SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
john edwards
Elizabeth Warren's Rise Is a Plus for Issue Politics--And a Bad Sign for Billionaires
The press is choosing to view it in another light. That will only work for so long.
Jun 14, 2019
Back in 2009, I called for Elizabeth Warren to run for president. I may have been the first media figure to do so. This was early in the Obama presidency, when he was beginning to renege on some of his progressive campaign promises (closing Gitmo, drug re-importation, etc.), but more importantly already showing an unwillingness to take on Wall Street after the crash.
Warren, a rare high-finance literate among national politicians, seemed like the person needed to lead an economic reform effort after the crash:
"We need someone ... to re-seize the Party from the Wall Street interests that have come to dominate it ... [Someone] who will know the difference between real regulatory reform and a dog-and-pony show, and will not be likely to fill a cabinet with bankers from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley."
believed that then and now. I'd happily vote for Warren. When she was about to launch her campaign and a string of editorialists came out with pre-emptive broadsides warning she would "not enjoy an easy path" to the nomination because of a "darkening cloud" of controversy around her, I called it out as the cheap Beltway-press manipulation it was.
Now Warren is the beneficiary of positive headlines, all cheering a recent rise in the polls--on average, she's jumped about 6 points overall since hitting a low of just over 4 percent in February. The substance of these stories is preposterous, and I'll get to why in a moment. But first, it's worth talking about the real reasons Warren is doing well.
The strength of Warren's campaign is a series of detailed policy proposals aimed at correcting a series of corrupting inequities in American life. The first major proposal she released, on January 24th, was aimed at perhaps the biggest problem in American society: the wealth gap.
While working people almost all live off highly-taxed "income," high net worth individuals mostly live off other revenue streams: carried interest, capital gains, inheritance, etc. Warren's plan would create a net worth calculation that would hit households worth between $50 million and $1 billion with a 2% annual "ultra-millionaires tax."
She has a similar plan for corporate tax, one that would wipe away the maze of loopholes big companies currently use, and force any firm that makes over $100 million in profits to pay a new 7 percent tax. "Amazon would pay $698 million instead of zero," she says. "Occidental Petroleum would pay $280 million ... instead of zero."
Other proposals include a Too Big To Fail breakup program for Silicon Valley that would designate internet firms that "offer an online marketplace" and have annual revenues of $25 billion or more as "Platform Utilities." Under the plan, "Google's ad exchange and businesses on the exchange would be split apart," and "Google Search would have to be spun off as well."
Warren has also unveiled ambitious plans for cancelation of student debt and free college, universal child care and a new corporate accountability plan that would force high-ranking corporate executives to certify they'd conducted a "due diligence" inquiry, making it easier to prosecute them for misdeeds conducted under their watch.
She even created an "economic patriotism" plan that overtly targets many of the excuses for domestic job loss offered by her own party -- automation, a "skills gap" or just blunt economic reality when trying to compete with cheaper labor abroad. She calls bull on it all. "No," she writes, "America chose to pursue a trade policy that prioritized the interests of capital over the interests of American workers."
She then laid out a series of plans that create "aggressive intervention on behalf of American workers," create a "Department of Economic Development" and put an end to practices like corporations using public money for R&D, then eating the benefits in stock buybacks while exporting jobs. Her plan would give taxpayers an equity stake in publicly developed enterprises.
This idea has such broad appeal that it even had Tucker Carlson talking it up last week as he denounced companies that "wave the flag, but have no loyalty or allegiance to America." She even got Carlson to rip Republicans, saying, "Republicans in Congress can't promise to protect American industries. They wouldn't dare. It might violate some principle of Austrian economics..."
Warren's platform has a lot in common with some rivals -- especially Bernie Sanders, who would also offer free college tuition, force the very wealthy to pay substantial new taxes, and create domestic jobs through a "Green New Deal" (Warren's plan is called "Green Manufacturing").
The two politicians do have some important differences, many of which were elucidated in a speech Sanders just gave on Wednesday at George Washington University. In it, Sanders explained why he calls himself a "Democratic Socialist," a term Warren has not embraced. (She went out of her way in March to say, "I am a capitalist. Come on. I believe in markets.")
