Don’t Run, Elizabeth!

MICHAEL TOMASKY, DAILY BEAST


So, Hillary’s taken a few questions from the press now. But something more interesting than that has been happening over the past month: She has moved to the left or signaled her intention to do so on a pretty broad range of issues. All of you who want Elizabeth Warren in the race? Chill, people. She practically is.

Now, for all I know it might make the Clinton people cringe to see me write that, because it surely provides some degree of ammo for the right. But I reckon the right would have noticed this without my intervention, so my conscience is clear. But this is the emerging reality: If you are a 40-something Democrat who has voted over the years for Bill Clinton and Al Gore and John Kerry and Barack Obama, it’s looking like you are about to cast a vote next year for the most liberal Democratic nominee of your voting lifetime.

Start with the two positions she’s taken since the announcement video that have probably gotten the most attention. Her immigration position is considerably more aggressive than Obama’s, expanding his executive actions to allow more people to obtain work permits. Then, on prisons, she famously called for the end of the era of mass incarceration. The speech was filled with pleas to get low-level and nonviolent offenders out of prison and with sentences like “there is something wrong when a third of all black men face the prospect of prison during their lifetimes.”

There’s a lot more where that came from, usually announced, or mentioned, in those meetings with voters that the press following her so loathe. Here are the four most notable ones. These aren’t fully fleshed-out policy proposals, but presumably those will come:

• She told an audience in Keene, New Hampshire, that the country needs a free and universal pre-kindergarten program.



• At Tina Brown’s Women in the World summit in New York, she called for greatly expanded after-school and child-care programs. Also in Keene, she came out for closing the carried-interest loophole for hedge-fund managers, and the rhetoric was pretty populist, as she told furniture workers: “You are in the production of goods, and I want to do everything I can to support goods and real services and take a hard look at what is now being done in the trading world, which is just trading for the sake of trading. And it’s just wrong that a hedge fund manager pays a lower tax rate than a nurse or a trucker or an assembly worker here at Whitney Brothers.”

• And most important from my personal point of view, she’s been speaking out strongly in favor of paid family and medical leave, saying to a questioner at a Norwalk, Iowa, roundtable: “Well, boy, you are right on my wavelength because, look, we are the last developed country in the world that has no national paid leave for parenting, for illness.  And what we know from the few states that have done it—California being most notable here—is it builds loyalty.  If you really analyzed turnover in a lot of businesses where you have to retrain somebody—well, first you have to find them and then you have to retrain them—making your employees feel that you care about these milestones in their lives and you give them the chance to have a child, adopt a child, recover from a serious illness, take care of a really sick parent and get a period of time that’s paid just cements that relationship.”

These six positions—along with her support for a much higher minimum wage that’s indexed to inflation—almost by themselves make Clinton the most on-paper progressive candidate (and putative nominee) since who knows when. She is saying things that one never thought the Hillary Clinton of 10 or 20 years ago would have said.

It may be true that it’s less that she’s changed than that the times have, and she’s adapting. But hey, give her credit for adapting. Last summer, during her book tour, she said she didn’t think paid family leave was possible. Now, she’s talking like someone who isn’t merely describing a crappy reality but someone who sees that the point is to change it.

Chris Rock and Tom Lennon in What to Expect When You're Expecting Melissa Moseley/Associated Press

There are some important positions she hasn’t taken yet. On the TPP trade agreement, most obviously, which is one on which I think she might go against the left, although I’m just guessing. I want to see what she has to say down the road about entitlements. Something tells me, the way she’s been talking so far, that there won’t be much emphasis on grand bargains and being responsible and raising the retirement age. I’ll be curious to see, for example, whether she endorses raising the payroll tax cap. I went to see West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin speak at Brookings the other day, and he said he’d gladly support raising the cap to help fix the entitlements’ insolvency problems. If Joe can say it, can Hillary?

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a column urging liberals to suck it up and accept the fact that Hillary Clinton was the choice and there’s too much at stake and there’s nothing else to do so just get over it and support her. That column didn’t say much about her positions. It was just about the Supreme Court and what a nightmare Republican rule would be.

