Professor Williams boils down central planning to its essence. http://www.LibertyPen.com

I chose, as Senator Rand Paul did, to fully support Mitt Romney once he secured the nomination. I went on record within a couple of days after Senator Paul, and I will submit to my fellow Ron Paul supporters that I have made the right choice.

Allow me to explain.

The single biggest thing that I hear from supporters of Dr. Paul is “Romney is no better than Obama.” Let me play into that assumption for just a moment, even though I do not share those feelings.

I’ll agree that Mitt Romney does not demonstrate the same Constitutional, Liberty principles that we do. However, I will firmly state that Mitt Romney will be superior to President Obama, if for no other reason than he will be in his first term, not his second term.

I have nightmares about what Obama can do with a second term. Let’s start with the Second Amendment.

Now, I highly doubt that Obama and his cronies will be able to repeal the Second Amendment. However, how far can they water it down? Outlaw assault weapon sales? Outlaw handgun sales via executive order? Outlaw ammunition sales by executive order? You and I both know that, even if the GOP controls both Houses of Congress, they will not be able to override an Obama veto of legislation to repeal his executive orders.

How about internet freedom?

Does anyone really think that a second Obama term is not going to be harmful to our freedom of expression via the internet? If you think that you will have the same freedom of expression on the internet if Obama is re-elected, please pull your head out of the sand. This is one thing that Homeland Security Obama style can’t wait to start attacking, ladies and gentlemen.

The deficit? It is a bipartisan issue that must be addressed, but what will be Obama’s motivation to do so when he never has to face the voters again? I sense none.

A second term Obama is a diabolical proposition to say the least. We will lose our Republic to Liberal Socialism. Obama is licking his chops at the proposition of having four more years of never having to answer to the voters again. He will shape this country in his image, which is an image of European Socialism.

So, Ron Paul supporters, I ask you this: Are you willing to take that chance by either not voting or voting third party?

(Mr. Smack in the Republican National Committeeman for Nevada) via Nevada News & Views.

“Republicans must acknowledge that not every dollar spent on the military is necessary or well spent,” said Kentucky Senator Rand Paul while addressing the Republican National Convention floor on day 3 of the event.

After Paul’s speech, which mostly stuck to the GOP’s “We Built It” theme but occasionally touched on libertarian themes such as the need for reduction of military spending or the importance of civil liberties, Reason TV was on the scene to ask Romney and Paul supporters alike what they thought of the speech and whether or not Rand and/or Ron Paul-style Republicanism has a future in the party.

About 3:30 minutes.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller and Tracy Oppenheimer.

Go to http://reason.com/reasontv for downloadable versions and subscribe to ReasonTV’s YouTube Channel to receive notifications when new material goes live.

Click here to read all about it.

As for the more “enthusiastic” Ron Paul fans who have written (usually angrily, as is their wont) in response to my column yesterday about the Nevada delegates violating the rules established long ago by the Nevada Republican Party with regard to “binding” delegates: Even if the RNC did violate and/or change its own rules related to how to nominate someone from the floor, every one of us with a loving, caring mother KNOWS that two wrongs don’t make a right.

The Paul delegates went to Tampa with the complete understanding that they were elected and chosen to represent all Nevada Republicans and cast 20 votes for Mitt Romney on the first ballot.  There was no misunderstanding about this.  No confusion.  No questions.  No debate.

Those delegates who were duly elected and bound to vote for Romney but nevertheless, in a hissy fit, voted for Paul instead, were wrong.  It’s just that simple.  Not saying they didn’t have a right to be angry; they just didn’t have the right to use that anger as an excuse for not fulfilling their obligation on behalf of those Nevada Republicans who sent them to Tampa.

SANDOVAL’S MOMENT ON THE NATIONAL STAGE

Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval took the national stage Tuesday night in Tampa, Florida at the Republican National Convention and delivered some 7 minutes worth of remarks that were, shall we say, less than scintillating.  Here’s the review by Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post:

“In the run-up to tonight’s slate of speakers, a number of Republican strategists flagged the Nevada governor’s address for us as one to pay attention to. Sandoval, after all, is a Hispanic Republican with a terrific resume (former state Attorney general, former federal judge). But his speech felt thin and he was clearly quite nervous.  It was decidedly forgettable for someone who is seen as a future face of the party.”

