Well, here they come already.

America Rising, the oppo factory born of Willard Romney's march to relative obscurity, has declared war on Senator Professor Warren in advance of the 2018 midterms, in which she will stand for re-election for the first time and, if they fail at that, aimed at crippling what is still her largely speculative run for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. And, while there is a lot of this targeting going on—Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin has been the recipient of similar attention—there seems little question that SPW is Job One.

Warren has another book coming out and, according to Tiger Beat On The Potomac, making the tour miserable is the opening gambit similar to that which the same group engaged against Hillary Rodham Clinton during her 2014 book tour. It's even given its effort a spiffy Ludlumesque monicker—The Elizabeth Warren Initiative.

This should come as no surprise to anyone. It's important to remember that, in 2012, when SPW was running against incumbent Scott Brown, the cross-pollination between the national Romney campaign and the McDreamy campaign in Massachusetts was considerable. So old grudges likely are in play here as well. But Warren would be a major trophy and the AR program will be available to whoever the Republican candidate turns out to be.

(One of the stars in 2012 was my old Boston Herald colleague Eric Fehrnstrom, who went 0-2. That was the year when GQ ran a profile of Eric in which Herald columnist Howie Carr, said, "Eric had the same attitude I did. He's a Massachusetts native like me. And guys like us—white heterosexuals without trust funds—we were never going to get hired by the Globe, so we decided pretty quickly that we were going to have fun." Fehrnstrom now writes regular op-eds for the Globe.)

The attack plan is pure Bay State yobbery. Warren is an elitist, a "far-left" hypocrite. (Fehrnstrom himself has already weighed in … from the pages of the Globe, which never would hire him.) They've already begun. The unfavorable numbers cited track almost exactly the numbers Brown got in 2012, which weren't enough, but AR barbers its argument to make them relevant to a 2020 presidential run, to which they are utterly irrelevant. In any event, the nation's politics is going to get dragged into a Massachusetts rockfight again. I just thought I'd give y'all a heads up.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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