Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The “burn-it-down” people are good with that until they become part of the kindling.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

They punch you in the face and then start crying because their fist hurts.

Let there be snark.

If a good thing happens for a bad reason, it’s still a good thing.

Prediction: the gop will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

The current Supreme Court is a dangerous, rogue court.

You cannot love your country only when you win.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

Everybody saw this coming.

The media handbook says “controversial” is the most negative description that can be used for a Republican.

Hell hath no fury like a farmer bankrupted.

You passed on an opportunity to be offended? What are you even doing here?

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

Giving in to doom is how authoritarians win.

We still have time to mess this up!

All hail the time of the bunny!

Mediocre white men think RFK Jr’s pathetic midlife crisis is inspirational. The bar is set so low for them, it’s subterranean.

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

You are here: Home / Elections / Election 2020 / Open Thread: The Political Horse-Race Touts Are Warming Up to Warren

Open Thread: The Political Horse-Race Touts Are Warming Up to Warren

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For better or worse. At least she’s out there!

… Warren showed her early strength again on Tuesday by signing up four experienced Iowa operatives to her campaign team. It’s an impressive haul. Especially notable is the range of experience they have. She added one staffer from Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign, two from Hillary Clinton’s, and one from Barack Obama’s 2008 run. That’s the sign of a candidate attempting to run a coalition-style campaign — the kind that has captured every Democratic nomination since 1984…

Of course, Warren won’t be the only candidate who will attempt to build a broad coalition. And it obviously takes a lot more than four good hires to do that anyway. It’s also true that Donald Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016 with a factional campaign that received very little support, and plenty of hostility, from party actors. Still, this is a path that winners have taken.

Beyond that, this kind of news is important for two reasons. One is that the specific skills these folks possess are scarce resources within each party, and those candidates who fail to secure enough of them are at a real disadvantage in the campaign — perhaps enough to drop out entirely before the Iowa caucuses. Another reason is that when campaign professionals side with a particular candidate, it’s a signal to other party actors that they should take that person seriously. As parties compete and coordinate over presidential nominations, we tend to focus on high-profile endorsements and fund-raising from party sources to determine a candidate’s chances. But it’s very likely that decisions such as these matter just as much…

John Cassidy, in the New Yorker, “Don’t Underestimate Elizabeth Warren and Her Populist Message”:

… The rap on Warren is that she missed her best chance in 2016, allowing Bernie Sanders to seize the mantle of populist tribune, and blundered last fall by rekindling the controversy over her ancestry. These are backward-looking critiques, the force of which is yet to be determined. What we know for sure is that, with at least a dozen Democrats thinking seriously about entering the primary, it will take someone resolute, resilient, and well organized to prevail. The successful candidate will need a message that distinguishes her or his campaign from the pack and resonates with Democratic voters. Since the prize is a head-to-head contest with Donald Trump, the winner will have to be someone who doesn’t shy away from confrontation.

On all of these grounds, an argument can be made for Warren, who has been in the Senate since 2012. Ever since Trump launched his 2016 Presidential bid, she has been mocking him. “Let’s be honest—Donald Trump is a loser,” she wrote in March, 2016. “Count all his failed businesses. See how he kept his father’s empire afloat by cheating people with scams like Trump University and by using strategic corporate bankruptcy (excuse me, bankruptcies) to skip out on debt.” At other points, Warren called Trump a “small, insecure money-grubber” a “loud, nasty, thin-skinned fraud,” and “a large orange elephant.”

Trump isn’t the only powerful man that Warren has taken to task. At a 2016 hearing of the Banking Committee, on which she sits, she told the chief executive of the scandal-plagued Wells Fargo that he should resign immediately and “give back the money you took while the scam was going on.” Before the February, 2017, confirmation vote for former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Republicans used an obscure Senate rule to silence Warren as she tried to read a 1986 letter from Coretta Scott King, in which the civil-rights leader opposed Sessions’s nomination to a federal judgeship. “She was warned,” Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, said subsequently. “She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”…

…[S]ome of Warren’s conservative critics have tagged her as an old-style socialist, but that isn’t accurate. Rather than having the government take over the commanding heights of the economy, she wants to use legislation and regulation to root out corporate abuses, correct glaring market failures, and rebalance the power relationships between capital and labor, firms and consumers, and big businesses and small businesses. “I believe in markets,” she told The Nation earlier this year. “But markets work only when everyone gets a fair opportunity to compete.”

