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" BOSTON \u2014 You see a lot watching American politics, but it&amp;#039;s not that often that you get to see a professor tap-dance around a monk. The Order of the Franciscans of the Primitive Observance have a community house in the Mission Hill district of Roxbury here. (The Franciscans of the Primitive Observance are on the more orthodox end of the scale of the multifarious communities that follow the rules laid down by Francis of Assisi. As the Franciscans say, &amp;quot;Not even god knows how many kinds of Franciscans there really are.&amp;quot;) Anyway, Brother James Wartman, in his gray robe and his rough belt and his rosary, came down to a forum on Wednesday night at which Roxbury Community College was hosting Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate. Her opponent, alleged Republican incumbent Scott Brown, declined to participate. Brother James had a question he wanted to ask the candidate about the now-famous provision of the Affordable Care Act by which employers must provide coverage for birth control as part of the health-insurance packages for their employees. This has been mendaciously attacked by the Roman Catholic hierarchy as an assault on &amp;quot;freedom of religion,&amp;quot; a viewpoint that, judging by his tangled answer on the subject in last week&amp;#039;s debate, Brown seems to share, at least for the moment. (&amp;quot;I will never come between a woman and her religion,&amp;quot; said Brown, apparently unaware that the argument is not an issue of conscience between a woman and her religion but, rather, an issue of politics between the religious and political hierarchies. In any case, the whole &amp;quot;issue&amp;quot; is merely a ridiculous vehicle through which the Catholic hierarchy is seeking to regain the moral power in secular politics that it squandered during its days as part of an international criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice \u2014 a conspiracy that exploded in public, it should be noted, not very far from where this forum was being held \u2014 and to regain that power by forcing the Presbyterian scrubwomen in their hospitals to abide by a prohibition on artificial birth control that most American Catholics have been ignoring in good conscience for almost 50 years.) Brother James stepped to the microphone and asked Warren whether, in the context of a neighborhood that contains not only his religious community, but Boston&amp;#039;s largest mosque, as well as the basilica from which was buried Ted Kennedy, she supported what he called the &amp;quot;protection of our First Amendment right to freedom of religion against the modification of our First Amendment freedoms proposed by the administration in the form of the Affordable Care Act.&amp;quot; Now you&amp;#039;d have to have beamed in from Vulcan on Wednesday morning not to know what Brother James was getting at here. Warren clearly knew, and she was not going to get caught giving a direct answer on ladyparts to a monk in full monk mufti. &amp;quot;I am a person of faith,&amp;quot; she told him. &amp;quot;In fact, I&amp;#039;m a former Sunday school teacher and it&amp;#039;s been my great pleasure to have visited all different kinds of churches and to have prayed in them. I don&amp;#039;t want to see any infringement on our freedom to worship as we please or any infringement on the free exercise of our religion. That&amp;#039;s just... just basic with me.&amp;quot; I caught up with Brother James after the forum. &amp;quot;Hey,&amp;quot; I said to him, &amp;quot;she never answered your question.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Thank you for noticing,&amp;quot; he said. Oh, she&amp;#039;s getting better at this, no question about it. If at the Democratic National Convention she became a politician, on the campaign trail Elizabeth Warren is becoming a candidate. These are two different things. Warren&amp;#039;s day started at a firehouse in South Boston, where she received the endorsement of the both the local and national firefighters unions. Harold Schaitberger, the president of the International Association of Firefighters, was wandering around the corner of Fourth and K, looking a bit lost, having just flown in from Montana, where he&amp;#039;d appeared on behalf of incumbent Democratic senator Jon Tester, as well as on behalf of Democratic Attorney General Steve Bullock, who&amp;#039;s managed to push himself a long way uphill and into a virtual dead heat with Republican Rick Hill in that state&amp;#039;s gubernatorial contest. That Schaitberger has been hop-scotching the country this way is an indication of how thoroughly local races have become nationalized, especially during recent days, when the Romney campaign seemed to be imploding. This is a dynamic that the Warren campaign has been concentrating on ferociously in the days since she spoke in Charlotte, after which she managed to climb into a slim lead in four out of five subsequent polls. &amp;quot;We don&amp;#039;t give out our endorsements easily,&amp;quot; Schaitberg said. &amp;quot;And we don&amp;#039;t need her opponent, who may look good in his jacket and his blue jeans and his truck, and who wants to be a regular Joe, but who votes against working-class people.&amp;quot; The foray into Southie was strategic, as Schaitberg&amp;#039;s comments indicated. Brown, who represented suburban Wrentham as a state senator before winning election to the Senate two years ago, apparently has determined that the only way he can win re-election is to cast himself as a yob from the three-deckers, as Good Scott Hunting. Because of her academic background, and because she wasn&amp;#039;t born here, Warren was supposed to be on the wrong side of both Boston provincialism and Boston yobhood. The Brown campaign has sought to exploit that perceived weakness on a number of fronts, most conspicuously in its weird assaults on Warren&amp;#039;s ancestry, which culminated in the genuinely stupid use of Brown congressional staffers to shout war whoops and perform the tomahawk chop, which went viral on video this week and made the entire campaign look like a collection of dolts lined up at a sobriety checkpoint on Cape Cod. That&amp;#039;s what the event at the firehouse was about: an attempt to blunt Brown&amp;#039;s blatant appeal to the proles while simultaneously linking him to Republican policies that would hit the men working there the hardest. &amp;quot;Hey,&amp;quot; said Bob McGrath, the head of the local firefighters union, &amp;quot;my idea of going to Harvard is falling asleep on the Red Line. I just know we need someone in Washington who will fight for the working class, and for the middle class.&amp;quot; The forum with the monks at Roxbury Community College was different. She was quite at ease, sitting in an armchair onstage and taking questions on a number of topics, most notably education. She did not dance away from these. Her answers were complex and they were informed, and they showed a deep understanding of the place of community colleges in communities like Roxbury. &amp;quot;We have to have money for our community colleges and our state universities, and that means we have to have public investment,&amp;quot; she explained to one RCC student. &amp;quot;Community colleges can present such an opportunity for lifelong learning as well, because a trend is coming, and the nature of work is changing, and community colleges can be a place for the people in the next few decades can prepare for that third and fourth career they might have.&amp;quot; And, at the end, she came back to what originally got her into politics in the first place \u2014 the sense that the game was rigged, the wheel crooked, and that there is no pea under any of the shells, something most of the people in this audience learned at birth, or shortly thereafter. &amp;quot;You know, my husband and I are going to be fine. We&amp;#039;ve managed to have good careers, and we&amp;#039;ve put a little something away,&amp;quot; she told them, and it should be noted that Brown, in their debate last week, made quite a lot of Warren&amp;#039;s salary as a professor at the Harvard Law School. &amp;quot;But that&amp;#039;s because we grew up in an America of opportunity. Now, I come close to despair because so many of the pieces of the country are broken, and when you see that, you have two choices: You can give up, or you can do something about it.&amp;quot; That got her a standing ovation. The next debate is on Monday night. --CLICK HERE FOR COMPLETE AND ONGOING COVERAGE OF THE MASSACHUSETTS RACE Follow The Politics Blog on RSS and Twitter &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a15999/elizabeth-warren-campaign-13132703/>