Warren /Stewart

The Comedy Central encounter between Elizabeth Warren and Jon Stewart is getting an impressive amount of blog buzz. From what I hear, her fans are settling on the view that she disappointed in the first half (shy and diffident) and recovered later (her old self).

I'd agree that she seemed (almost unheard of for Elizabeth) a bit like a deer in the headlights at the beginning, and also that she hit her stride in the home stretch. But in terms of audience appeal, I'd rank it the other way around. Elizabeth in full flower can sound cocky and contentious--I think it was her good fortune that she ran out of time before she got into high gear. But in her opening colloquy with her host, she came across as the mistress of the pregnant silence. Mrs. Buce (who had never seen her in action before) thought her Jack-Benny-like pauses were so funny as to have been scripted. I doubt that they were scripted; I'm pretty sure they were accidental, but I would agree that they worked just fine.

And an aside to Jon Stewart: Jon, Baby, the job of a comedy host is not to go all Cocker Spaniel on your guest. A few more outbursts of gush and you'll be as dull as Rush Limbaugh was back with he was sleeping in the Lincoln Bedroom.

Elizabeth Warren in Newsweek

I see that Newsweek has an amiably puffy profile up of my friend Elizabeth Warren, Harvard professor known to the larger world as scourge of the mighty in her role as chair of the bailout oversight board. If I were Elizabeth, I'd take this piece as evidence that she is bound for greater things: it bears all the earmarks of a reporter who wants to make sure that he polishes the apple before it goes golden.

Which is may be a complaint about the piece, but not about the subject. I like Elizabeth. We've had our differences here and there but as far as I'm concerned, she's mostly on the side of the angels. She is also, not incidentally, an enthusiastic (some would say "savage") street-fighter with boundless energy and a full complement of elbows and knees. I wouldn't want to be around her while going all pompous and prissy about the rights and privileges of big banks: she'd waste little time in having me trussed and stuffed and cuffed to the doorknob. For which, God bless her.

But ranked just as journalism, I'd say the Newsweek piece is remarkably slack. Mr. Reporter says she has spent "three decades ... churning out treatises that are rarely read outside of law libraries," which is just reportorial laziness--the kind of sentence you write because it fits a script, before you ever leave the office. To check my instincts, I just helped myself to a quick look at her CV over at her Harvard Law School faculty page and there isn't a treatise in sight. Granted, for most of her career she's written primarily for law audiences. But her primary achievement is that she (with her co-authors) has been to serve as co-proprietor of the first- or second-best bankruptcy data set in the country. And she has always done her best to present her findings in a manner that is straightforward, dynamic, and gratifyingly non-technical.

It's equally formulaic to suggest that her interest in public issues is a new-come thing. I'd say she has seen her work in a larger context since at least the first time I ran across it (about 1980). More: Elizabeth was an energetic and active combatant in all the conflicts that led up to the bankruptcy amendments in 2005. On balance, I think you'd have to say that she lost far more rounds in that fight than she won in that campaign, but she left some blood on the table--not all her own--and I'd also have to concede that the odds were pretty much stacked against her from the start. She may have broadened her audience somewhat in recent years, but looking over her whole career, I'd say it is pretty much all of a piece.

Bottom line: it's fun to read, and I am pleased to forecast that it will do her more good than harm. But as is so often the case with journalism, a truer story would have been subtler and more complex. Also, for my money, a lot more interesting, but I guess those guys make up their own minds about what will sell.

[H/T: John, who still reads Newsweek]

Use a Donkey, Go to Jail

Running around and trying to put out a midterm, so not able to write about stuff I’d like to write about. Left to link to other good stuff.

Like the ever-dependable Patrick Kurp, though I am not quite certain what moral I should draw from this piece

Or Patrick Lang, speaking on a subject that he really knows something about (clarification: I think Lang almost always knows whereof he speaks; I wish others would profit from his example).

Or Glenn Greenwald, who just keeps getting better and better (put up with the Salon gateway: not all that burdensome, and worth it).

Or Elizabeth Warren on another tsunami.

Or this, which beggars description. But here’s a teaser:

He was also charged with damage to a mini-bar in the room, but this charge was later dropped when the defendant said that it was the donkey who caused that damage.