But at the rate she’s going, very little sucking it up will be required. She’s turning into a bona fide progressive. She may not go for the class-warfare rhetorical jugular with quite Warren’s gusto. But “the top 25 hedge-fund managers together make more money than all the kindergarten teachers in America,” which she said this week in Iowa, is close enough for me, and a lot closer than I thought she was going to be at this stage.

NY REVIEW OF BOOKS, GARRY WILLS

Believers in the good and true have for some time been urging Elizabeth Warren to run for president. They don’t, most of them, expect her to win—just to hold Hillary Clinton’s feet to the fire on populist issues she is beginning to endorse. Warren might even pry loose some of Wall Street’s cephalopod arms wrapped around Hillary. But Warren is already doing that, by her stellar work on the concrete issues that have long animated her—jobs, wages, bank excesses, mortgages, student loans. All the things she is doing in these areas pose a challenge to Hillary, which is why Hillary has been adopting some of her positions.

Besides, Bernie Sanders, having convinced himself that Warren is not going to run, has taken up the task of fire-bringing to Hillary’s feet. Good for him. His work at his day job in the Senate will be less missed than Warren’s. She is a massive presence there, perpetually bearing in on her colleagues—and the president. Sanders is more a gadfly making some of the livestock itchy. Furthermore, as a declared socialist he is so unlikely a candidate that there is little chance of his being infected by the attendant delirium of a campaign and starting to believe he can win. Of course he has to lie, as all candidates do, when he says he is “in it to win it.” Bill Buckley demonstrated long ago how dangerous is the truth for anyone running a symbolic campaign.



In 1965, when he was running for mayor of New York, Buckley was asked what he would do if he won, and he shot back: “Demand a recount.” That one comment got more attention than all the position papers he had labored over to show that the nascent Conservative Party of New York should be taken seriously. More immediately, the quip almost made his assistant campaign manager faint. He took Buckley aside and said, “You have people working night and day for your campaign. You can’t dismiss their efforts, making it harder for them to raise money or make voters pay attention.” Buckley never again said he could not win. He had learned the rules: pretend candidates have to pretend they are not pretending. It seems almost cruel to let down people whose belief in you is greater than your own.

Of course, once you start professing belief in yourself, it is easy to try sipping some of your own Kool-Aid. It saves psychic wear and tear just to go along with the campaign’s official line. I observed the perils of pretend campaigns in the case of Ralph Nader. In 1972, many were urging Nader to run for president—among them my friend Marc Raskin. Nader told Raskin he had worked hard to master the projects he was devoted to—car safety, consumer protection, the environment, and the PIRGs (Public Interest Research Groups) he was setting up state-by-state. If he ran for president, he would have to learn about many things he had not studied (who is the president of Uzbekistan?) and try pleasing a range of constituents with priorities very far from his own. He could do more by staying focused.



But ten years later, I ran into Nader at the New Hampshire primary and had lunch with him. When I quoted what he had told Raskin, he said that he now had wider interests and had convinced himself that the best way to draw attention to his concerns was to become a candidate for the highest office in the land. He ran half-heartedly in 1972, but in the nineties he changed his mind, readying himself to plunge ruinously into the 2000 race, where he came as a savior to prove that there was no real difference between Democrats and Republicans and we should reject them both for his one true position. This made him refuse to run only in states where he could not affect the outcome (advice given him by friends like his old fan Marc Raskin). He thus became one of the factors electing George Bush, giving us all the Iraq war, torture, and the Surveillance State. He has haunted subsequent presidential campaigns as the ghost of his former self, a social prophet dwindled into a mini-messiah, joining Gene McCarthy in the Harold Stassen brigade of perpetual candidates. That is how running for president can hollow you out.

I would never compare Elizabeth Warren to Nader. She is more profound and more human than Nader, the furious ascetic; and people prefer a genially learned preacher to a desert father. She is probably proof against the delusions that campaigns instill in their captives. But I would hate to see her wasting her valuable time on what I think of as visionitis, the concocting of airy nothingnesses to show you have a big message, a dream, that you want to share with Americans. In the 2012 campaign journalists called on candidates to “go big, not small,” which meant getting higher and emptier. In the 1968 presidential race, the first I covered as a journalist, Richard Nixon was told that he needed to enunciate a vision, and someone on his still-small staff (I think it must have been Pat Buchanan) came up with one—that under him the country will have “the lift of a driving dream.” Nixon shakily kept rehearsing that line in the New Hampshire and Wisconsin primaries, pairing it with a feeble Harold Lloyd right-uppercut gesture. When George H.W. Bush was campaigning he made fun of “the vision thing,” but then he took the one written out for him, reading “Message: I care.” His son said the same thing—that is, nothing—with more syllables, when he promised a “compassionate conservatism.”

