The New Republic

A bastion of power and prestige, Harvard’s excellence extends to its faculty. However, some in the GOP argue that Elizabeth Warren’s teaching post at Harvard Law poses a conflict of interest:

“Warren is teaching at Harvard Law School while she runs, and that’s unethical, the Bay State Republicans claim. ‘For Harvard to continue to employ her as a candidate is inconsistent with the academic mission of the college; detracts from the work that she would be expected to perform as a member of the faculty; and creates the impression that Harvard endorses, supports and is in fact subsidizing her campaign,’…. But had the Globe looked back a little further, it would have discovered that Daniel Patrick Moynihan continued teaching at least one class at Harvard during the fall of 1976 while he was running for Senate in an entirely different state. I know because I audited it.”

-Timothy Noah. “GOP to Harvard: Dump Warren.”

Courtesy of the New York Times.

Fresh off announcing her bid last week for the Senate seat vacated by the late Ted Kennedy, there is more good news for Harvard Law professor, turned consumer advocate, Elizabeth Warren. She now leads incumbent Republican Senator Scott Brown by two points in the Massachusetts Senate race, according to an early poll released this morning by Public Policy Polling.

Warren, who drew early criticism for her Harvard proclivities prior to announcing her decision to run for the seat, stepped up her campaign in the last few days with more serious rhetoric:

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory… Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea — God Bless! Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

Today’s poll results are a big improvement over Boston’s NPR news station’s poll several weeks ago that found Warren trailing Brown by 9 points and July internal polling by the Republican Senator’s office that found him leading Warren by 20 points. Now Warren holds a razor-thin lead over Scott Brown, at 46-44 percent among the state’s voters.

While it is still too early to make predictions, TNR is excited to watch as the Massachusetts Senate race begins to unfold.

Courtesy of the AtlanticWire

Elizabeth Warren officially announced her candidacy for Senate in Massachusetts this morning, in a short video posted to her new campaign website. In the video Warren claims to be running on behalf of middle class families, saying “I don’t think Washington gets it.”

Warren who was the driving force behind the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had hoped to head the agency she helped create. She got her first taste of conservative opposition when Republicans, vowing to block her nomination in the Senate, forced her to withdraw her appointment as head of the new bureau.

TNR reporter-researcher Simon van Zuylen-Wood writes that it may get tougher for Warren in the months ahead. Warren’s Harvard bona fides and mass appeal to liberals may actually do her a disservice in the Bay State’s senate election.

Assuming she gets past the Democratic primary, any attempt to use her background as a consumer advocate to run a populist campaign against incumbent Republican Scott Brown will be burdened by her day job as a professor at Harvard Law School. Even before Warren officially declared her candidacy, she was already being accused of “Harvard elitism.” 

How Warren fares in 2012 will likely be determined more by her response to these criticisms than by any of her previous policy prescriptions.

Courtesy of the Atlantic Wire