The LA Times look at a current New England US Senator that crew up in Oklahoma…..
When Elizabeth Warren first ran for the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts in 2012, her opponent mocked her as a Harvard elitist, addressing her in debates as “Professor,” dripping out the syllables so it sounded more like an epithet than an honorific.
Warren won anyway, swamping the Republican incumbent, Scott Brown, who had campaigned in a pickup truck.
Now, as she runs for president, Warren faces the same arduous political challenge — rushing to portray herself as a prairie populist from homespun roots in Oklahoma before opponents can paint her as an out-of-touch Ivy League academic.
On the campaign trail, Warren, 70, rarely mentions her two decades at Harvard Law School, where she was once one of the highest-paid professors. She instead highlights her upbringing in a state known for wide expanses and oil pump jacks, saying she dreamed of becoming a schoolteacher when she lined up her “dollies” and learned the lessons “my momma told me.”
“Any Okies?” she asked supporters at a recent rally in Seattle. “Oh, we got some right here. Woohoo!”
In speeches, she poignantly recounts how her mother was forced to take a minimum-wage job at a Sears store in Oklahoma City after Warren’s father, a Montgomery Ward salesman, suffered a heart attack. As medical bills mounted, the family feared losing their home and one of their cars was repossessed.
Warren leans on her biography to argue that American families can no longer escape poverty with minimum-wage jobs or gain access to affordable colleges that can provide a ticket to the middle class.
“That’s the story of millions of people all around this country,” she said in Seattle.
It’s still Warren’s story. But she now has lived longer in leafy Cambridge, Mass., with her husband, Bruce Mann, another Harvard Law professor, in a $3-million Victorian townhouse, than in Oklahoma, which she left to attend college.
Class struggles have helped define presidential races since at least 1840, when William Henry Harrison ran as the “log cabin and hard cider” candidate, masking his life as a wealthy plantation owner. He ultimately beat the incumbent president, Martin Van Buren, whom he had lambasted as a wealthy snob.
In 2016, Donald Trump won over working-class voters by positioning himself as the bane of cultural elites, even though he inherited millions, lived in a Manhattan penthouse and claimed to be a billionaire. Once in the White House, he approved a tax cut that chiefly benefited corporations and high earners.
Warren’s past is more complex. She kept her Oklahoma ties through the decades, supporting family members there. Long before she ran for political office, she described her family’s struggles as the motivating force behind her extensive academic research into the causes and effects of bankruptcy.
Whether that helps her chart a path to the White House is another matter. Polls so far show her support is strongest among highly educated voters — those more likely drawn to her Harvard pedigree — and not with the working-class and minority voters she would need to win….
image…bostonglobe.com
That Republicans view “professor” as a pejorative says a lot about where that party has gone in recent years.
In the 90s the GOP was practically run by former college professors–House Speaker Newt Gingrich, House Majority Leader Dick Armey and Senator and 1996 presidential candidate Phil Gramm were all former college profs.
Trump has no use for ‘experts’….