Sen. Warren tries and fails to be cool by drinking beer online

Sen. Elizabeth Warren likes beer, or at least she wants voters to think she does.

In a New Year’s Day livestream on her Instagram account (which is no longer there), the Democratic presidential candidate cracked open a cold one and took questions from viewers and voters. However, the awkwardness of the effort resulted in what the young people these days call a “fail.”

Take a look for yourself:

It appears that Warren was trying to mimic the relatability that other prominent (and younger) Democrats like former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-Texas, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., have had by livestreaming themselves from their kitchens. But for Warren, the whole thing comes off more than a little forced and awkward, rather than being genuinely informal or informally genuine.

It’s so awkward that a blog post over at Legal Insurrection compares the effort to the now-infamous moment in the 1988 election where Mike Dukakis (another Massachusetts Democrat) desperately tried to make himself look tough by riding in a tank and failed pitifully:

The image tanked his presidential campaign because the theater he created exposed him as a phony. Trying to portray the candidate as something he so clearly was not diminished the candidate and reduced him to a punchline. … Does this have the potential to be Elizabeth Warren’s "Dukakis Tank" moment?

Elizabeth Warren already has a lot to contend with going into the 2020 Democratic primaries. She already has a problem endearing herself to the progressive wing of her own party, who seem largely underwhelmed by the prospect of her getting the nomination. And there’s also the fact that she made herself more of a punch line with the ham-handed release of her DNA test results last year.

And to overcome all that, it might take something just a bit stronger than a beer.

Editor's note: An earlier version of this article included a tweet with an edit of Sen. Warren's awkward kitchen video. We have replaced the tweet with a YouTube version that was uploaded earlier.

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