Man this has been on the back-burner for the longest time, stuff keeps popping up, I keep getting all these distractions like I need a hole in my head (and yes, black comedy is keeping me going at the moment),
But I can't hold off on this much longer. The primaries officially kick off in less than two weeks I think, and my surgery is set almost a week away. So no more delays...
I've been tracking the habits and behaviors of the top four Democratic candidates facing off against Loser of the Popular Vote trump, having visited my personal fave Kamala Harris, then Joe Biden, then Bernie Sanders, and finally with this post
Elizabeth Warren. During this stint, Harris had to drop out as she couldn't keep her early debate win momentum going (as well as keep up with the fundraising), all the while watching the dark horse candidates like Pete Buttigieg get a week or two in the spotlight much like any other primary with 2000 candidates all vying to be the
Not-Hillary uh Not-Biden swaying the Democratic voting base to side with them.
We're at the point the field is winnowing (which is good) but we're also at the point where the candidates are starting to play the state-by-state pandering game that sells well in Iowa and New Hampshire but doesn't do so well for the bigger states like New York, Florida, Illinois and California where most Americans live anywho. (Yes, I am ranting in favor of a 50-state one-day primary thank you again)
All except for Warren as far as I can tell. Warren's been campaigning in a different style than most of the other front-runners. She's been campaigning as the Idea Candidate.
"Warren's Got a Plan For That."
Want
Medicare 4 All? Warren's got a plan for that. Cancelling
college student debt. She's got a plan for that.
Robbing three casinos in one night? You damn betcha she got a plan for that!
Okay, I kid about the Oceans 11 thing (but hey if Warren calls me needing that guy on the computer to hack into the mainframe, I'll refer her to somebody and
take the driver's gig instead), but Warren is serious about putting out plans and proposals for families and workers and everyone who's key to the Democratic voter turnout. It's why Warren has been getting a solid number of support groups
like the Working Families PAC to switch
their votes from Bernie to Warren.
As such, Warren is more of a threat to Bernie's hold on the Progressive Left forces in the Democratic ranks than she is a threat to Biden's hold on the Moderate/Centrist forces. Even though given Warren's range of topics she's supporting and covering puts her as a major candidate for BOTH factions.
So why isn't she polling any higher?
Because Biden's lead as a Passive-Positive figure appealing to a majority of the Democratic base is kinda hard to punch against. Because Sanders' True-Believer BernieBro faction isn't going to give up their ideal Utopia of a revolutionary democratic socialism... something
they believe Warren isn't really going to support if she wins this November. Because the
mainstream media still has a problem with women candidates and the harsh coverage shows.
Which is a damn shame because Warren's character traits suggest she'll be a strong Adaptive figure in the White House that trends towards an
Active-Positive administration.
To
refer to this New Yorker article by Sheelah Kolhatkar:
...Warren is one of the country’s foremost critics of Wall Street firms and big banks, which make much of their profit, in her view, by abusing consumers and taxpayers. It’s a perspective that has grown out of Warren’s work as an academic and has shaped her ideas as a politician, propelling her from Harvard Law School, where she was a professor specializing in bankruptcy law, to the Senate, where she has represented Massachusetts since 2013.
On many economic issues, Warren has been remarkably prescient. She has spent decades warning Americans about the pernicious effects of income inequality, predatory corporations, and consumer debt, and about the failures of our financial system—issues that are at the heart of the 2020 Presidential campaign... She is attempting to position herself as a pragmatic advocate for the middle class, someone who can bring systemic reforms to education, health care, and democracy itself. But, unlike the Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, Warren doesn’t describe herself as a “democratic socialist,” and says that she isn’t trying to do away with capitalism. “I believe in markets,” she says, over and over. She says that she simply wants to make them work better for more people...
