Is Elizabeth Warren as Big of a Con Artist as Donald Trump?
I've come to the unfortunate conclusion after viewing much of last Tuesday night's Democratic primary that I really don't care for Elizabeth Warren that much, at least as a Presidential candidate. As the Democratic primary electorate has come to like her more, I've come to like her less. That's a tough admission to make because I still like her work in the U.S. Senate, an erudite left-populist champion speaking truth to power with a working policy agenda geared toward reining in Wall Street excess. What more could a liberal want? Well, intellectual integrity in a Presidential campaign would be a good start.
We're not yet at the stage in the Democratic Presidential primaries where the candidates are fully speaking to voters yet. They're still mostly auditioning for campaign donations needed to keep the lights on in their campaign through the Iowa caucuses in February, which requires them to take delusional positions that go over well among the faculty on college campuses and rank-and-file tech industry workers but are electoral poison on Main Street. But it's October now and some candidates seem to be pivoting to a campaign pitch that is at least nominally saleable in the real world. Not Elizabeth Warren. She's doubling down on a maximally progressive agenda while holding firm in refusing to tell us where the revenue's gonna come from to pay for what will amount to a more than doubling of the federal budget. And what irked me most was when other candidates on the stage asked her how she was gonna pay for it and she fired back with the ad hominem strawman that "everybody else on the stage thinks it's more important to protect billionaires than it is to invest in an entire generation of Americans". Where to begin in unraveling how unserious this is....
First of all, this year's lineup of Democratic Presidential aspirants is more liberal--by orders of magnitude--than any lineup of Democratic Presidential aspirants that preceded them. Even those in the field labeled "moderates" are running well to the left of Barack Obama in 2008. Warren's accusation against other candidates in the race is not salient or believable in any way. And as a possible frontrunner, she has a responsibility to the party and the country to give us a credible path toward enactment for the expansion pack policy agenda she's proposing if elected...or else she doesn't deserve to be a frontrunner.
I'm amenable to a single-payer health care plan, and I suspect nearly all of the other candidates in the race are too, but Warren would have us believe if she's elected in 2020 we would successfully slay the insurance industry leviathan by 2021. It isn't gonna work like that and Warren knows it. A path to single-payer will come in baby steps, likely beginning with adding a public option to Obamacare, which was proposed but shot down back in 2009. If that public option provides good care at lower costs than people's insurance policies, more people will join and eventually the insurance industry will either rein in its excesses or cease to exist. Single-payer will rise if the insurance industry fails. When other candidates talk about "Medicare for All Who Want It", this is what they're talking about, fully expecting the government plans would eventually choke out the insurance industry model for all but supplemental coverage. The only other approach would be a huge tax increase to pay for an abrupt switch to single-payer as Bernie Sanders is proposing. Warren is pretending she can have the hugely expensive new policy with no stated way to pay for it. This was irresponsible last year at this time when she was at 3% in the polls and is even more irresponsible now when she's leading the field.
I'm also sympathetic to Warren's proposed wealth tax that taxes not just income, but accumulated wealth, thus hitting the trust fund babies who currently pay lower tax rates than janitors making $20,000 per year. But other candidates on the stage were pointing out that such taxes were implemented and rolled back in several countries, including Scandinavian countries whose governments most closely resemble the democratic socialism Warren embodies, because they failed upon implementation. Again, Warren responded defensively, putting the motives of her challengers in question rather giving a serious rejoinder to push back against the notion of why her wealth tax might not work in practice. At this point, shouldn't voters expect her to have a credible answer?
Thankfully, Warren's ascent is happening relatively early, meaning there's time before Democrats actually vote to put her frontrunner status to the test. Given Biden's demographic strength among African Americans and older, blue-collar whites who live in states with significant delegate hauls, I think it's far too early to write Biden's obituary, but let's take current polls at face value showing that if primary voters all went to the polls today that Elizabeth Warren would become the nominee. The heat will be on for the next three months to test her ability to revise policy statements in a way that shows she could actually govern, but the rigidity of her platform leaves little room to maneuver if attempting to shoehorn her proposals to fit a real-world template. She's sold herself as an alchemist and if she starts putting conditions on it now that are in keeping with political reality, she could lose current supporters she won over by convincing them of her alchemy skills.
It's all more than a little depressing. It's depressing that someone with as much to offer as Warren is playing such a high-stakes con on voters in the Presidential campaign. I've always questioned her political judgment ("my DNA test shows I am a Native American"!) and her communication skills (preachily professorial), and those early question marks now seem more prescient in terms of a broader portrait of character. It's also depressing that the media is giving her a pass without scrutinizing her program or her past statements that in some cases directly contradict her biggest applause lines at rallies. And it's also depressing that Democratic voters appear to have radicalized down a rabbit hole of unseriousness as Republican voters did four years ago in that, thus far, they're buying Warren's third-rate hustle. Ultimately, Warren's health care promise that "Costs will go up for the wealthy, for corporations, but for middle-class families, it will go down." is no less P.T. Barnum-esque than "We're gonna build a wall on the border and Mexico's gonna pay for it."
