If political betrayals were base hits, Barack Obama would be approaching the record for hits in most consecutive games. This week he kept the streak going by not nominating Elizabeth Warren to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the federal agency she willed into being over the past year, allegedly because he's sure Republicans would block her appointment.
This was a sad development for American consumers, but I couldn't help noticing how many liberal readers on this site hemmed and hawed and then swallowed whole the rationale for Obama's decision. On Tuesday, Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism summed up the situation in a piece called "Why Liberals Are Lame, Part 3":
What little remains of the left seems to be rallying around Elizabeth Warren, which given the dearth of prominent figures who are serious about standing up for middle class Americans, as opposed to pandering to them and then selling them out, isn’t a bad impulse per se. But they are deploying their energies in quixotic missions or worse, falling completely in line with the Administration’s plan, which has been to... box [Warren] in and render her incapable of independent operation. And in case you wonder what I am talking about, I mean the plan, concocted by the Democratic Party hackocracy, for her to run for the Senate seat now occupied by Scott Brown.
We're supposed to believe Warren was removed from the sort of work she does best because of the possibility of the dreaded filibuster. However, in case you haven't noticed, the Obama administration has used the same excuse to cave on almost every issue important to the "quixotic" people who helped vote Obama into office.
It's important to put what happened to Warren in perspective. As Glenn Greenwald wrote today:
The same President who supported the transfer of $700bn to bail out Wall Street banks, who earlier this year signed an extension of Bush's massive tax cuts for the wealthy, and who has escalated America's bankruptcy-inducing posture of Endless War, is now trying to reduce the debt by cutting benefits for America's most vulnerable – at the exact time that economic insecurity and income inequality are at all-time highs.
So it's par for the course that Obama would bow to Republicans on the Warren nomination, and no surprise that his true believers would find a way to defend his action.
But true believers still occasionally surprise me. On Tuesday, a writer on this site actually castigated Warren fans in advance of any objections to her removal, largely on the grounds that Warren herself isn't saying anything bad about the president's handling of the situation. As if she was in any position to do so!
Wouldn’t it be interesting if, just once, the political party that supposedly represents us, the poor and middle-class, had followed through on what should be done and let the Republicans do their own dirty work? If they'd let the country watch Republicans try to explain why they think Warren isn't ideally suited to run an agency that's supposed to protect consumers from dirty-dealing financial companies?
If Obama had pushed for Warren, millions of people might have learned something about her credentials and importance. Now they won't have that opportunity.
Footnote: Question for true believers: What are the chances that rednecks like Sen. Richard Shelby will be any more receptive to the appointment of Richard Cordray as CFPB director, given the fact that the GOP is more or less opposed to CFPB's existence?