No, the speech surely didn’t send a tingle up Chris Matthews’ leg, but what struck me was the governor’s claim in his remarks that, “like Republican governors all across this nation, I chose to make the tough decisions.”

Really?

While Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Ohio Gov. John Kasich made the tough decisions to stand up and go toe to toe with the government employee unions that were bankrupting their states, Gov. Sandoval ducked any such fight in Nevada.

And while so many other Republican governors such as Gov. Rick Perry of Texas and Gov. Rick Scott of Florida have made the tough decisions to fight the implementation of ObamaCare in their states, especially the expansion of Medicaid, Gov. Sandoval has been quietly and incrementally laying track for it here in Nevada.

And while Republican governors such as Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana have made the tough decisions to take on the teachers unions and fight for vouchers to break up the public school monopoly over education, Gov. Sandoval has given parental school choice mere lip service.  He didn’t even fight for a HEARING on his own voucher bill last session.

But worst of all, of course, is the fact that Gov. Sandoval is the ONLY Republican governor who resorted to raising taxes rather than making the tough decisions to dramatically cut government spending in 2011…and promises to do it again next year!

I guess it all depends on your definition of “tough decisions.”

And while I didn’t notice it, political pundit Jon Ralston caught another reference in Gov. Sandoval’s speech that doesn’t appear to comport with the historical record.  Here’s what the governor said about his decision to step down as a federal judge and run for governor in 2010:

“Like so many, I looked around for help.  And what did I find?  A president who promised change, but turned instead to the same tired strategy of ever larger government.  A president who abandoned hope and embraced only blame.  So I stepped down from a lifetime appointment to make a difference.”

To which Mr. Ralston wrote:

“Really? Not once when he left the bench in 2009 did Sandoval mention he did so out of disgust with the (Obama) administration’s policies.  And I doubt it had anything to do with that at all. It was a fairly silly stretch for the man who left a lifetime appointment to help the GOP oust Jim Gibbons and preserve a Republican in the governorship. That is it.  Period.”

Ralston concluded, seconding Cillizza’s emotion: “The speech will not be long remembered.”

The problem with delivering a speech 2,766 miles away from home in this day of the Internet is that folks back home who know and remember the facts can watch a speech and correct the record even if the speech isn’t carried by the TV networks.

Why can’t politicians, from both parties, simply tell the truth about their records instead of trying to embellish them and change history when it’s inevitable that they’re going to get caught and called on it?

FAMOUS LAST WORDS

“College graduates should not have to live out their 20s in their childhood bedrooms, staring up at fading Obama posters and wondering when they can move out and get going with life.” – GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan at the GOP convention Wednesday night

“A little girl grows up in Jim Crow Birmingham – the most segregated big city in America – her parents can’t take her to a movie theater or a restaurant – but they make her believe that even though she can’t have a hamburger at the Woolworth’s lunch counter – she can be President of the United States and she becomes the Secretary of State.” – Condi Rice at the GOP convention Wednesday night

“Growing up, I never imagined a girl from a border town could one day become a governor. But this is America. Y, en America todo es posible.” – New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez at the GOP convention Wednesday night

“When the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare, the first words out of my mouth were: I still think it is unconstitutional!  The left-wing blogs were merciless. Even my wife said – can’t you pleeeease count to 10 before you speak?  So, I’ve had time now to count to 10 and, you know what? I still think it’s unconstitutional!” – Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul at the GOP convention Wednesday night

“Ask the rising stars of the GOP about their party’s future and two names repeatedly come up.  One of them, Ronald Reagan, was born in 1911; the other, Paul Ryan, in 1970. … The next generation of Republican leaders, most of them born in the 1970s, see themselves as the heirs to an upbeat, Reagan-style conservatism and believe Ryan’s free-market orthodoxy is the platform upon which they’ll return to national majority status.” – Morning Score, 8/29/12

NEVADA PAULISTAS PUNCH SELVES IN THE EYE

Welcome to Wayne’s World, Nevada.

Look, I’ve said all along that as long as the Ron Paul folks were following the rules, their efforts to wrest control of the Nevada GOP from establishment Republicans was fine and dandy.

Indeed, the Paulistas showed up en masse at the Nevada GOP Convention in Sparks in May and had the votes to elect as delegates to the national convention who they wanted to elect and approve the rules, resolutions and platform planks they wanted to implement.  Majority rule. That’s the rule.

