Sen. Elizabeth Warren says she isn’t running for president. At this rate, however, she may have to.
That is how Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Eugene Robinson begins
this piece in today's Washington Post.
By now many here may have seen clips of Warren on the stump for Democrats running to keep or gain seats in the US Senate. Others have heard her speak in other venues - for example, at Netroots Nation, or when she was running for her own Senate seat, or in her role in the US Senate, where she is one of the most outspoken liberal and progressive voices in a generation.
As Robinson puts in in the second paragraph of this powerful column,
The Massachusetts Democrat has become the brightest ideological and rhetorical light in a party whose prospects are dimmed by — to use a word Jimmy Carter never uttered — malaise. Her weekend swing through Colorado, Minnesota and Iowa to rally the faithful displayed something no other potential contender for the 2016 presidential nomination, including Hillary Clinton, seems able to present: a message.
I note that in 2010 one reason the Republicans were able to dominate is that they offered a coherent message that resonated nationally. In theory the Democrats had the opportunity to do that - after all, the Republicans did shut down the government and in the process came close to destroying their brand. But few besides Warren are presenting a message that resonates with our base, few are outright pointing the finger at Republicans for being responsible for the troubles we now face as a society. Warren does.
Please keep reading.
Robinson notes that the key is Warren's focus is economic inequality, and her critique, which is
both populist and progressive, includes a searing indictment of Wall Street. Liberals eat it up.
Think about that for a moment. Populist in speaking to the ordinary, working class person who is getting screwed. Progressive in addressing what government can and should do to level the playing field, to provide a meaningful safety net until it is leveled.
Or in words she offered at Carleton College (where Paul Wellstone taught) on behalf of Al Franken, The game is rigged, and the Republicans rigged it.
Almost half of my students this year are seniors, but even the freshman who make up a slim majority of my teaching load have the same concerns - how far in debt will I have to go to be able to pay for college? They may not know that student debt for education now exceeds credit card debt, but they know there is something wrong when the banksters live high on the hog with the profits they make from student loans the burden with debt those taking them for decades. Addressing student loan debt is a message that resonates even with those who are not already inclined to be Blue voters.
The list of issues that Warren addresses is comprehensive: comprehensive immigration reform, support for same-sex marriage, the need to raise the minimum wage, abortion rights and contraception. These are all issues that resonate not merely with Democratic base voters, but on which independents and even some Republicans are more inclined with us than with the party of the pachyderms. Yet there is more, as Robinson notes:
The centerpiece, though, is her progressive analysis of how bad decisions in Washington have allowed powerful interests to re-engineer the financial system so that it serves the wealthy and well-connected, not the middle class.
Here I offer a caution: Warren rightly slams Republicans for the damage of what has been called "deregulation" - it has been a centerpiece of their economic program for decades. The caution is this: there are too many Democrats who have been complicit. After all, it was under Jimmy Carter that Alfred Kahn deregulated the airlines, and Bill Clinton was President when his Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin led the charge to repeal Glass Steagall, an act whose name, Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, only includes names of Republicans, but which Democrats allied with Wall Street (Chuck Schumer, anyone?) also supported.
Still, it is a message that trying to "clarify" might be impossible for Republicans - after all, absent that law much of the economic deprivation that the majority of us have experienced to some degree would never have happened, and almost certainly we would not have had the bailing out of the "too big to fail" banks in the previous administration by the Federal Reserve, led at the time by a former head of Goldman Sachs who himself had fought against regulating derivatives, the primary cause of the crisis.
That said, Warren tells a compelling story, in part because she can and does tie it to the diffrerence she experienced growing up: on a clip shown last night on Lawrence O'Donnell, she talked about how her mother dressed up and went and got a minimum wage job at Sears - and that was enough to support a family of three. The vast majority of Americans support raising the minimum wage, and that kind of tale reminds them that Republicans oppose doing so.
There is much more in this column, which you should both read and pass on. Robinson also points people at Warren's book, A Fighting Chance (and you will note that I do NOT provide a link to Amazon!).
I began as Robinson began, with his noting that Warren might have to run for President if she keeps this up. And his conclusion? Well, let him speak for himself:
She’s not running for president apparently because everyone assumes the nomination is Clinton’s. But everyone was making that same assumption eight years ago, and we know what happened. If the choice is between inspiration and inevitability, Warren may be forced to change her plans.