Those inside the Sanders campaign would say the speech he gave this week--which explained his policies as a continuation of FDR's "New Deal"--outlined the main difference between the two candidates.
An oversimplified view might describe Warren's campaign as an effort to correct and more aggressively regulate the flaws of American capitalism, while also preserving the market-based system in which she does seem to genuinely believe.
Sanders, meanwhile, believes in "guaranteed economic rights for all Americans," and is faster to place the solutions to problems he and Warren both identify in the hands of government. He believes health care, for instance, should be completely divorced from market considerations, and is less squeamish about disenfranchising private health insurance and other powerful lobbies. In fact, his campaign believes that any candidate who isn't creating enemies is probably not proposing real change--as Sanders says, a Biden-esque "middle ground" platform "antagonizes no one, stands up to nobody, and changes nothing."
But both the Sanders and Warren campaigns essentially have the same critique of the corruption of modern American capitalism. In fact, a lot of the Democrats are campaigning on promises to alleviate inequities and injustices built into our current laissez-faire, corporate-backed Stupidocracy, from Andrew Yang's Universal Basic Income scheme to Tulsi Gabbard's plan to end regime change wars.
They've all got good ideas, and this is exactly what primary season is for: debating which ones are best. That, however, is not what the campaign press is doing. When Warren burst into the news this week, the headlines almost all carried the same theme:
Newsweek: Elizabeth Warren Ahead of Bernie Sanders for First Time in Two New 2020 Election Polls
Politico: Warren Leapfrogs Sanders in Pair of 2020 Polls
New York magazine: Elizabeth Warren Edges Past Sanders in New 2020 Polls
Mediaite: Bern-Out: Elizabeth Warren Knocks Bernie Sanders Down a Peg in New National Poll
None of these stories features a lead like, "Surging on a blistering anti-corporate message, Warren..." Frankly the coverage of her rise is an insult to the work she's put in at crafting a plan to take on American systemic corruption that voters find plausible.
Instead, Warren's obvious appeal to the conga line of think-tankers and DC political consultants currently swooning over her campaign is her perceived utility in helping remove Sanders from the race. It's why Bernie's in almost every headline about her rise.
The Sanders campaign has come to expect the doomsaying headlines, even taking them as validation. Echoing the famous FDR quote, "We welcome their hatred," Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir suggested it's all par for the course.
"This isn't bean-bag politics," he said. "It's a war for what vision of the country you believe in."
As I wrote earlier this week, even if they're true, poll-watching horse race stories like this are almost unavoidably idiotic so early in the race. But these stories are dumber than usual. They're based on two data points: a Monmouth Nevada state poll of 370 likely caucus-goers that shows Biden at 36 points, Warren at 19 points and Sanders at 13. The second is a YouGov national poll that shows Biden at 26 percent, Warren at 16 percent and Sanders at 12 percent.
Again, I have no dog in this fight. I like both Sanders and Warren and have no idea how I'd vote right now because, among other things, I haven't seen all the candidates yet. (I'm anxious to check out Yang, for instance.)
But these latest stories praying for signs of a Sanders demise are as clearly absurd as all the ones that came before, and there have almost been too many to count -- from Salon's "The Sanders Revolution is Probably Doomed From the Start" in January, to RealClearPolitics' "Bernie Sanders, It's Over" in February, to the Chicago Tribune's "The Case Against Bernie Sanders" that same month, to Yahoo's "Why Medicare For All is Doomed'" and on and on.
Some of the stories are preposterous on their face. The Week, for instance, ran a piece called, "Bernie Sanders' socialism speech might have been more about Elizabeth Warren than about Trump." It quoted former White House communications director Jen Psaki, saying the address "is a pretty clear indication he is feeling the heat from Elizabeth Warren's recent momentum."
Does she mean the momentum from yesterday? The day before? The speech was scheduled six weeks ago, when Sanders was ahead of Warren by fifteen points. There's silly, and then there's really silly.
A different way to read the same polls is that both Warren and Sanders are rising right now, and the campaign that's actually declining is Joe Biden's. Even MSNBC cited just this week a new Quinnipiac Poll showing Biden at 30, Sanders 19, and Warren 15. Biden was down five points since May, while Sanders was up 3 and Warren was up 2.