Warren has better things to do than fool with such ventures into lyrical nonsense. She has become a force by sticking with what she knows better than anyone—the obscenity of banks’ high profits and workers’ low wages. She understands the concerns of ordinary people with jobs, health care, and student loans. While Republican governors are trying to learn who is the president of Uzbekistan, she has better things to do.

May 12, 2015, 12:24 p.m.

DEMOCRATS NEED TO COME TOGETHER

Michael Tomasky, Daily Beast

So this is something that starts happening in an incumbent president’s sixth year, especially after an electoral walloping like the one the Democrats just absorbed: The fissures start to show. Because the president is becoming a lame duck and minds are turning naturally toward the next presidential election, the moment is now for the heavyweights in the party to start defining it in post-Obama terms. And the big fight the Democrats are starting to have, and need to have, is about how to put themselves squarely on the side of the broad middle class.

Of course, to someone who sees the world the way I do, it’s comically pathetic that there’s even a competition here. The Republicans are the party of the 1 percent. Oh, maybe the 5 percent on a good day. But really the 1 percent. No—actually really, the .01 percent. That more people can’t see this is, ah, well, a whole ’nother column really.

But in fact I think most people do see it—they just don’t mind it that much anymore. This is because 1) after 30 years of trickle-down agitprop, they’ve come to accept that what’s good for their bosses is good for them (because most people don’t know, for example, that U.S. wages haven’t really grown in those 30 years while for their bosses it’s been a party practically without rival in recent human history), and 2) most folks would simply rather blame poor people for their problems because doing so requires a lot less connecting of dots and is thus a more comforting narrative for them.

This is the crucial point that Democrats often don’t get. Democrats and liberals are inclined to say to themselves things like “if only most Americans knew X”—X being, say, that George Bush’s or Mitt Romney’s tax plan overwhelmingly benefits the rich—“why, we’d have ’em on our side.” But most Americans do know that, in their bones anyway. And they mind it, a little, but they don’t mind it as much as some of what they see from the Democrats.

Here, my conservative Beast colleague Lloyd Green is not entirely wrong to argue as he did Monday that a lot of middle-class people look at the two major domestic-policy matters the Democrats have placed before them—the Affordable Care Act and Obama’s executive order on immigration—and see a party that is more interested in helping poor people, and even illegally arrived poor people, than it is in serving them.

The Affordable Care Act was always a short-term political loser with respect to middle-class voters. Most of them have insurance, and only a small percentage face catastrophic illness. And you can explain why the individual mandate is a necessary leg of the three-legged stool until you’re purple in the face and it won’t get through to most voters. If it survives, it may start paying political dividends in a decade or so, when people have gotten used to it and it has increased the amount and type of preventive care insurance companies offer and made us a healthier society. It was the right thing to do for these and other reasons, but I don’t think anyone, including Obama himself, thought it would be a big political winner in his era.

Ditto the immigration executive order. True, a solid majority backs the Democratic position on the substance. But the recent batch of polls shows Americans to be, what else, deeply split on whether Obama was right to do this by fiat. (I’d love to know the percentage of Americans who are actually aware that the House could have spared us all this by passing the bill the Senate passed, which the country supports roughly two-to-one, at any point in the past 18 months; it’s surely single digits.) So Obama is not getting pummeled on this one so far, but he’s not winning it either. Again, the right thing to do, by my lights, but something that will be seen by the broader middle class as not really benefiting them.

In the coming months and up into 2016, Republicans will make sure these two programs stay front and center, because they of course know all this, and they’ll want to paint the Democrats as only looking out for “those people.” So the Democrats, as Chuck Schumer put it in his big speech last week, have to show the middle class that the party is firmly on its side.