Alas, when the shoe was on the other foot – when the Paul folks got to Tampa and were in the minority and didn’t get their way – delegation leader Wayne Terhune – perhaps the biggest complainer and loudest whiner over alleged rule-breaking at the 2008 Nevada GOP convention – said, “Screw the rules.”

He and 16 other members of the Nevada delegation then proceeded to vote for Dr. Paul even though they said all along they’d follow the rules and vote for Mitt Romney on the first ballot.

What an embarrassment to the legions of honorable, well-intentioned Paul supporters here in the Silver State who suffered the loss of all respect and trust for their movement thanks to Terhune, whose word has been demonstrably proven to be absolutely worthless.

“It was absolutely bizarre and just disgusting to see them (Terhune’s Paul delegates) purposely break the law,” said Nevada Republican National Committeeman Bob List.  “Every other state with a split vote represented it accurately.  But they didn’t.”

Or as James Smack, a rock-solid Ron Paul supporter and Nevada Republican National Committeeman-elect, put it in a statement late Tuesday afternoon:

“The actions of an unruly few should not color the entire state party, and we share the frustration of all Nevada Republicans by the actions taken by a delegation that chose not to follow the rules.”

But those actions HAVE colored the entire Nevada GOP, which is collectively red-faced over Terhune’s actions.

Heckuva job, Wayne.

MORE ON THE PAUL INSURRECTION

Morning Score reports that Ron Paul’s son, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, “plans to make the case” in his convention speech tonight “that it is better for the movement to work with the GOP establishment rather than from the rebellious fringe.”

Hear that, Wayne Terhune?

Morning Score also reports today that “Ron Paul is being denied a speaking slot this week because he refuses to endorse or release his delegates to Romney.”

That’s a smokescreen.  It’s not that Paul hasn’t endorsed Romney; it’s that some of Paul’s views are markedly different from those of the nominee and establishment Republicans…and the congressman surely wouldn’t agree to prior restraint of his remarks.

Do you remember the hue and cry from Republicans in 1992 when Democrats wouldn’t let pro-life Pennsylvania Gov. Bob Casey speak at their convention because Casey was publicly at odds with the party’s nominee, Bill Clinton, on the issue of abortion?  Explain to me how this is different.

It’s not.  And the Paul folks have every right to be angry with the snub.

My criticism above of *some* Paul supporters aside, this is the REPUBLICAN National Convention, not the ROMNEY National Convention.  Sorry, but REPUBLICAN Dr. Paul has MORE than earned the right to speak in Tampa at the REPUBLICAN convention.

If the GOP really wants “unity” at the end of its convention, it ought to find a last-minute way to work Dr. Paul into Thursday night’s program.  And don’t tell me it can’t be done.  If organizers were able to find a way to combine Monday’s cancelled speeches with Tuesday’s, surely they could find a way to allow Paul to address the convention.

If they wanted to.

FAMOUS LAST WORDS

“(Barack Obama is) worse than (Jimmy) Carter.  Carter was a governor. At least he ran something in his life. This guy hasn’t even run a bath.” – Political strategist Roger Stone

“(Barack Obama has) never run a company.  He hasn’t even run a garage sale or seen the inside of a lemonade stand.” – RNC Chairman Reince Priebus

 

Coming in Fall 2012, The Bubble asks the experts who predicted the current recession, “What happened and why?” Diving deep into the true causes of the financial crisis, renowned economists, investors and business leaders explain what America is facing if we don’t learn from our past mistakes. The film poses the question: “Is the economy really improving or are we just blowing up another Bubble?”

The Bubble, a new film featuring experts that predicted the last economic crisis, argues America is facing an even worse financial bubble. Business leaders, politicians and financial commentators such as Jim Rogers, Peter Schiff, Ron Paul, Marc Faber, Jim Grant and 10 others examine Washington’s economic policies and its impact on America. The film is co-written by Dr. Tom Woods and inspired by his New York Times Bestseller “Meltdown.”

“Americans have been fed a cartoon version of what has happened to the economy over the past several years,” said Woods. “They believe the government was merely an innocent bystander, while the real culprits, egged on by so-called deregulation, are to be found in the private sector.”

“In The Bubble, we’re going to turn our attention to those neglected voices who actually had an inkling of what was going on, not the Federal Reserve economists who could find no problems with the economy. The White House may not be interested in these neglected voices, but we believe anyone of good sense will be anxious to listen.”

