Sen. Elizabeth "I Have a Plan For That" Warren
There is a specter haunting presidential politics: whether to support the candidate whose policies and personality one likes best, or instead, to support the one person you believe will have the best chance of defeating the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. At this early date, few political wonks, geeks or activists have come close to aligning themselves to a particular candidate. Indeed many are caught between the devil and the deep-blue sea when it comes to answering the question “What yardstick or barometer should one use in selecting their presidential candidate?”: ideology and policy (which are based largely on fact) or a sense that candidate X or Y has the best chance of cold-cocking ‘45 and his alternate reality universe on November 3, 2020 (which is, of course, based far, far more on emotion)?
Hey, here’s a novel thought: what’s to say that we cannot find and support a candidate who combines intelligent, well thought-out policies with passion, a down-to-earth personality and the ability to inspire? For those of us who are already deep into our search, the name “Elizabeth Warren” is growing in stature and believability. While few have been watching, Senator Warren has been crisscrossing the United States and talking to voters face-to-face. It seems that hardly a day goes by without her offering up yet another plan or proposal addressing America’s most pressing “kitchen-table” needs. As a result, she has been moving up in the polls; as of today, June 17, 2019, the newest NBC NEWs/WSJ poll shows that a combined 64% of Democratic primary voters now say they are either enthusiastic or comfortable with Elizabeth Warren, up from 57% in March. A combined 27% say they either have reservations or are very uncomfortable with her candidacy, as compared to Senator Bernie Sanders (her chief progressive opponent) for whom 56% are either enthusiastic or comfortable (down from 62% in March), and a combined 41% say they either have reservations or are very uncomfortable with him. And, according to Bloomberg News’ Sahil Kapur, “A national Economist/YouGov poll released last week showed Warren in second place among the large Democratic field with 16%, behind former V.P. Joe Biden’s 26% and ahead of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’s 12%.
Typical of the Massachusetts’ senator, candidate Warren has neither crowed nor led a pep rally over these new polling figures. “I’m out there doing what I believe in. I get a chance to talk about what’s broken in America, how we can fix it, and build a grassroots movement to get that done. And I get to do it every day.” The one thing she does seem to communicate virtually every day is her latest “plan” for everything from rebuilding America’s infrastructure, to providing (and paying for) childcare for working-class and impoverished families, addressing (and paying for) Medicare for All, fixing a broken immigration system without resorting to fear-mongering, addressing global warming and reversing the Trump tax cuts for corporations and the hyper wealthy. (At this point in the essay, you may wish to check out Senator Warren’s campaign website, which details all of her proposals; they are a real eye-opener.)
And for all her efforts, the Republicans’ response has consisted of precisely 3 words: “Pocahontas,” “Socialist,” and “Radical.”
Pocahontas (Rebecca Rolfe)
I would venture a guess that only a tiny fraction of those referring to her as Pocahontas have any idea of who she was, of why she has a place in American (and British) history, or that she who was born Princess Matoaka, in present-day Gloucester County, Virginia in c. 1596 and died Rebecca Rolfe in Kent County, England, at age 21. All they likely know is that in 1986, Senator Warren claimed to have Cherokee ancestry, took a DNA test to back it up, and has since apologized. The DNA test concluded that the “vast majority” of her ancestry was European but that her lineage was very likely to include one Native American ancestor somewhere between six and 10 generations ago. Regardless of this, ‘45 stuck her with the nickname “Pocahontas” and continues to mock her to this very day. And that, as mentioned above, is the sum and substance of what most Americans know about her . . . which is really next to nothing.
The coming months will predictably bring a whittling down of the roster of Democratic pols seeking nomination. They will leave the field either because they’ve:
Come in 5th, 6th, or lower in a primary;
Run out of money;
Made an on-camera boo-boo;
Had something from their past dug up and magnified to the point where it defines them;
Shown themselves to be not ready for prime time.
And since a majority of the 20 or so hopefuls are currently spending the majority of their time and money just making a name and identity for themselves with the public - separating themselves from the pack - you had better believe that there’s also going to be quite a bit of negativity.
Here’s where Senator Warren is different. Quite different. Like Senator Sanders, former Vice President Biden and Mayor Pete-of-the-unpronounceable-last-name, Elizabeth Warren doesn’t need to spend all that much time introducing herself to the public. But unlike them, she spends the lion’s share of her campaign time speaking truth to power; explaining what she intends to do in a Warren Administration.
And unlike most - if not all - of those running for the nomination, Senator Warren already has an enormous paid staff in place and working. By the end of March, Warren's campaign staff numbered about 164 people, according to payroll spending released this week in a quarterly Federal Election Commission disclosure. The 69-year-old candidate, who was the first major contender to jump in the race with a New Year's Eve announcement, now has a team of more than 170 people and plans to bring on new hires every month in the second quarter of 2019, campaign officials confirmed.
As Warren and her advisers see it, it's part of a larger strategy that diverts from past presidential campaigns that have prioritized spending on television ads. As voters change the way they consume information online, they say, Warren has focused on building a campaign operation in early-voting states like Iowa and New Hampshire, holding events (58 town halls in 14 states) where the emphasis is on answering questions (more than 250 from audiences), engaging with the press (105 one-on-one interviews and 44 media availabilities), and demonstrating substance on policy.
“We are building a grassroots organization that’s built to last,” said Kristen Orthman, the campaign’s communications director. “We have front-loaded a tight-knit team and set our organizational plans, priorities, and culture faster and in finer detail than anyone.” In other words, Elizabeth Warren began putting together her campaign - and future presidential staff - long, long before her official announcement.
As far back as 2009, journalists were beginning to take interest in Elizabeth Warren. In late October 2009, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi wrote a major piece entitled Elizabeth Warren for President. (And mind you, this was less than a year into the Obama Administration.) In that article, Taibbi wrote: “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.”
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…”
Can Elizabeth Warren capture the Democratic nomination and even the White House? Can her utterly unique blend of political progressivism and economic populism; of small-town-Middle-American-single-working-mother values and Harvard Law School professorship; of writing books for the masses which discuss elite topics . . . actually work? (Senator Warren has written more than a dozen books. My favorites include A Fighting Chance, This Fight is Our Fight: the Battle to Save America’s Middle Class, All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan, and The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are (Still) Going Broke.
Can Elizabeth Warren succeed? Can she actually grab the Democratic nomination and then defeat ‘45? To be honest, I do not know the answer; my crystal ball has been in the repair shop since early November 2016. What I do know is that she is not the radical her opponents accuse her of being; rather, she is running against a radical who has instilled fear and silence in his supporters and both hatred and total fatigue in his challengers. Simply stated, Elizabeth Warren is surging in the polls because the more people learn about her and hear what she has to say, the more they realize just how refreshing and revitalizing a bipolar opposite can be.
The more ‘45 calls her Pocahontas, accuses her of being a Socialist and an effete intellectual snob without engaging her in serious debate about all the serious dinner-table issues she has spent a lifetime dealing with, the more obvious it will be that the emperor has no clothes . . . and even fewer brains.
When it comes to running against Donald Trump, Elizabeth Warren can honestly say “I have a plan for that too!”
508 days left until the 2020 election.
Copyright©2019 Kurt F. Stone