We're not yet at the stage in the Democratic Presidential primaries where the candidates are fully speaking to voters yet. They're still mostly auditioning for campaign donations needed to keep the lights on in their campaign through the Iowa caucuses in February, which requires them to take delusional positions that go over well among the faculty on college campuses and rank-and-file tech industry workers but are electoral poison on Main Street. But it's October now and some candidates seem to be pivoting to a campaign pitch that is at least nominally saleable in the real world. Not Elizabeth Warren. She's doubling down on a maximally progressive agenda while holding firm in refusing to tell us where the revenue's gonna come from to pay for what will amount to a more than doubling of the federal budget. And what irked me most was when other candidates on the stage asked her how she was gonna pay for it and she fired back with the ad hominem strawman that "everybody else on the stage thinks it's more important to protect billionaires than it is to invest in an entire generation of Americans". Where to begin in unraveling how unserious this is....
First of all, this year's lineup of Democratic Presidential aspirants is more liberal--by orders of magnitude--than any lineup of Democratic Presidential aspirants that preceded them. Even those in the field labeled "moderates" are running well to the left of Barack Obama in 2008. Warren's accusation against other candidates in the race is not salient or believable in any way. And as a possible frontrunner, she has a responsibility to the party and the country to give us a credible path toward enactment for the expansion pack policy agenda she's proposing if elected...or else she doesn't deserve to be a frontrunner.
I'm amenable to a single-payer health care plan, and I suspect nearly all of the other candidates in the race are too, but Warren would have us believe if she's elected in 2020 we would successfully slay the insurance industry leviathan by 2021. It isn't gonna work like that and Warren knows it. A path to single-payer will come in baby steps, likely beginning with adding a public option to Obamacare, which was proposed but shot down back in 2009. If that public option provides good care at lower costs than people's insurance policies, more people will join and eventually the insurance industry will either rein in its excesses or cease to exist. Single-payer will rise if the insurance industry fails. When other candidates talk about "Medicare for All Who Want It", this is what they're talking about, fully expecting the government plans would eventually choke out the insurance industry model for all but supplemental coverage. The only other approach would be a huge tax increase to pay for an abrupt switch to single-payer as Bernie Sanders is proposing. Warren is pretending she can have the hugely expensive new policy with no stated way to pay for it. This was irresponsible last year at this time when she was at 3% in the polls and is even more irresponsible now when she's leading the field.
I'm also sympathetic to Warren's proposed wealth tax that taxes not just income, but accumulated wealth, thus hitting the trust fund babies who currently pay lower tax rates than janitors making $20,000 per year. But other candidates on the stage were pointing out that such taxes were implemented and rolled back in several countries, including Scandinavian countries whose governments most closely resemble the democratic socialism Warren embodies, because they failed upon implementation. Again, Warren responded defensively, putting the motives of her challengers in question rather giving a serious rejoinder to push back against the notion of why her wealth tax might not work in practice. At this point, shouldn't voters expect her to have a credible answer?
Thankfully, Warren's ascent is happening relatively early, meaning there's time before Democrats actually vote to put her frontrunner status to the test. Given Biden's demographic strength among African Americans and older, blue-collar whites who live in states with significant delegate hauls, I think it's far too early to write Biden's obituary, but let's take current polls at face value showing that if primary voters all went to the polls today that Elizabeth Warren would become the nominee. The heat will be on for the next three months to test her ability to revise policy statements in a way that shows she could actually govern, but the rigidity of her platform leaves little room to maneuver if attempting to shoehorn her proposals to fit a real-world template. She's sold herself as an alchemist and if she starts putting conditions on it now that are in keeping with political reality, she could lose current supporters she won over by convincing them of her alchemy skills.
It's all more than a little depressing. It's depressing that someone with as much to offer as Warren is playing such a high-stakes con on voters in the Presidential campaign. I've always questioned her political judgment ("my DNA test shows I am a Native American"!) and her communication skills (preachily professorial), and those early question marks now seem more prescient in terms of a broader portrait of character. It's also depressing that the media is giving her a pass without scrutinizing her program or her past statements that in some cases directly contradict her biggest applause lines at rallies. And it's also depressing that Democratic voters appear to have radicalized down a rabbit hole of unseriousness as Republican voters did four years ago in that, thus far, they're buying Warren's third-rate hustle. Ultimately, Warren's health care promise that "Costs will go up for the wealthy, for corporations, but for middle-class families, it will go down." is no less P.T. Barnum-esque than "We're gonna build a wall on the border and Mexico's gonna pay for it."
posted by Mark at 1:38 PM
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