The trailer of the film will be premiered this Friday, July 13^th, 2012 at Freedom Fest in Las Vegas, NV. Following the trailer, a panel with Peter Schiff, Doug Casey, Gene Epstein and Tom Woods will discuss the film and the future of America’s economy.

The feature length film will have a world premiere this fall in New York City, followed by a nationwide release soon after. More information about the film, including, the trailer, can be found at www.TheBubbleFilm.com.

Considering how close presidential elections have been in recent years, conservative votes for the Libertarian Party nominee, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson – who is likely to be the preferred back-up option for Ron Paul supporters – could swing enough votes in enough swing states to swing the election…and control of the Supreme Court for a generation…to Obama in November.

So what does the GOP do about all those conservative/libertarian voters who still aren’t sold on voting for Mitt Romney?

First, Republicans need to understand that browbeating and kvetching about “wasting your vote” on a third-party candidate will only cause those voters to dig in their heels.  Instead, you might want to brush up on Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends” advice.

That said, Republicans must bear in mind that Libertarians have a political self-interest, as well.  They’ve nominated the most credible and accomplished candidate in their party’s history, which could earn them a record-breaking popular vote total this year.

But there’s a way for everyone to eat their cake and have it, too.  The way to do it is for Johnson and the LP to focus their campaigning in the solid “blue” (Obama) states where a popular vote for Johnson won’t affect the electoral vote calculus.

But what about the Libertarians and Ron Paul supporters in swing states, like Nevada, who are hesitant to vote for Romney?  What can they do to help boost Johnson’s popular vote total without risking Nevada again going for Obama?

Vote swapping.  Johnson and the LP should embark on an effort to get people who want to vote for Johnson in swing states to voluntarily and unofficially “swap” their vote with a Romney voter in a blue state.

Now, this vote swapping idea isn’t anything new.

I remember it hitting radar screens in 2000 when Al Gore’s Democrats were trying to find a way to keep the Green Party’s Ralph Nader from spoiling “Ozone Al’s” presidential bid.  Imagine how much easier it would be for the LP to promote and coordinate a similar nationwide vote swap project using the Internet, Facebook and all the other social media tools we have at our disposal today.

Here’s the bottom line: Gary Johnson is no more going to be elected president this year than Ron Paul.  But if his objective is just to beat the LP’s popular vote record and move his party forward, many conservative/libertarian voters would gladly swap their Johnson vote in swing states with Romney voters in blue states in November.

But if Johnson’s objective is simply to spoil Romney’s chances in swing states, thereby re-electing the imperial socialist we have in office now, well…fuggetaboutit.  Not too many swing voters will want to have THAT on their conscience the rest of their lives!

The Nevada Republican Party convention this month was pretty much like every other GOP convention: Floor arguments over obscure Robert’s Rules of Order, bylaws and credentials.  Lots of proverbial sound and fury signifying nothing.  Only this year, on steroids.

The convention was fairly evenly split between Mitt Romney supporters and party loyalists vs. Ron Paul supporters and many tea party activists – with the insurgents enjoying a sufficient majority to not only elect 22 out of 25 of their own to go to the GOP national convention in Tampa, but to oust the party’s sitting National Committeeman and Committeewoman, as well.

The rabble’s success has many establishment Republicans gnashing their teeth, with one sour grapes GOP blogger referring to the Paul supporters as a bunch of “liars, cheats and thieves.”

But the reality is, the Paul folks played by the rules and more of them attended the convention than the other team.  As the saying goes, the world belongs to those who show up.  (Not surprisingly, the Reno blogger-whiner is one of the malcontents who didn’t bother to show up.  Go figure.)

In the meantime, many in the media are scratching their heads wondering, “What was this all about?  What do the Paul people want?  Don’t they know that they’ve lost; that Romney’s going to get the nomination?”

While true that some Paul supporters still hold out hope for a Tampa miracle, the more realistic are already looking well beyond November’s election.  They know that in politics you often lose a number of early fights in order to gain experience and grow your movement for the long term.

Indeed, should Ron Paul “fail” in his presidential effort, he will have nonetheless successfully planted the seeds for an emerging “liberty” movement (not quite the same as the “conservative” movement) that will (hopefully) enjoy far greater political victories in the years to come.

Call it Barry Goldwater 2.0.

As such, don’t be surprised when a lot of Ron Paul Republicans cast their lot in November with Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson rather than with Mitt Romney.  “But that’s stupid!” many establishment Republicans who have never heard of Dale Carnegie are already braying.  “Don’t they know that will only help re-elect Obama?”