The problem is that the Democrats are more divided on the “how” of doing this than they are on any other single question. At least that’s what we’re told. But are they, really? So much is made of the Elizabeth Warren Wing vs. the centrists (they don’t have a figurehead who can equal Warren in stature). And sure, there are differences. Trade is probably the biggest one, and the issue puts Democratic interest groups at each other’s throats, although regular voters don’t care much about trade policy. Whether to attack the deficit is another, but the deficit is going down, and by the way most voters don’t care much about it either. Whether to give a little ground on entitlement reform is a third, and that admittedly is a big one that there is no way to finesse (except to raise the payroll tax cap, which is the most sensible approach and one the Democrats will come around to someday).

But on loads of economic issues, as Schumer suggested in his speech, virtually all Democrats agree—minimum wage, student loans, workplace rules, infrastructure, a tighter link between productivity and wages are just a few of the things that all Democrats agree on and that, with the partial exception of the minimum wage, would benefit huge majorities of voters.

I said “partial” because a higher minimum wage, often thought of as helpful only to those at the very bottom, would have ripple effects for workers higher up the wage chain. In fact, this is a terrific case in point for the way in which the war between the Democrats’ two economic wings can be greatly exaggerated. I have before me on my browser two recent studies on this question, one by the centrist Hamilton Project and the other by the more liberal Economic Policy Institute. Both give estimates of how many U.S. workers would benefit from an increase in the minimum wage.
Only about 3.3 million Americans (pdf)  earn the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour or less. The Hamilton paper estimates that an increase would benefit as many as 35 million workers, while EPI puts that number at more like 28 million.

Here’s what I’d like to see. Now that Warren and centrist Mark Warner are both in the Democrats’ Senate leadership ranks, I think the two of them should sit down and hammer out a Warren-Warner Middle-Class Compact that consists of 10 or however many major points that they know they can get everyone from Bernie Sanders to Joe Manchin to agree on (and of course they also need to be confident that Hillary Clinton will agree to most of them). Warren makes one clearly recognizable gesture to the center, and the centrists make one recognizable gesture to the left. But they agree. They have the stature and the position and the power to do so. I don’t know if they’re friends, but they don’t seem to be enemies; Warren helped raise money for Warner this year.



The core problem in Washington is that many both in the center and on the left are just too emotionally committed to a narrative by which the other side’s prescriptions will bring about the certain apocalyptic destruction of the Democratic Party. Warren and Warner have the power to change that narrative. Their chance to do so starts now

ELIZABETH WARREN: THE 'GREAT WHITE HOPE' OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY?

CHRIS CILLIZZA WASHINGTON POST

Quick, name someone who would have a realistic chance of beating out Hillary Clinton for the 2016 presidential nomination. Martin O’Malley? Nope. Joe Biden? Maybe but probably not. Howard Dean. No way. There’s only answer to that question that makes even a little sense. And that answer is Elizabeth Warren.

The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber hits this nail directly on the head in his cover story this week entitled “Hillary’s Nightmare? A Democratic Party That Realizes Its Soul Lies with Elizabeth Warren“. The entire piece is worth a read but this paragraph stood out to us:

In addition to being strongly identified with the party’s populist wing, any candidate who challenged Clinton would need [two] key assets. The candidate would almost certainly ....have to amass huge piles of money with relatively little effort. Above all, she would have to awaken in Democratic voters an almost evangelical passion. As it happens, there is precisely such a person. Her name is Elizabeth Warren.

Scheiber’s broader argument is this: The Democratic party is facing a looming debate between those friendly and those hostile to Wall Street and its interests come 2016. Clinton is on the friendly side. Warren isn’t. And all of the grassroots energy in the Democratic party — as judged by activists and what animates them — sits on Warren’s side.
Need evidence? Check out the $42 million Warren raised in her 2012 Senate victory over Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown. Or, as Scheiber notes, the massive response her fundraising emails get for the national party — trailing only asks from President Obama and, yes, Hillary Clinton.  Or watch Warren’s speech and, more importantly, the reaction to her speech, at the 2012 Democratic National Convention.