As I noted, it's that last bit - Warren's unwillingness to join the Far Left completely, even as she pushes for reforms that would clearly fulfill a lot of what the Far Left hopes for - that scares the BernieBro faction. But it shouldn't (back to Kolhatkar):
...With the help of advisers working from her headquarters, in Boston, Warren has been releasing a torrent of detailed policy proposals. She has issued a plan to dramatically reduce student debt and to offer free tuition at public colleges; a plan to unwind large agriculture conglomerates in order to make the market more equitable for family farms; a plan to require large corporations to pay more in federal taxes; a plan to dismantle the behemoth technology companies and regulate them like utilities; and new legislation to address opioid addiction, modeled on a bill passed by Congress in 1990 to combat the H.I.V./aids epidemic. She has announced an “Economic Patriotism” plan, intended to create opportunities for American workers, and has issued proposals targeted at Donald Trump, including one that would make it permissible to indict a sitting President.
Together, the proposals promise a new level of government intervention in almost every aspect of economic life. Some of the ideas are pragmatic; others seem aimed more at marketing than at implementation. Regardless, “I have a plan for that” has become a rallying cry for her campaign—an echo of the way that “Nevertheless, she persisted” became a tagline for Warren supporters after Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, used it to describe Warren’s refusal to stand down during the confirmation hearing for Jeff Sessions, Trump’s former Attorney General. In May, the comedian Ashley Nicole Black wrote, on Twitter, “Do you think Elizabeth Warren has a plan to fix my love life?” Warren responded, “DM me and let’s figure this out...”
There's a couple of things to point out here about character traits: Warren's self-deprecation with that last bit, but overall a detailed, comprehensive view of every problem facing the nation and a willingness to answer those problems. A lot of this fits into what Professor Barber established as Active-Positive traits: Problem-solving, engagement, and a willingness to take stands.
When confronted with the challenges of running any election, specifically her run at the U.S. Senate in 2012, this came up:
Many voters saw Clinton as flip-flopping and opportunistic; Warren comes across as straightforward. She rarely brings up breaking the “highest and hardest glass ceiling,” as Clinton often did, although she acknowledges its existence. She told me that, when she was considering running for the Senate, in 2012, people advised her against it because of her gender. In the previous election, Martha Coakley, the Massachusetts attorney general, had been beaten by an inexperienced Republican, Scott Brown. “Massachusetts is not going to elect a woman. It’s just not going to happen,” Warren was told again and again. “Every time I heard that,” she said, “I’d think, I’m definitely getting in this race...”
As I mentioned before about Truman, an A-P figure relishes the challenges of a political fight not for their own sake but for the issues and communities affected. As an aside, it should be noted Coakley didn't do a good job of campaigning, even failing at proper support of local sports teams - it's Bawston, it mattahs - while Warren proved adept at the game.
When I asked Warren how she would survive all that, she said, “I know how to fight and I know how to win.” She pointed to two of her major accomplishments in Washington: the creation of a new regulatory agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in 2010, and her Senate campaign against Scott Brown.
“After the financial crash, I knew that we needed a consumer agency to keep big banks from cheating people,” she said. “People told me two things: ‘It’s a great idea’ and ‘Don’t even try it. You can never get it passed into law. The big banks will never permit this. They’ll fight you every inch of the way.’”
She paused. “But we got organized. We fought for working people. We built a grassroots movement. And President Obama signed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau into law.”
A little more than a year later, Democrats encouraged Warren to challenge Brown for his seat, despite considerable odds. “I decided that I was not going to wake up on the day after the election and he would still be my senator, voting against my values, and I would have done anything less than everything I could to stop that from happening,” she said. “And I went from down seventeen points to beating Brown by seven and a half points...
While this attitude shares the ambition of the Active-Negative, you'll notice a good amount of "we needed," "we fought," "we got organized." A good Active-Positive speaks in the "We Can" voice (opposed to the "I Must" of the A-N), which tends to be the overall delivery from Warren.
And speaking of Warren's work with the CFPB:
A person involved in the effort to get the C.F.P.B. included in the bill told me that Warren’s drawn-out bankruptcy battles had helped her acquire the skills to get things accomplished in politics. “She was pretty good about both the inside game and the outside game, and how the two intersect,” he said. “The inside game is very important: you need to get a bill passed in Congress, and she understood this and got C.F.P.B. into Dodd-Frank. And then she did a lot of press interviews and a lot of things to engage the public.”
