The anointed and increasingly embattled Elizabeth Warren is no longer looking all that anointed in her bid to take on Republican U.S. Senator Scott Brown for his Massachusetts seat. Today, the Boston Herald’s reporting that there’s a very real possibility Warren might face a primary challenge and, better still, a debate situation in which she won’t be able to run away from inconvenient questions.
This coming weekend, Massachusetts will hold its Democratic convention. With Warren’s brewing scandals involving her claims of Cherokee ancestry and possible plagiarism, Democrat grassroots are looking much closer at Marisa DeFranco, who is also a Democrat running for the opportunity to face Brown. And should DeFranco pick up 15% of the delegates this weekend, she and Warren will fight it out through a September primary election.
For the same reason this is bad news for Warren, it’s also bad news for the mainstream media desperate to protect her.
As my colleague Mike Flynn pointed out, the media chose the day before a long holiday weekend to finally pick up and give the story surrounding Elizabeth Warren’s disputed Cherokee heritage the attention it deserves. By choosing the Friday before Memorial Day, this allows the media to say they’ve covered the story without doing as much damage to Warren as it might otherwise. Further proof that this was the plan all along can be found in the lack of follow ups. Since Saturday, the Boston Globe’s and its ilk have all but ignored the controversy.
Obviously, both Warren and her media allies would like to ignore the story completely, but if there’s a primary, that tactic isn’t likely to work.
Since January, DeFranco has been requesting the opportunity to debate Warren. Now that request is not only picking up steam, but the pressure has apparently forced the Warren camp into considering it:
Democratic underdog Marisa DeFranco, claiming she’s riding a new wave of momentum as party establishment darling Elizabeth Warren struggles with a persistent scandal, is demanding at least four primary debates as the U.S. Senate race rivals head into the weekend’s state Democratic convention — and last night the Warren campaign opened the door to the possibility.
“I’ve been asking her to debate me since January, and she’s turned me down,” DeFranco told the Herald last night, adding that she’d like to spend the entire summer locked in debate, much as the Republican presidential candidates spent last fall. “Hey, I’d be happy with four (debates), but if the people want more …” …
Warren campaign spokeswoman Alethea Harney said in a statement last night: “We are focused on getting ready for the Convention this Saturday. We look forward to debates and will consider them once the convention is over.”
Obviously, the media hates this story. The balance of the United States Senate might depend on Warren unseating Brown, and national bad news for Democrats means bad news for Obama. The Globe and the others were pretty much forced into covering Warren’s brewing troubles after New Media, including Breitbart News, did the digging and found the evidence they could no longer dismiss. This is why the media chose to drop the story into the hole of a Friday before a holiday weekend.
But it’s not just the balance of the U.S. Senate that worries the left-wing media. The scandal also involves Harvard and the dirty little secret of identity politics wherein a pasty woman need only claim she’s 1/32 Cherokee to benefit from all kinds of goodies which might include a tenured professorship at a prestigious university.
But Warren can only run and her media allies can only cover for her for so long . If there’s an honest broker asking questions, in a debate situation (whether it’s with DeFranco and /or Brown), Warren will have to answer questions once and for all. The same is true if there’s a four-month long primary. It’s hard to imagine DeFranco not using the Cherokee issue to convince Democrats that a scandal surrounding Warren’s heritage and her inept handling of it could tip a no-brainer Democrat Senate seat to Scott Brown for a second time.
When you consider the deafening silence coming from the left in support of Warren these days, my guess is that both rank and file Democrats and the party’s movers could be convinced of that without much trouble.
As Ed Morrissey points out at Hot Air, a third option would be the “Toricelli option” in which they dump both Warren and DeFranco and bring in the widow of Ted Kennedy as a ringer.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
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