Note the word “fair,” which Warren uses a lot. Even though she represents Massachusetts, she bears traces of her upbringing in the great American expanses. Indeed, in many ways she is a modern version of a prairie populist, inveighing against the trusts, the plutocrats, and their corrupt political allies. Like William Jennings Bryan and Robert La Follette before her, Warren makes economic arguments, lots of them, but the essence of her case is an ethical one: many aspects of modern American capitalism and democracy are fundamentally immoral, and, therefore, indefensible.

We’ll have to wait and see whether this message will be sufficient to carry Warren to the Democratic nomination, or even to the White House. But for the past decade or so she has been one of the most vital voices in American politics. Her participation in the Democratic primary can only enrich it.

Reader Interactions

131Comments

  1. 1.

    Adam L Silverman

    Allahpundit, referred to in Weigel’s tweet, and a number of other conservatives are now AOC dance truthers.

  2. 2.

    feebog

    If nothing else she is going to eat Wilmer’s lunch on the left side of the party. Their positions aren’t that different, but she expresses them so much better.

  3. 3.

    magurakurin

    I still have $100 on the table that says Warren won’t be the nominee if anyone wants a piece of that action.

  7. 7.

    dr. bloor

    @feebog: Yep. Talking with Bloor, Jr. this evening about BS’s prospects, and we agreed there will be too many others in the race this time around who can actually articulate progressive policy positions and plans as opposed to hand waving and underpants gnomes. He’s toast.

  10. 10.

    lamh36

    Posted late in last thread, but posting here too. Has anyone has been to Shrine Auditorium in LA recently for a concert performance? If so, what seats are better: the Upper Mezzanine, or Rear Orchestra?

    I’ve already looked on the Shrine website and seen their “views from this section” pics, but I’d like to hear from someone who actually had buts in the seats.

  11. 11.

    Jeffro

    @dr. bloor:

    No one with any brains would take a specific person versus the field at this point.

    So, what you’re saying is…oh wait…I get it. =)

    I like feebog’s take on this. She already boxes out Wilmer (and has the advantage of being an actual party member, too).

    I like that having her out there sets the agenda/discussion to at least some degree. 95% of the media don’t have the chops to keep up with what she has been/will be talking about, but 51% of the country does.

  14. 14.

    tobie

    Ari Melber replayed portions of Rachel Maddow’s interview with Elizabeth Warren this evening and my impression this time around was even more negative than the first time. I hated every aspect of her speaking for the people, the desires of the people, the needs of the people, etc. It felt condescending and presumptuous. Then Terry MacAuliffe came on, whom I normally dislike, but this time he talked about what he wanted to do, what the jobs of the future would look like, what kind of K through 12 education and beyond we will likely need and it felt like a breath of fresh air: energetic, forward looking, detailed, pragmatic. Earth to Warren: Americans like hopeful individuals and they don’t find it appealing to be characterized as dupes of a rigged system.

  15. 15.

    Fair Economist

    Oh, and remember that discussion we had a few days ago about supposed Native American complaints about Warren’s DNA test? Unsurprisingly it’s all made up. Key points:

    No tribal leader has criticized Warren. The few who have spoken on the record have been supportive.
    She got support to do it beforehand.
    The criticisms are coming from a VERY small number of Republicans.
    The media has conflated the criticisms from a very few Republicans with general tribal opinions. Remind you of the email “scandal”? It should. The NYT even brought up “lingering clouds” – for real!

  17. 17.

    kindness

    Really I wish nobody was campaigning yet. Give it a rest, please. Yea that ain’t happening but one could wish, right?

  19. 19.

    Baud

    I hope she recants her false rigged primary allegation. I know most people don’t care about it, but that’s one of my red lines.

  21. 21.

    magurakurin

    @B.B.A.:

    I like her best of all the nominees who have declared.

    can’t argue with that. Me, too. If she ends up being the only one…I’ll happily vote for her in the general.

    but she won’t be, of course.

  23. 23.

    Baud

    Rachel explaining that elections have consequences, including good consequences in the case of elected Dems.

  25. 25.

    kindness

    Honestly I think Senator Kamela Harris could clean anyone’s clock if she ran. But I don’t really want to give her up as my senator.

  27. 27.

    Amir Khalid

    @Frankensteinbeck:
    He’s not claiming to be God, or God-like in omniscience (probably; although of course one never knows, does one?) so I reckon he just wants to offend Muslims.

  29. 29.

    magurakurin

    @Baud: Probably, eh? It’ll force everyone’s hand. I think Warren is trying to get out ahead quick, but in some ways she might be fighting the last war…maybe she should be in California and Texas and not Iowa? I imagine we will see a string of announcements happen pretty soon.

  33. 33.

    MisterForkbeard

    @Baud: I think that was boneheaded for her to say, but I think she already explained/walked it back at some point.