After the legislation was approved, in 2010, Warren seemed the obvious choice to lead the new agency. But Neil Barofsky, who oversaw the bailout with her, told me that her desire for the role never entered into her decision-making. The head of the new agency would initially report to Geithner, and Barofsky recalled a hearing in which Warren aggressively questioned Geithner about his treatment of the insurance company A.I.G., which had paid its traders generous bonuses after taking taxpayer funds. “If she had pulled punches in that hearing, nobody would have known,” Barofsky said. “And she just eviscerated him, and exposed the hypocrisy and the failure of the program.”
News outlets later reported that Geithner opposed the idea of Warren running the C.F.P.B. He wasn’t alone. The financial industry mobilized to derail her potential nomination. “You remember preapproved credit cards?” Warren told me. “I was a pre-rejected nominee...”
...Obama, facing intense resistance, nominated Richard Cordray, a former Ohio attorney general, for the role. But he asked Warren to help set up the agency; she spent a year doing that. Under Cordray, the C.F.P.B. forced financial institutions to return twelve billion dollars to customers who had been targeted by scams such as unauthorized overdraft charges and illegal fees for student-loan repayments. Congressional Republicans kept up their opposition; by 2017, they had introduced a hundred and thirty-five bills and resolutions to weaken or eliminate the agency...
One measure of respect in politics is the class of enemies you make. Warren is arguably the most hated Democrat among the super-rich financial institutions and corporations trying to squeeze more money out of Americans (and the world) than ever before. In that regards, she deserves serious consideration to run against the most corrupt financial figure of the last 50 years in trump.
So how would I grade her as a candidate for the Presidency?
Elizabeth Warren - Senator, Massachusetts.
Positives: Popular Senator who has had national coverage since her consumer advocacy in the 2000s, has worked as a major player of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is aware of the challenges of reining in fraud and financial corruption, she would be the one of the few candidates if elected to hold businesses accountable and do a lot of things to end the income inequality threatening the nation. Would be the first Woman President to actually sit in the Oval Office (sorry Hillary). Would be someone capable of undoing a lot of the fiscal damage trump has done since 2017. Also, Kate McKinnon can play her on SNL.
Negatives: Along with Biden and Sanders, Warren is part of an aging Boomer population (despite the appeal she has to a lot of Gen X and Millennial liberals/moderates). Still is answering for questionable past behavior revolving around a college-period claim of Native American ancestry (which trump and fellow haters are using to drag her real name through the mud). Is too Pragmatic a figure for the Progressives to accept and too Reformist for the Moderates to trust. Like Hillary before her, Warren has to overcome a legitimate problem with sexism in our nation's media and voting population.
Chances: She's currently in the mix in the early primary / caucus states for the Democratic primaries, but she's low on funding compared to Biden and Sanders (and also to the rich guys Steyer and Bloomberg who are spending millions in ads she can't afford to make and air yet). If she can pull off an upset or two early on - maybe Iowa, maybe New Hampshire - and weather the push by the media to drop out before the big states, she may gain momentum the way Obama did in 2008.
Character Chart: I've already pointed out how I view her as an
Active-Positive figure. She shows the Adaptive trait of accepting and taking on policy ideas of fellow candidates (with a willingness to admit where she got the ideas from), working with a level of
Self-Confidence (her primary trait IMHO) and Long-Term Planning (the gamemanship skills of a Kennedy/Obama) that other A-Ps have deployed. Like Truman before her, she does the homework to debate her points with aplomb and directness.
If I had to compare Warren to anyone, it would be FDR (A-P), a reform-minded charismatic willing to fix a broken system rather than replace it outright.
Okay, that's all I got for the four three main candidates for the Democrats to choose from. Having lost my primary candidate in Harris - whom I supported for her early advocacy for better teacher pay and boosts to education funding - I've decided to put my support to Warren, whose agenda mostly matches my own hopes for a better government taking care of the citizenry. Past all that, I am willing to support ANY Democratic candidate - even Sanders but
definitely NOT Gabbard - due to the reality of how dangerous it is letting trump and the Republicans retain ANY power in our government.
If I had a preference order, it'd be 1) Warren, 2) Booker, 3) Klobuchar, 4) Biden, 5) Sanders, 6) Maybe Mayor Pete, I'm not sure who's left in the equation 7) Anybody but Gabbard.