Oh, they know it. They just don’t care. The emerging Liberty Movement is sick of both establishment Democrats AND establishment Republicans.  Their objective is for a return to the limited, constitutional government established by the Founders.  In that pursuit, you’re either with them or against them, regardless of party.

Now, unless you’re part of this movement, such logic will seem insane.  But for the Paul folks, it makes perfect sense.  And the GOP establishment would be well advised to wake up and smell the revolution.  Better yet, embrace it.  Or else.

Five days before he is scheduled to appear at a Tea Party rally in Austin alongside U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, former Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz released two new TV ads highlighting supporters from around the state, including several conservative activists.

“I’m Standing with Cruz” is set to air statewide on both cable and broadcast networks starting Wednesday, a campaign spokesman said. While Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and former Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert have already aired ads on the more expensive broadcast networks, this is the Cruz campaign’s first ad that won’t air solely on cable.

The ad shows a series of people affirming their support for Cruz in the U.S. Senate race, including Dave Nalle, chairman of the Republican Liberty Caucus, and Konni Burton, vice president of the NE Tarrant Tea Party.

A second ad, called “Conservatives on Dewhurst,” features many of the same people from the first ad as well as former Texas Republican Party Chairwoman Cathie Adams criticizing Dewhurst for his record and his campaign’s recent attacks on Cruz for Cruz’s work as an appellate lawyer representing a Chinese tire firm against an American businessman.

“David Dewhurst thinks I care more about Chinese tires than his tax-and-spend record,” Maggie Wright of Burleson says in the ad.

 

Elizabeth Warren would be a catastrophe in the Senate, but she is hell on wheels when it comes to directing human traffic, which is no small thing at the St. Patrick’s Day breakfast in Boston. She goes bulling her way through a crowd of faces the color of 2 percent milk, sicklied o’er with the pale cast of Southie Irishness, or rendered rosy by the effects of seriously draining down a full bar that opened at eight o’clock on a Sunday morning, plowing through like she’s just graduated from a seminar in Advanced Executive Body Language, all exaggerated masculine gestures and “Yes! I am very seriously paying attention to you!” head bobs and vigorous “This is what Sincerity looks like . . . approximately!” power nods, complemented by “Move along, sir!” shoulder grips followed by quick and vigorous “Back the Hell Off” chest pats when some florid Southie denizen moves in for a hug — she is like Moses parting the kelly green sea. She is a populist in search of a people, and the wall-eyed gang shout-singing “Southie Is My Home Town” and chasing their eggs and rashers with Jameson on the rocks isn’t it. St. Patrick’s Day, as state senator Jack Hart (“Senator Hot,” in the local pronunciation) reminds the crowd, is also celebrated in Boston as Evacuation Day, and Warren looks like she is in dire need of an emergency airlift back to Cambridge.

The breakfast is a political roast, which puts Warren at a disadvantage: As with cancer and feminism, there is nothing funny about Elizabeth Warren. Once she has traversed the beshamrocked riff-raff and been seated on the dais, she fades away — hardly anybody takes notice of her. Whether this is because her fellow Democrats regard her as a fragile little thing or because they can think of nothing to say about her, almost nobody makes an Elizabeth Warren joke. Even her Republican opponent, Senator Scott Brown, barely acknowledges her, merely spitting over his shoulder, “Professor Warren, it’s good to see you. You were a little late, but I’m glad you were able to get out of Cambridge and find your way up here.”

Most of the rest of the morning’s humor isn’t so subdued. Lieutenant Governor Tim Murray, who recently honored Massachusetts’s long tradition of fishy car accidents involving Democratic nabobs by totaling a state vehicle in the very most wee hours of the morning while barreling down icy roads at 108 miles per hour — and then claiming he was just up bright-’n’-early to get a cup of coffee and inspect snowstorm damage — enters in full NASCAR regalia, bearing a tray of Starbucks. Brown made headlines by quipping that Rick Santorum’s new Secret Service detail represents “the first time he’s ever actually used protection,” and now makes a few jokes about himself and his fellow Republicans: “Mine the moon? Newt Gingrich ought to mine whatever planet Ron Paul is from.”

