How did Elizabeth Warren ever get elected?
I remember the '08 election like it was yesterday. Mitt Romney, perhaps the most unpopular Republican president ever since Nixon was kicked out in '74, was on his way out. The GOP, desperate for just one last term in the driver's seat, decided to pick the shady Indiana neo-populist, Mike Stearns as their candidate in '08. Stearns, though not well known before the decade started, was highly regarded by the GOP establishment, though he wasn't exactly popular with centrists, or with the hard right, so in an attempt to court the support of the latter, Stearns decided to go a little out of left field, and he picked former Texas Congressman Edwin Ragnall to be his VP.
Liz Warren had always had a bit of a radical streak, and had been a member of the Peace & Justice Party back in the '70s. Her parents were both labor activists in Oklahoma in the '50s and may have inspired part of this. She had long been an anti-corruption and anti-crime activist and played a key role in exposing Idaho governor Mike Troutman's cover-up of white supremacist & militia scam rackets in '92, as well as the impeachment of Georgia governor Lester Maddox a decade earlier, for his involvement in the financing of an attempted white nationalist coup in Trinidad in 1980.
Warren served a term as a senator for her home state between '90 and '96, and was well-liked even by some Republicans, during her tenure.
She originally planned to run in 2000, but was slightly upstaged by the Gore/Babbitt ticket.....which, btw, lost the election despite winning the popular vote. Due to some worrisome discrepancies in the 2000 results, she helped head an investigation into the matter, and again in 2004, and further cemented her status as a watchdog for the people.
Warren, when she ran, didn't have a lot going for her at first: though well-liked by many, she was still an outsider, and her radical past didn't help matters either; the popular hard-right Tyler, Texas based radio host James Edward Turner, went so far as to label her as a "Flaming socialist", something that would stick for quite a while.
However, though, hiring Florida moderate Alan Grayson as her VP did help things a little and was only the first gamble of hers to pay off, but she still had a long way to go, and continually lagged in the polls right thru the summer of '08, and it seemed like even Pa., and Michigan might go for Stearns; many began to wonder if the Democratic Party had made it's biggest blunder since selecting Eugene McCarthy for their ticket in '72.
That all began to change in August, however; early the previous month, a mysterious source leaked some very, very, tantalizing information to the Warren campaign; it included the answers to questions about the extent of Stearns's shady business dealings in the middle and late '80s, Ragnall's whereabouts on the night an ex-business partner of his was murdered in Plano, TX, in September 1982, and other things such as Stearns's past involvement with the Texas KKK, Ragnall's involvement in the stonewalling of a Carter administration corruption investigation which could have prevented the stock market crash in Sept. '88, and the possibility that Stearns may have been involved with the Taliban arms scandal in the early '90s.
After all of this information was carefully scrutinized, Warren began to slowly release some of the information she and her team had been given. To say that this information rescued her campaign, may be a bit of an understatement; rather, it may very well have been the tipping point for both of them.
Stearns struggled to deal with the controversy that began to erupt from both sides of the political aisle, and floundered constantly; his facade of the calm and collected business executive, had been forever shattered. The 55-60% lead he once had in most of the swing states, began to fall apart, and quickly.
By the time November rolled around, Stearns was done; despite record amounts of conservative turn-out, and over $2 billion dollars worth of funding thrown his way, Warren still won 51.7% of the popular vote, and therefore, the election. Shortly afterwards, the GOP, already beginning to fall apart at the seams, splintered between the radical-right "Tea Party" factions, and the more moderate Reaganite people.
Since then, she's done a fantastic job while in office and I haven't at all regretted volunteering to help the '08 campaign, and if she gets selected at the convention in Denver this year, I'll be happy to do it all over again.
