Seems some right-wingers have an axe to grind with Elizabeth Warren, running to unseat Scott Brown as Massachusetts Senator. Their complaint? She's rich.
Elizabeth Warren may have embraced the Occupy Wall Street movement and the “99 percent” crowd, but public records reveal the liberal firebrand belongs to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans.
Her financial well-being will likely hand conservatives a new line of attack against the consumer advocate and Democratic Senate hopeful in Massachusetts who has fired up the left and was labeled by one columnist as “the first candidate of the Occupy Wall Street movement.”
“I don’t begrudge her own personal wealth. I begrudge her hypocrisy of trying to play the demagogue against those who have achieved and who have created wealth,” said Rick Manning of the conservative group Americans for Limited Government.
Added National Republican Senatorial Committee spokesman Brian Walsh: “Her poll-tested campaign rhetoric simply doesn’t match reality as voters learn more about who Elizabeth Warren really is.”
Warren earned nearly $535,000 in 2009, including $310,000 for teaching law at Harvard University, according to financial disclosure reports she had to file as a political appointee of President Barack Obama.
She took home $507,000 in 2010. Neither of those figures included the salary of her husband, fellow Harvard law professor Bruce Mann, or the $192,722 Warren earned between 2009 and 2010 for chairing the congressional panel tasked with overseeing the bank bailouts. The totals also did not include the roughly $138,000 she earned between September 2010 and July 2011 while launching the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, according to separate salary records obtained by POLITICO.
The Cambridge couple reported at least $4.6 million in financial investments and property.
This is among the dumbest critiques of a political person that one can conjure. And it's an old play from the GOP playbook. Remember how Michael Moore was also a "hypocrite" because he was so concerned about the poor, yet he has made millions off of his movie?
A "hypocrite" is defined as a person who espouses one belief but acts in an inconsistent or opposite manner. With that simple definition, it is not hypocrisy to be financially successful AND still care about things like income equality. That's like a saying a healthy doctor is being a hypocrite because he cares about sick and injured people.
And the world is full of wealthy and successful people who champion the poor. Sean Penn anyone? Warren Buffet? Bill Gates? The late Steve Jobs? The aforementioned Michael Moore? And it's not unusual in politics either: FDR? Any of the Kennedys?
I mean, who buys this hypocrisy argument? Are there people out there who are really going to think, "Oh, Elizabeth Warren really is one of those richies, and she's only pretending to care about income inequality to get votes?"
Ridiculous.