Elizabeth Warren doesn’t do self-deprecating — she just can’t. Her humor is of the self-aggrandizing sort: In mockery of Brown’s famous Cosmopolitan spread, she shows an image of herself as a centerfold in Consumer Reports. She opens with: “I’m the daughter of a maintenance man, who became a professor and fought against big Wall Street Banks. If that doesn’t ring a bell, you might remember me as the elitist professor from Hollywood who’s running against Scott Brown.” And then there are crickets.

The joke goes down like a Soviet airliner in no small part because she told precisely the same joke yesterday at another St. Patrick’s Day event, in front of a lot of the same people. But that isn’t the only problem: The point of the roast is to laugh at politicians, not to be reminded by politicians of how awesome said politicians are. Behind every rolled eye and polite cough that greets Warren’s foundering attempts at humor is the unspoken thought: “Yeah, we know: You grew up in modest circumstances in Muskogee or wherever and think of yourself as a consumer advocate. Super. Say something funny, you insufferable snoot.” But she does put in the work, clapping along unrhythmically like a poorly trained SeaWorld porpoise while the band plays “Whiskey in the Jar” — a song that, like most of the Southie anthems sung this morning, she plainly does not know the words to.

“Shrill.” “Hard.” “Wound-up.” These are the first three adjectives offered by a group of observers asked why Warren is having a tough time against Brown in a state in which Republicans are about as welcome as head lice. The young ladies in question are wearing Elizabeth Warren buttons.

The hard thing about being a populist? The damned people.

Elizabeth Warren is what Thomas Jefferson would have recognized as one of nature’s aristocrats, which is one of the reasons she is so manifestly uncomfortable around hoi polloi, a Democrat who does not want to be so much as downwind from the demos in the flesh. Life can be cruel to natural aristocrats, especially in politics. Also high school. She makes much — too much — of her humble background, particularly of her father’s having worked as a janitor. Brown had it pretty rough as a young man, too: His mother was none too capable a parent, he spent part of his childhood on welfare and a great deal of it surrounded by domestic violence of varying degrees of intensity, and he was sexually abused by a camp counselor when he was a child. Warren’s story is a bit more complicated than she lets on: Her father was employed as a maintenance man, and before that he had held a number of middle-class jobs, including one as a salesman at a department store. At one point, he had saved up enough money to start a promising business — a car dealership — but, as Warren tells the story, he got swindled out of his life’s savings by an unscrupulous business partner. Later, a heart attack cost him another job. Warren’s mother went to work and was bitter about it, and a few missed car payments meant that the family’s Oldsmobile, that sturdy mid-century symbol of middle-class life, was repossessed. Young Elizabeth, wracked with status anxiety, made her father drop her off a few blocks from school so that her fellow students would not see their new, less prestigious car. Her family’s story is not one of hereditary poverty and privation but one of a downwardly mobile middle-class family hit by bad luck and bad decisions.

Happily, that rough spot didn’t last forever. The Oldsmobile was gone, but by the time she was 16 years old, Warren had a car of her own, and there were two more in the family — not too shabby for Oklahoma in 1965. Her family struggled, but they were also able to buy a house in a nice neighborhood, which allowed young Elizabeth to attend an elite public school, a springboard to her later education and smashing professional success. She’s written popular books and served in government, while her endowed chair at Harvard Law pays her more than $350,000 a year. Her husband also occupies an endowed chair at Harvard Law. The two share a multi-million-dollar home in Cambridge, a multi-million-dollar investment portfolio (including a large position in notorious corporate-income-tax minimizer IBM, which recently paid an annual net effective rate of 3.8 percent), and a net worth of up to $14.5 million, according to Warren’s financial-disclosure statements. The Warrens’ net worth dwarfs that of the Browns, which is at most $2.3 million. (Yeah, pity.)

But though she is much wealthier than he, Warren and Brown resemble each other far more than they resemble most of their constituents. Each is a testament to the fact that in the brutal meritocracy that is the United States of America, smart and energetic people rise, almost unstoppably, and the increasingly high returns to individual performance mean that those at the top live lives very different from that of Joe Median. Neither Warren nor Brown attended an Ivy League university, neither had family connections or social standing. Both worked in professions that they would later abandon: Warren taught public school briefly and then quit rather than go through the obligatory, despair-inducing credentialing rigmarole (a fact that speaks better of her than almost anything else you’ll learn), and Brown was, famously, a model. Both gravitated toward the surest shortcut to wealth and security in this litigious republic — law school. Both took an interest in politics in their early years, and both have made ugly concessions to political reality: Warren may rail against Wall Street wagering and the “army of lobbyists” in Washington, but her campaign is run by a particularly grim casino lobbyist.

