Opinion

Harvard’s ‘populist’

BOSTON — There’s a reason why most would-be politicians start by running for lesser offices, as Massachusetts Democrats are finding to their chagrin this spring, as their anointed US Senate candidate springs one unpleasant surprise after another.

Elizabeth Warren, a 62-year-old Harvard Law School professor, seemed to have all the right stuff to regain the lost Senate seat of the late Ted Kennedy from Republican usurper Scott Brown.

In this bluest of states, she remains competitive, out-fund-raising the incumbent 2 to 1 in the last quarter. In recent statewide polls, she’s been running even or slightly ahead. Yet her campaign is sputtering, as she slips on one banana peel after another.

It’s turning out that she’s not quite the working-class heroine her worshipers in the limousine-liberal crowd thought she was.

Last week, news broke that Harvard Law had cited Warren as a minority hire — a Native American — when it was under criticism for lack of faculty diversity in 1996. Asked Friday for proof of her Indian ancestry, Warren’s said it’s part of her family “lore.”

She also said she couldn’t “recall” if she’d ever claimed minority status when applying for a job and that she’d never known of Harvard’s 1996 boast until Friday. When Brown’s campaign demanded that Warren apologize for taking part in a “diversity sham,” she said her campaign is searching for “evidence” of her Native American lineage.

When the campaign began, The Boston Globe saluted Warren for her “rise from poverty” as a child in Oklahoma City. Since then, as the truth has trickled out, the narrative has evolved. Goodbye poverty, hello to “the jagged edge of the middle class.”

We’ve learned that, by 1965, Elizabeth’s family had three cars, including a white MG that the hard-scrabble Native American drove daily to her tony high school. Still, the Globe insisted, the MG was “beat up.”

Last Friday, she released four years of tax returns. Over those four years, Warren and her husband, another Harvard Law prof, averaged $300,000 more than Sen. Brown and his spouse, a TV anchor. In 2009, the Warrens made $981,000 vs. the Browns’ $249,000.

Even the Globe had to admit that Warren was “in the top 1 percent of earners” — ironic, considering her bragging that she provided the “intellectual foundations” of Occupy Wall Street.

As recently as January, Warren was still crying poor, saying on MSNBC: “I realize there are some wealthy individuals — I’m not one of them — but some wealthy individuals who have a lot of stock portfolios.”

No, she has mutual-fund portfolios. Her financial disclosures put her worth between $4.6 and $14.5 million.

Well, being middle class is “not about a number,” she told one reporter. “It’s about a place in your heart.”

Another recent embarrassment: The Massachusetts state-income-tax form includes a voluntary check-off for any concerned citizens who wish to pay the old, higher tax rate of 5.85 percent rather than today’s 5.3 percent.

Warren, who sternly lectures every audience on the need for higher taxes on the wealthy, is a multimillionaire — so she must have paid at the higher rate, right? First, she refused to answer, then she issued a press release denouncing Brown’s Senate votes.

Finally, she admitted that no, she hadn’t made what she described as a “charitable contribution” to the commonwealth.

Despite her missteps, Warren has raised vast amounts of cash — $6.9 million in the first quarter alone. Wall Street is lavishing millions more on her than on Brown, even though she regularly brands her GOP opponent as a rubber-stamp for the robber barons.

Asked how she could be raising so much more money on Wall Street than a capitalist running-dog like Brown, Warren answered with a straight face that her money is coming from bankers who “want reform.”

Whatever else, Warren’s stumbles have provided great comic relief for the working people of Massachusetts whom she claims to love so dearly. They don’t much like Harvard; as a well-known old joke has it: You can always tell a Harvard man, but you can’t tell him much.

Now Warren is providing new fodder. Democrats always say they need to raise taxes “for the children.” Warren, as one cynic on a Boston message board yesterday noted, demands higher taxes “for the papooses.”

Howie Carr is a columnist for the Boston Herald.