 Clinton represents the head of the Democratic party. But Warren is its heart. We’ve touched on this idea in this space before, noting that in many ways Warren is the liberal populist that liberals thought they were getting when they elected President Obama in 2008. The New York Times’ Rebecca Traister wrote about this phenomenon, describing Warren and Obama this way:

Embracing Warren as the next ‘one’ is, in part, a way of getting over Obama; she provides an optimistic distraction from the fact that under our current president, too little has changed, for reasons having to do both with the limitations of the political system and the limitations of the man. She makes people forget that estimations of him were too overheated, trust in his powers too fervid.

But, there’s more to Warren — and her differences from Obama and Clinton — than simply her willingness to stake out unapologetically liberal positions. It’s the way she does it, a sort of quiet confrontation — yes, we know that seems contradictory — that has created an image of her as one of the only people (in either party) willing to speak truth to the political and financial powers-that-be. It’s that willingness to confront that, more than anything else, has turned Warren into an Internet sensation – her You Tube channel is littered with speeches that have been viewed more than 1 million times, she is regularly part of highly-trafficked items on Reddit.com — and given her a base of political power that lies outside the Senate chamber and, more importantly, beyond the long reach of the Clintons.
All of the above comes with two big caveats: 1) Warren and her people insist she has no interest in running for president and she has already signed a letter supporting Clinton for president and 2) She is untested on the national stage and/or against an opponent as able as Clinton. Warren, for all of the passion she creates in others, is not the Dean-like populist firebrand (at least not yet) on the campaign trail. She often comes across as wonky rather than “wow”.  She’s heavily focused on policy, not politics.

And yet, a path does exist for Warren.  As Clinton learned in 2008, a candidate that appeals to voters’ hearts can beat a candidate that appeals to their heads.  And Clinton, for all of her built-in advantages in a 2016 race, will be hard pressed to ever be the heart candidate of the party base. Elizabeth Warren would be that candidate the minute she signals her interest in running. That fact should scare Clinton and her political team.

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GREG SARGENT WASHINGTON POST

I doubt Warren is running — her statement to the Boston Globe yesterday seemed pretty definitive. However, Warren’s speech to the Roosevelt Institute is definitely worth noting as a touchstone in a larger Democratic Party argument that may well unfold right through 2016. In it, she calls for a reinstatement of Glass-Steagall (by the way, do you remember which Democratic president presided over the repeal of that law? He’s a Clinton, too) and frames the big story this way:

I spent most of my career studying the growing economic pressures on middle class families — families that worked hard and played by the rules but still can’t get ahead. And I’ve also studied the financial services industry and how it has developed over time. [...]
We should not accept a financial system that allows the biggest banks to emerge from a crisis in record-setting shape while working Americans continue to struggle.  And we should not accept a regulatory system that is so besieged by lobbyists for the big banks that it takes years to deliver rules and then the rules that are delivered are often watered-down and ineffective.
What we need is a system that puts an end to the boom and bust cycle.  A system that recognizes we don’t grow this country from the financial sector; we grow this country from the middle class.
Powerful interests will fight to hang on to every benefit and subsidy they now enjoy.  Even after exploiting consumers, larding their books with excessive risk, and making bad bets that brought down the economy and forced taxpayer bailouts, the big Wall Street banks are not chastened. They have fought to delay and hamstring the implementation of financial reform, and they will continue to fight every inch of the way. That’s the battlefield.  That’s what we’re up against. 

The key to the speech is that it amounts to a sweeping indictment of the whole economic system that unapologetically deprives the financial sector for all the credit for economic growth. In this, Warren goes farther than many Democrats, who support progressive taxation and nominal Wall Street regulation, but “still fundamentally believe the economy functions best with a large, powerful, highly complex financial sector,” as Scheiber puts it.
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...Warren is talking about a much deeper level of reform designed to address inequalities resulting from the upward transfer of “a giant share of the money flowing through the system,” reform that gets to the core question of “what kind of economy we want for all of our citizens.”

...as I understand Scheiber’s argument, his primary point is that Warren’s popularity and appeal reveal the presence of larger political forces within the Democratic Party that Clinton should take very seriously, whether or not Warren runs. Warren’s speech today is a good marker for understanding the potential for tensions among divisions among Democrats on these issues, which look very real.