And therein lies the critical contrast between the two: Brown is a moderate Republican, a member of a party that believes, to the extent that it believes anything, that in a free and competitive economy, talent and drive will in most cases bring success, and Brown is a gold-plated example of the fact that this is true. Warren is a member of a party that believes, to the extent that it believes anything, that the deck is impossibly stacked against the middle class, and she is a gold-plated example of the fact that this is false. Brown’s implicit message is: “I did it, and so can you.” Warren’s implicit message is: “I did it, and you don’t have a prayer.”

Warren’s view is exaggerated to the point of falsity, but there is grain of truth in it, even if it is a truth that Warren cannot understand or will not admit.

The fact is, Warren’s career model is not available to the great majority of the middle class, to say nothing of the poor. She has written a boring little financial self-help book (heavy on phrases such as “the Lifetime of Riches investment strategy”), but her path to prosperity, if she were to document it honestly, would look like this: 1) Get born with an XXL brain; 2) become an endowed professor at Harvard with a salary in the middle six figures and another six-figure payday from speaking and consulting fees; 3) marry same. The secret to a 1 percent lifestyle is, in Warren’s case as in so many others, having a 1 percent brain. Most people are not packing the cerebral heat to do what Warren has done, no matter how much they want it, no matter how hard they work. You can rail against the iniquities of Wall Street, but there is a scarcity of college graduates who have the quantitative skills to fill even grunt-level back-office jobs in financial firms.

Warren wrote an(other) unimpressive little book, The Two-Income Trap, in which she argues that contemporary two-income families are in many ways worse off than single-income families were a generation or so ago, back during the golden years of the post-war boom, with less financial security and less disposable income. That is true: Men’s inflation-adjusted incomes peaked in 1973, and household incomes have risen in real terms since then only because so many women have entered the work force, making single-income families into two-income families. Household incomes per capita have climbed, too, but mostly because the size of households has decreased as Americans have had fewer children. (What else happened in 1973 that might in part explain decreasing household size? Discuss among yourselves.)

She and her co-author (who is also her daughter — because the 99 percent hates nepotism) cite all kinds of financial pressures on the middle class — rising child-care costs, college tuition, health-care expenses — and offer an array of policy prescriptions ranging from the mild (decoupling public-school assignments from geography) to the Swedish (subsidizing stay-at-home parents) to the authoritarian (a government-imposed freeze on college tuitions, drastic credit-market restrictions of the sort that Warren’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was empanelled to dream up some years later), but the two show themselves to be shockingly shallow in their analysis of the underlying economic facts: The post-war era was an extraordinary economic period, for the United States and for the world. Just as Warren’s career path does not represent much of a realistic recommendation to the individual striver, the post-war era does not offer much in the way of policy guidance to the 21st-century politician, unless we are seriously willing to entertain replicating the conditions that obtained in 1950 and thereafter, which would necessitate the rest of the world’s destroying its industrial infrastructure in a war that was pretty much the worst thing to have happened to the human race up until that point, with the United States and Canada practically alone in surviving unscathed. You don’t get the post-war boom without the war, and in any case it doesn’t last forever.

In her ceaseless hunt for a villain and in her refusal to account for the facts of economic history, Warren as an economic thinker very closely resembles another progressive lawyer, Robert Reich, and both of these lawyers seem to believe that our economic difficulties are the result of having put the wrong lawyers in charge of things, as though we could pass a law against scarcity and in favor of productivity. To a lawyer, everything is a question of law, and Warren has made her name by putting Wall Street on trial, at least rhetorically. It is precisely this kind of economic romanticism that has made her the marquee candidate of Occupy Wall Street and its economically illiterate sympathizers, and it is why she is in effect running a national campaign for a statewide office. She may laugh off jokes about her being the professor from Hollywood, but look where she goes when she needs to raise money.

