I’m trying not to get emotionally attached, and I’ll definitely, obviously, be working for and donating to and voting to elect whatever Democrat emerges from the primaries.
But my current choice is Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
I am a convert to her cause. I didn’t think she had the right spark a few years ago, and I admired her desire to stay in the Senate and do the hard and different coalition-building work that role required. But I’m now on-board, and I couldn’t love her approach more — the small donors, the folksy approach, the smarts paired with feminism paired with experience. The happy warrior vibe. The emphasis on people. The joy she seems to feel going through the whole process.
Here’s the thing though: I think we need to have a little chat about what all these “plans” really amount to. Not all that much!
Look: if your football team was “electing” a new high school football coach, and a group of coaching candidates all published their ideas for the team in the local paper and folks started weighing the pros and cons, then you could really get into the weeds. Because the coach really gets to decide how the team ran! Every inch of it! Which plays to run. Which players to bench. What philosophy to follow. Who would start at quarterback. All this stuff is completely decided by the coach, and most of these types of key issues are known to all in advance, because they’re the same season after season. The game is the same. The rules don’t change. And so anyone could look at the different coaching candidates as nothing more than a compilation of a bunch of options for the existing team, and pick.
But a presidential election isn’t like that.
Yes, obviously the president is a tremendously powerful person, and there are a few choices that he/she alone gets to make that directly affect the nation. But there are many more things that can only be accomplished in concert with the other branches of government — forming a cabinet, signing/vetoing bills, appointing SCOTUS justices, appointing ambassadors, making treaties, spending money, etc. etc. It’s a much longer list. The President can use the bully pulpit to move public opinion, or sway other policy-makers — lots of levers there. But his/her ideas don’t just get magically turned into a new playbook right out of the gate, like a new football coach’s might.
Obviously I enjoy Sen. Warren’s analytical approach. Her “I have a plan for that” campaign is wonky, and I’m wonky; I appreciate its curiosity and seriousness and intelligence. I love how she’s borrowing the best ideas from others. I’m fairly progressive so I tend to favor her approaches on big key issues (though, again, not all). Candidly, I like that she’s a woman (and I’m a 40-something white cis man). We’re way way overdue.
But this doesn’t mean I love every solution she’s put out there! And guess what? I don’t lose any sleep over this. Again, if it were a coach and he/she said “Jake is going to be my starting quarterback” and I thought Jake stunk, then really no amount of other opinions that potential coach might have would probably sway me to approving of him/her. Jake would be, in my estimation, a horrible QB choice… I would understand that the QB choice plays a massive role in how the team performs... I would recognize that who to play at QB is 100% the coach’s call... and therefore that coach wouldn’t get my vote.
But Sen. Warren simply won’t get that amount of autonomy. She’ll have to negotiate, navigate systems, build relationships, etc. This back-and-forth might mean her positions get watered down, or pulled to the center. Or to the left. It might mean they move towards the solutions I favor… or away from them. I don’t know how that will play out, and neither does anyone else. Events will unfold unpredictably, as always.
But more importantly, we don’t actually know what issues will actually come up during a presidency. We have a vague idea about a few likely focus areas, and candidates’ priorities carry some weight in an ideal world. But life intrudes. The “unknown unknowns” are many, and honestly any candidate’s “known” plans are likely to be outweighed and overshadowed by their responses to “unknown” situations later.
So — with all this in mind, I feel good about my support for Sen. Warren not because I support every paragraph of every plan she’s put out there.
Rather, I support the way in which those plans appear to have been developed. I support the values that underlie them. I support the manner in which she conducts herself and her campaign. And as I project these ideals and beliefs forward into a completely unknowable future during a potential presidential term in office, I like how they map onto it. It gives me confidence that she’ll be a fantastic choice to address the completely unexpected issues as they come up.
Policies are important. But to those picking apart folks’ plans that they don’t like bullet-by-bullet, I would suggest that you’re in the weeds. Pick the candidate who goes about the business of determining positions in the way that suits you. They will never — no matter who they are, or what the issue — get to do it exactly the way they want. No one does.
Thanks for reading. Crossing my fingers for a resurgence by Sen. Warren in the early states and beyond. I would love to see how her administration would refocus the priorities of the nation, and watching her advance our national ideals would be a joy.