The RealClearPolitics average of all the major polls, which is what I go by in the rare instances when I actually care enough to look, shows a clear picture: at the time Biden announced in late April, he was leading Sanders 29-23 percent, with everyone else below 10 percent. Biden then shot up to a high of 41 percent, with Sanders dropping to a low of 14.6 percent nationally.
Since then Biden has been steadily dropping (though he's still well ahead at 32.2 percent). Sanders has crept back up to 16.8 percent, while Warren (10.8 percent) and Buttigieg (7.2 percent) have gained.
You can read these numbers any way you like. Has Sanders gained 2.2 percent since May 14th (14.6 percent), or dropped 2 percent since May 20th (18.8 percent)? Is Biden up 2.9 percent since April 27th (29.3 percent) or down 9.2 percent since May 9th (41.4 percent)? It's moronic. Polls at this stage are just toys for pundits to serve up hot takes whose lives will be shorter than most ants or house flies. "There's a reason why we're not talking about President John Edwards, President Ben Carson, President Rick Perry," says Shakir. "It's a long campaign."
The observation about the Democratic race that's sure to be relevant when real bullets start flying in primaries is that Democratic voters are in schism: there is a corporate-funded, centrist wing and an oppositional/anti-corporate/anti-war wing.
Warren has smartly marketed herself as having a foot in both camps. She may very well prove a unifying figure -- if that is possible, given how fierce the resistance would inevitably be to any real attempt to reorganize the banking, pharmaceutical and tech industries. A lot will depend on how much credibility she'll muster with hardcore progressive voters, some of whom are already grumbling, for instance, about her unwillingness (to date) to confront the health sector via Medicare-for-All.
If she does win over those voters, she'll quickly end up with the opposite problem, i.e. Bernie's current problem. If Warren is beating Biden by next January, and Sanders has fallen off, bet on this: the candidate who wants to tightly regulate banks, break up Amazon and Google and tax the hell out of the party's biggest donors will once again find herself besieged by negative press, and questions about what the Times has already called her "difficult path to winning over moderates."
Horse race coverage exists so commercial news can cover presidential races without talking about issues. It's why outlets would rather report on Biden responding to being called "mentally weak," a "sleepy guy" and a "dummy" by Trump (this was on the front page of both the Times and the Post this week) than run stories asking which candidate has the best plan for getting Amazon, IBM and other companies to pay above zero in taxes.
If Elizabeth Warren is rising in the polls, it's not because people are tired of Sanders. It's because they're pissed at Amazon and Facebook, Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase, Dow-Dupont, Monsanto, Syngenta and countless other soulless, nationless, money-sucking companies -- along with their overpaid, under-prosecuted, deviant scum executives who've had outsized influence with both parties for too long.
By an amazing coincidence, this is also why Sanders is still very much in contention. Don't let anyone tell you that anything else is going on. Polls are noise. Fights over issues are real.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Why 2020 Is Starting to Feel Like 2004
Sixteen years ago, leading Democrats shied away from doing the right thing. Today, they're perilously close to making the same mistake
Jun 03, 2019
On March 15, 2003, Governor Howard Dean of Vermont, at the time a decidedly second-tier presidential candidate, took the stage at the convention of the California Democratic Party. The first thing he said, to a thunderous cheer, was this: "What I want to know is what in the world so many Democrats are doing supporting the president's unilateral intervention in Iraq." He then ran through a litany of his party's failures to stand up to George W. Bush and the GOP, and finished with a rhetorical flourish that instantly made him a serious contender: "I'm Howard Dean, and I'm here to represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party."
While Dean didn't win the nomination, his candidacy shone a bright light on the way Democrats had become timid and fearful, always worrying that if they were too clear in their criticism of the war or the administration that the public would reject them. More important, he showed how disgusted so many in the rank-and-file were with the way their representatives had been acting, and what a hunger there was for a more forceful brand of opposition.
Back then it was Iraq, and today it's the potential impeachment of Donald Trump.