But her appeal is not limited to economic illiterates. Some time back, I wrote an essay for The New Criterion in which I argued that a typical American couple making a modest income would do far better in retirement if they invested most of the money that they would have paid in Social Security taxes, putting aside 10 percent of their income with an expectation of a 7 percent return. Among those who took the time to scoff was Susan Webber (writing under her pseudonym, “Yves Smith,” of the blog Naked Capitalism), a highly regarded analyst of the U.S. financial system and a trenchant critic of Wall Street. She argued that both of my assumptions were nuttier than pecan pie: Nobody is going to invest 10 percent, and nobody is going to make 7 percent back. As late as August of 2011, Webber was arguing that Warren should run for president of these United States — as a challenger to Barack Obama, Wall Street stooge and marionette of the 1 percent. If my assumptions were the financial equivalent of unicorns exflatulating distilled sunshine, I wonder what Webber makes of Warren’s model. For my sins, I have recently digested Warren’s schlocky self-help book All Your Worth, in which she suggests that families of modest means should be saving 20 percent of their income and expecting a 12 percent return, roughly doubling down on my optimism. Webber, quelle surprise, has not addressed that proposition. The appeal of us-and-them stories is powerful.

Warren’s advice in All Your Worth is, for the most part, pretty solid — and pretty banal. It is precisely the sort of thinking you’d hear if you walked into the office of any halfway competent personal financial adviser in Poughkeepsie or Springfield: Invest in low-cost index funds, pay down your credit cards and other debt, keep a cash reserve, don’t buy a house unless you can put at least 10 percent down and preferably 20 percent, shop for better mortgage and insurance rates, don’t take out home-equity loans, etc. She’s Dave Ramsey without the wit or the evangelical fervor.

But if you’d taken her advice in 2006, when the book was published, you’d have missed the opportunity of a lifetime. In fact, you’d have been better off taking precisely the opposite of her advice. The one investment that Warren really warns her readers off from is gold, which has returned about 320 percent since her book was being written in late 2005. If you’d taken that 20 percent down payment and put it into gold, the tripling of that investment and the crash in housing prices would have probably allowed you to pay cash by now for the house you’d been thinking about buying.

Does that mean that Warren gives bad financial advice? No, it simply means that financial life is unpredictable, and that it is easy to make a compelling case for what one obviously should have done in retrospect. Unfortunately, nobody gets to invest in hindsight — not homeowners, not Wall Street, not Warren. But that lesson remains entirely lost on the lady from Cambridge, who apparently still believes that Lehman Bros. and the rest of the Wall Street kingpins filled their own books up with radioactive mortgage-backed securities because they thought they were a bad investment, rather than because they thought — wrongly — that they were a pretty good investment. (She repeated that argument as recently as November 2011 during a Morning Joe interview.) Villains must be identified and crucified, plain facts be damned. And that is really the truth that Elizabeth Warren is speaking when she says of Occupy Wall Street: “I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do.”

Warren is everything her admirers say she is — smart, tough, principled — and almost everything her critics say — out of touch, ideological, narrow. The one inaccurate barb thrown at her is that she’s homely — “Granny Warren,” Senator Brown’s factota call her. She isn’t. If she were lined up at a party with a representative cross section of 62-year-old American women, Warren would be the one you’d ask to dance. But there is a meanness in her, a nasty little puritanical streak gone left, and her secularized Puritanism is probably the most Massachusetts thing about her. Like Hillary Clinton, she has Methodist roots and cites the Wesleyan approach as key to the development of her political thinking. (How Protestant is she? She was conspicuous in failing to cross herself when the priest at the St. Pat’s event got to the Trinitarian part of his blessing, even though the signum crucis is a common feature of Methodist worship.) It would not be inaccurate to call her political career a crusade.

The question is, Does Massachusetts want a crusader? Senator Brown has been anything but one — he’s a deal-making, favor-trading, ideology-eschewing politico about one degree removed from being the new Olympia Snowe. There is an element in Massachusetts that wants to Occupy the Senate, even though the economy of Boston is heavily reliant upon finance. But Warren isn’t about Boston, or Southie, or even Cambridge, much less Pittsfield or Monson. She is the single most important bridge between the Democratic party and the trans-Democratic Left. She doesn’t represent a place, but a state of mind.

You can take the girl out of Oklahoma and, contrary to the proverb, you can take the Oklahoma out of the girl, too, if you work at it long enough. (A notable fact about Warren is that she has never been to a class reunion.) But a scholarly study of “Charlie on the MTA” isn’t going to gain her admittance to the tribe of Jameson-sipping, milk-faced South Bostonians, either. There’s no whiskey in her jar, and for Warren, no politics is local — it’s Occupy Wall Street, Occupy the Senate, Occupy Everywhere.