Elizabeth Warren is trailing frontrunner Bernie Sanders and that other guy in the New Hampshire polls right now, but she got a big bump in my personal poll assessing the candidates’ jokes on Sunday night when she made a very good one.
At a town hall in Lebanon, New Hampshire, a voter asked Warren—who, as a reminder, has a very good dog/shameless political prop named Bailey Warren—whom she might pick as a running mate. Here is the exchange:
VOTER: At night, when you’re lying in bed whispering in Bailey’s ear, and you’re kind of—
WARREN: He’s asleep right now.
VOTER: He’s asleep. And I’m imaging, you know, the parlor game I play is thinking about running mates, and what tag team is gonna beat the monster. Is, do you whisper into Bailey’s ear, “Who is going to be my Mike Pence? Who, who, who is going to look at me with adoring eyes every time I stand up?”
WARREN: I already have a dog.
The audience loved it:
The joke loses a couple points because the voter framed his whole question using Bailey as a device, so Warren was already set up with the dog bit (a PLANT???) before she dropped the punchline. Still, it was funny! A small bit of levity in an election cycle gone wild! The dog is extremely cute and loves class warfare!
Does a good pet and/or well-timed quip have political power? Probably not, but the joke was better than this one.