Sixteen years later, the situation is not precisely the same, but it has some important parallels. That same fear--that if Democrats make their beliefs fully known or act too forcefully in opposing a Republican president, then the public will react against them--survives, even if it doesn't dominate the party's upper reaches the way it did in 2003. As they were back then, they are desperate to unseat the president, but divided on how best to do it. And on the question that dominates their internal debates, they seem to be concerned mostly with whether it's too politically risky to do the right thing. Back then it was Iraq, and today it's the potential impeachment of Donald Trump.
Perhaps I'm not being entirely fair to those many Democrats who voted to authorize the war in the fall of 2002. Some may have sincerely believed that it was a good idea. But coming a little over a year after September 11--and amid a constant barrage of Republican assaults on their patriotism--the fear of looking insufficiently "tough" dominated their thinking as they considered authorizing the use of force.
And it wasn't hard to see that the Bush administration was carrying out an enormously deceptive propaganda campaign to convince the public that if we didn't invade Iraq, at any moment they'd attack us with their fearsome arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. When Dick Cheney said, "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us," there was no doubt he was lying, along with the rest of the administration.
But ambitious Democrats were certain that opposing war would be politically disastrous. So among those who voted to give the invasion the green light were future presidential candidates John Kerry, John Edwards, Dick Gephardt, Joe Lieberman, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton. History has not been kind to them on that score.
At the time, though, they justified their vote by arguing that the threat from Saddam was indeed a terrifying one. In stark contrast, it's almost impossible today to find a Democrat who doesn't agree on substantive grounds that Donald Trump deserves to be impeached. Many thought so even before Robert Mueller released the report detailing his findings, but the rest certainly do now, after Mueller laid out not only how Trump sought and welcomed help from the Russian government to win the 2016 election but the repeated attempts he made to obstruct the investigation.
And Trump adds to the grounds for impeachment on a near-daily basis. When the House Judiciary Committee approved articles of impeachment for Richard Nixon in July 1974, one of the articles cited the fact that he had "failed without lawful cause or excuse to produce papers and things as directed by duly authorized subpoenas" issued by Congress. Trump has not only done that multiple times, he has declared that he will simply refuse to comply with any and all congressional investigations of him and his administration.
There are no Democrats saying his actions don't warrant impeachment. The ones who oppose it, or at least oppose it for now, argue that it would be politically disadvantageous for Democrats. You might or might not find their arguments persuasive (I don't, though I'm willing to grant that no one knows for sure), but it's hard to imagine that when the history of the Trump era is written, declining to impeach him will look like some kind of profile in courage. As I've argued before, the simplest moral calculus says that if Donald Trump deserves to be impeached, then Donald Trump should be impeached.
The latest California party convention happened this past weekend, and there was no one who broke out with the kind of striking criticism of their party that Howard Dean managed in 2003. That's because there are already plenty of Democrats running for president who are not only ready to impeach Trump but are also advocating sweeping policy change. "When I lead the Democratic Party, we will not be a party that nibbles around the edges," said Elizabeth Warren. "Our Democratic Party will be a party of bold, structural change." In a similar vein, Pete Buttigieg said of President Trump, "He wins if we look like more of the same. Which means, surprisingly, that the riskiest thing we could do is try to play it safe."
There was a figure they and others were not-too-subtly referencing: Joe Biden, who not only advocates a more moderate set of policy solutions but recently said that when Trump is out of the White House, "You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends," and they'll be ready for bipartisan governing. Biden's friend Mitch McConnell no doubt had a good laugh at that one.
While Biden is leading the polls at the moment, you can bet that his circa-2002 approach to the Trump presidency will become an issue as the primary race goes on. The question is whether the party is fundamentally different now than it was then, and whether they're looking for something else in their next leader.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Fueled by Ambitious Policies and High Favorability, Progressives Celebrate an Elizabeth Warren Campaign 'On the Rise'
"Voters are inspired by her personal story of struggle growing up in Oklahoma and how she connects that to her big-picture worldview of fighting for everyday people and challenging power."
May 30, 2019
Progressives on Thursday pointed to new polling by a number of sources which suggest that after months of polling in the single digits in many national surveys, Sen. Elizabeth Warren's presidential campaign is growing in popularity with Democratic primary voters.
In a poll released Wednesday by The Economist/YouGov, the Massachusetts Democrat was shown with a 42 percent favorability rating, coming in second behind Joe Biden's 45 percent rating. Sen. Bernie Sanders was behind Warren by one point in overall approval among Democrats.
