If anyone should have been eager for a turn at the mic at last Sunday’s St. Patrick’s Day breakfast, it should have been Liz Warren, whose stock is sinking so fast that Marty Walsh feels free to hint he might wash his hands of her if and when Joe Biden jumps into the presidential race.

That had to come as “ouch” news to our ambitious senior senator, correctly suggesting she’s drifting further and further away from everyday relevance in this state she calls home now that she no longer has to pretend to seriously care about what goes on in Massachusetts.

Massachusetts? Please. It’s now onward and upward for Liz as her absence on Sunday told everyone.

On the local political landscape that corny breakfast remains a colorful stretch of common ground, a hokey event where hostilities are checked at the door and camaraderie reigns.

It’s a chance to show you’re a good sport, even — or especially — if your jokes fall flat. In fact, sometimes the worse you are, the louder they laugh and cheer.

The only way to blow it is to not show up.

When City Councilor Mike Flaherty directed the crowd’s attention to imaginary smoke signals, explaining they were solicitous greetings from our ubiquitous senator, it would have given Liz a chance to laugh at herself, which is a very endearing quality.

Instead she was down in Tennessee, trying to charm goobers.

But the breakfast is only one indication of how much she has put Massachusetts in her rear-view window.

She could also have spent that morning reassuring still-displaced residents of the Merrimack Valley, or comforting burned-out workers in East Boston, or vowing solidarity with the fishermen of Gloucester.

But who’s got time for them when there are votes to be chased in Sioux City?



We have become her “third beer.”

That’s a phrase the great novelist Toni Morrison coined in “Song of Solomon” to describe the frumpy Hagar who would wait longingly for Milkman, her true love, to occasionally stop by.

“She was the third beer,” Morrison explained. “Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude, nor the second that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it’s there, because it can’t hurt, and because what difference does it make?”

What a devastating description of not mattering much to someone who matters much to you.

Here in Massachusetts, we know the feeling, don’t we?

We just don’t matter much to Liz anymore.