【纽约时报111010】麻省参议员竞选陷入裸体模特之争

诺基亚

Warren, a Harvard law professor who was the architect of the Obama administration’s new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, leads the pack of contenders for the Democratic nomination to challenge Brown, the Republican incumbent. And during the first Democratic debate last week, she answered a question about how she put herself through college by saying, “I kept my clothes on.”

This was a reference to Brown’s long-ago career as a model, during which he posed naked, with a strategically placed hand acting as a fig leaf, for Cosmopolitan magazine. And though funny, her remark was unfortunate, because Brown modeled in part to earn school money, which he had to drum up on his own. By the cynical arithmetic of modern politics, his disadvantaged youth + her Harvard credential = looming accusations of elitism, which she bumbled into.

Brown inadvertently saved her. Asked about her quip that she stayed clothed, he responded, “Thank God.” Pretty-boy Republican + brainy Democratic woman = looming accusations of sexism, which he stupidly invited.

A sense of humor is the first casualty of any fiercely fought campaign. And Brown vs. Warren (if she gets the nomination) will be one of 2012’s fiercest. His victory in a special election in early 2010 not only stunned but galled Democrats: a photogenic, ineloquent upstart took the seat left vacant by the death of Ted Kennedy, the roaring liberal lion of the Senate. And the party’s success in getting it back could prove decisive in preventing Republicans from wresting control of the chamber.

Both parties will flood the state with money — Warren on Monday announced an impressive two-month tally of $3.15 million in donations — and both parties’ candidates will be shoehorned into the election cycle’s abiding clichés and conceits, whether they fit or not. Warren and Brown don’t, at least not neatly.

So their matchup would present a fascinating example of the way optics and actuality diverge — of the overly simplistic labels that strategists, ad makers and the whole sordid political superstructure attach to complicated candidates.

Because Warren has spent most of the last two decades at Harvard, conservatives will fashion an ivy noose to hang her from an ivory tower. But she grew up in a working-class family in Oklahoma, waited tables at an aunt’s Mexican restaurant, got married at 19 and had a baby at 22. Her college diploma is from the University of Houston and she had to juggle motherhood with classes to get her law degree from Rutgers University.

It’s Brown who attended fancier schools: Tufts as an undergraduate, Boston College for his law degree. Of course liberal opponents conveniently ignore that in order to cast him as an intellectually challenged Palin in pants.

He has the kind of golden-boy looks that can make life much easier, but his has been plenty hard. His mother’s marriages were many and brief, and, as a boy, he had to protect her from an abusive husband. The family often lacked money.

You’ll hear that Warren certainly doesn’t, and had an income that reportedly exceeded $500,000 in 2009. But the arguments she made for greater consumer protections suggest a grasp of the middle class’s plight that’s much more than academic.

You’ll hear just as much about Brown’s common-man ways. But for his first real date with his wife decades ago, he wore pink leather shorts, and the much-ballyhooed beat-up pickup truck he used during his last campaign was initially purchased to haul a horse that belonged to one of his two daughters.

Because he has received large amounts of Wall Street money, he’ll be tagged a Wall Street puppet. But he voted for the Dodd-Frank financial reforms that most Republicans opposed, breaking party ranks.

He also broke them to vote for the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell”; openly discussed his past sexual abuse by a male camp counselor; and is married to a TV journalist who never stopped working.

None of that conforms to the troglodyte image summoned by opponents who were offended (justly) by his seeming put-down of Warren’s looks.

I say seeming because his gibe, like hers, may have been little more than a throwaway line, though nothing gets thrown away anymore, and candidates are no more permitted instances of carelessness than they are nuances, layers, contradictions: humanity. Campaigns turn them into caricatures, and often hinge on how flatteringly they can be dressed or unflatteringly dressed down.

So I thought it might be nice, before that befalls Warren and Brown, to look at both of them outside of those clothes.

古斯拉

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