Fifty-three percent of respondents identifying themselves as "liberal" said they were currently supporting Warren in the primary, with Sanders coming in second with a 47 percent rating.
"Warren has withstood the entry of 20-some competitors, and after mediocre polling led to media insinuations she couldn't sustain a campaign, she still ranks in the top handful of candidates," wrote Dylan Scott at Vox last week. "She has two supremely obvious things in her favor: She's very well-known and Democratic primary voters like her. Warren has distinguished herself with a very thoroughly prepared policy platform."
Warren also had the lowest "unfavorability rating" in the YouGov poll, with just 9 percent of respondents saying they had a negative impression of her and the campaign she officially began in February. Those who were surveyed often described the second-term senator as "intelligent," "strong," "smart," and "progressive."
The Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) argued Thursday that Warren's campaign, marked by the frequent roll-out of detailed policy proposals aimed at combating inequality through what Warren calls "big, structural change," has connected with voters.
"It's becoming clear to voters that Elizabeth Warren is the most electable Democrat we could put up against Trump," Stephanie Taylor, co-founder of the PCCC, said in a statement. "Voters are inspired by her personal story of struggle growing up in Oklahoma and how she connects that to her big-picture worldview of fighting for everyday people and challenging power."
Warren's acceleration in polls, author Sady Doyle wrote, is "not just about her famously prolific policy rollouts -- though she's laid out detailed strategies on everything from housing discrimination to abortion access -- but about the depth and care with which she approaches every aspect of her campaign."
"It's about her tactical preparation in Iowa, where she has already hired more staffers than any other candidate," she added. "It's about the depth and breadth of her learning, and her commitment to having answers on the issues that matter."
Taylor suggested that voters may be comparing Warren's far-reaching proposals with Biden's centrist approach.
To the contrary, Taylor said, "voters can picture Warren crushing Trump on the debate stage. As voters hear more from Biden and Warren, the trajectory is clear: Warren is on the rise."
On social media, other political observers in recent days have pointed out Warren's momentum.
\u201cThe truth behind Elizabeth Warren rising in the polls: Democrats like her https://t.co/deBlXK30n6\u201d— Kay Steiger (@Kay Steiger) 1558552642
\u201c4. That's ELIZABETH WARREN. She's run a brilliant tortoise \ud83d\udc22\ud83d\udc22v. hare campaign, lapping the field with her policy ideas and proving she's plenty likable to everyone who's not a sexist, and -- guess what? -- she's finally moving up in the polls https://t.co/G2bIrfzg08\u201d— Will Bunch (@Will Bunch) 1558563179
At Vogue on Wednesday, Michelle Ruiz pointed to Warren's ambitious policy proposals--including her plans to forgive student debt and establish tuition-free public college and institute a universal childcare program, all paid for with her Ultra-Millionaires Tax:
She is hardly the first presidential candidate to introduce comprehensive plans. John Kerry had plans; John Edwards had plans. Of course, Hillary Clinton had plans, too--plenty of plans she often referred to as being spelled out in great detail on her website. Candidates' plans--and their implied, dreaded sense of policy wonkiness--haven't exactly been sexy sources of charisma or media buzz. But they've also, largely, been forgettable. Warren's proposals feel different, perhaps because they are so sweeping, so thoughtful, and so ambitious. Perhaps because they actually offer solutions to the very real drains on voters and the economy.
Other recent polls bolstered the case that Warren is growing more popular with voters. Quinnipiac University found in a survey released last week that Warren was behind just Biden and Sanders in terms of which candidates voters say they would support if the primary were to be held now. Warren held 13 percent of the vote, behind Sanders's 16 percent and Biden's 35 percent.
After frequently polling behind Sen. Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg in national polls, Warren was ahead of both candidates in a Morning Consult survey taken between May 20 and 26.
"Sen. Warren has national name recognition as an anti-Wall Street warrior and a person unafraid of standing up to both Trump and Mitch McConnell, who famously scolded her for 'persisting' on the Senate floor," Ruiz wrote. "But Warren's new momentum also feels like a triumph for the way she is shifting the political conversation from trending hashtags to real issues."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular