democratic opponent for his Senate seat, Elizabeth Warren, on her ethnicity, the central issue for the Brown campaign is whether or not Warren knowingly lied about her heritage in an attempt to advance her career. This is similar to the circumstances that led to Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial, which was about whether or not he knowingly lied to Americans, not the nasty stuff he was doing in the Oval Office with Monica Lewinsky. That said, the ways in which Brown and his campaign are bringing up Warren’s ethnic background go beyond the pale, so although there may be that kernel of legitimate questioning about Warren’s trustworthiness in this tactic, it’s surrounded by so much garbage about ethnicity, some of which comes right out of the Southern Republican playbook of generations past, that it’s impossible to see the attack as a whole as anything but a highly inappropriate attempt to interject Warren’s genealogy into the campaign and shine a spotlight on it.

The “she doesn’t look” lines Brown made repeatedly at last week’s debate with Warren, without any prompting on that topic, would be bad enough in and of themselves. Talking Points Memo pointed out yesterday how many Cherokees, to borrow a phrase in the article, “look white,” and I’d add Tori Amos to that list. Worse enough is the overt turn Brown made in the debate to tie Warren’s ancestry to affirmative action, which is pretty much the definition of playing the race card from the bottom of the deck. Using the Tomahawk Chop and “war whoops” to mock Warren is the kind of thing that you just can’t believe could happen in America in 2012, especially coming from a campaign’s own staffers. What would these Brown staffers have done to mock President Obama? Would they have put on blackface and sang “Mammy” to Obama supporters? How would that have been significantly different from what they actually did to mock Warren?

I find it hard to believe this could happen anywhere in this country in this age, but if it did happen you’d at least think you’d see it in the deep south, where there’s still a lot of lingering race-based resentment that could potentially make this a workable tactic despite its blindingly obvious drawbacks. This is Massachusetts we’re talking about, though; few states are bluer than Massachusetts, and while they love their moderate Republicans, this tactic would likely backfire in most (if not all) red states. Scott Brown could have potentially saved face by making a full apology and firing all the staffers caught on camera, but he’s only offered equivocating language and continued to press the issue of Warren’s ethnicity even while discussing this incident. Between this, and everything surrounding Todd Akin, and the “rolling calamity” of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, it sometimes feels like Republicans are throwing this year’s election, and as many problems as I have with the Republican Party — particularly its far-right elements — it’s downright painful to watch what they’re doing to themselves this year.

Elizabeth Warren gave the second best speech of this year’s Democratic National Convention, and the only person who gave a better speech, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, has already said he’s not going to run for President in 2016. Warren never planned on running for public office, but she’s been a quick study, and next to Dennis Kucinich I can’t think of another Democrat I might consider over whomever the Green Party candidate would be in 2016. Whatever personal likability Scott Brown might have had going for him likely evaporated after that first debate with Warren, and I don’t see him recovering from it by Election Day. I have a feeling we’re going to hear a lot from Elizabeth Warren in the next four years, especially 2016.

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