You all remember the “Mike Dukakis Tank” image?
Dukakis, trying to overcome the public perception that he was a wimp and soft on the military, boarded a tank on September 13, 1988. The image tanked his presidential campaign because the theater he created exposed him as a phony. Trying to portray the candidate as something he so clearly was not diminished the candidate and reduced him to a punchline.
Even the press corps howled with laughter at Dukakis.
Fast forward to Elizabeth Warren’s campaign launch.
Warren is surrounded by a team of consultants who have carefully managed her campaign rollout, and in the process have damaged her severely.
The release of her DNA test results right before the midterms is almost uniformly seen as a public relations disaster, from which she still is trying to recover. Rather than confirm the validity of her claim when she was climbing the law professor ladder to Harvard to be Native American, it turned her into a laughingstock.
Then Warren announced her candidacy on New Year’s Eve day. What were her handlers thinking? The timing could not have been worse. Perhaps they thought that in a slow news cycle her announcement would dominate the headlines in a good way. Instead, with little else going on, it gave even left-leaning media the opportunity to express doubts about her. And that slow news cycle ended up being dominated by Trump announcing on television that only Warren’s psychiatrist knows whether Warren actually believes she can win.
All those mistakes are dwarfed by what Warren did on New Year’s Eve. She went on Instagram live to drink beer in her kitchen. Seriously.
It’s obvious that she was trying to mimic Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the far-left Democrat rising star, who has made a name for herself, among other ways, by live streaming her meal preparation from her kitchen.
It worked for Ocasio-Cortez because — love her or hate her — it was genuine.
So Warren’s handlers had an idea. Let’s have Elizabeth try to be like the cool kid, and live stream her drinking beer from her kitchen.
It didn’t work.
Does this have the potential to be Elizabeth Warren’s “Dukakis Tank” moment?
Much like Mike Dukakis and Hillary Clinton, there appears to be no core to Elizabeth Warren. She will be whoever her political consultants want her to be.
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