    As in, she meant it as “Hillary had advantages and the party liked her and she got some minor benefits from that” but not a “the race was stolen from Bernie”. The problem is that she said it in a spectacularly boneheaded way that made me question her political instincts.

  37. 37.

    magurakurin

    @debbie: overshadowed by her DNA dust up, I reckon. Warren is okay, but she isn’t gonna win…maybe she should, maybe she’s the best choice, maybe the party will make a mistake passing her over, but she’ll never survive the South.

  41. 41.

    Ohio Mom

    I said it before and I’ll say it again: I have no idea what Warren thinks needs to be done about our relations with the rest of the world. The presidency is more than domestic economics.

    I like her very much, think she has brought a lot to the table. But I’m not feeling the President thing (yet).

  44. 44.

    jl

    I can only hope and pray there is no video of Warren dancing, or drinking a beer, or doing something else outrageous, lurking out there.

  46. 46.

    tobie

    @MisterForkbeard: As far as I can tell she is still making an implicit critique of Clinton. On Maddow’s show, she said that “this time around” all Democrats should reject the funding of billionaires and millionaires and PACS. The implication was that Hillary won the 2016 primary because she had big money but not the grass roots behind her. IMO this overstates the influence of big money in the age of Facebook and Twitter. Republicans had lots of PAC funding in the midterms and still lost mainly because Democrats and Independents were psyched to vote them out.

  48. 48.

    jl

    @Baud: I cannot imagine that the Baud 2020! campaign would ever have anything to do with a party that had to rig an election against it for it to lose. Baud 2020! has standards. Odd standards, but still, standards.

    Or so I thought. I can never remember what goes on at Baud 2020! meetings. I wake up later, it’s all kind of foggy.

  54. 54.

    Duane

    @Fair Economist: It took a minute, but I now realize any odd, head-scratching story about or directed at Democrats comes from a deceitful Republican source. Just lies that the MSM not only overlook, but often promote. Makes me wonder why I can figure it out but they can’t.

  58. 58.

    Redshift

    @tobie: Or she could just be pointing out that the environment for Democrats has changed, and 2018 taught us that you really can succeed on small donors alone, which was hotly debated in 2016. I’d want to see more context, because brief quotes and paraphrases make it way too easy for confirmation bias to take hold.

  63. 63.

    Redshift

    @debbie: I don’t particularly share Ohio Mom’s concerns, but it’s still a valid question. Foreign policy isn’t going to wait while we fix domestic economics, no matter how important that is.

  65. 65.

    Steve in the ATL

    Important question for the hive mind: it’s around 10 pm and I’m not that tired. Do I open another bottle of wine or just suffer through the rest of the evening?

  67. 67.

    jl

    @Fair Economist: Thanks for posting that story on the infamous Warren DNA test. The supposed fact that Native American peoples, nations, tribes, whatever, were angered by it turns out to be BS? One guy from one group, who doesn’t like Warren, decided to use it as an opportunity to bash her? OK then.

    @Duane: Any politician who seriously goes after big money corruption will be relentlessly attacked by a corporate dominated media. And add in their habitual sloth, and probably some shills who keep pumping propaganda and BS from the legions of GOP operatives through the systems, you get a media perpetual motion machine attacking progressives. But, I am very cynical about it.

  69. 69.

    FlyingToaster

    @Mike in NC: SPW’s not running for Veep.

    You might want to look at her original Senate run. Everybody in the MA punditaria dismissed her too. And then she pulled a Jack Kennedy-for-senate-in-52, and visited all 351 DTCs and had delegates wrapped up before anyone else realized what had happened.

    The woman knows how to fight against misogynists (Hello, Senator Centerfold!) and how to organize a campaign. And dog knows she can raise money.

  70. 70.

    Gex

    @Redshift: Can we make the case that small donor fundraising works well enough? Bernie never answered the FECs inquiries about his fundraising. Or were there enough verifiable small donors such that whatever funkiness might have been in there is irrelevant?

  71. 71.

    Steve in the ATL

    @Ohio Mom: on a related note, block out the evening of January 15 on your calendar.

    Steve who will be in Blue Ash, if that’s even a real place

  75. 75.

    Kay (not the front-pager)

    I wore my “Nevertheless she persisted” tee shirt today. What with Senator Professor Warren announcing she’s running at the beginning of the week, Speaker Pelosi becoming, well, Speaker Pelosi again yesterday, and a record number of women taking their places in the House, it just seemed like the right thing to do.

  76. 76.

    Baud

    @Gex: My question too. I think small dollar donations are accomplishing more, but I haven’t seen any nationwide figures.

  81. 81.

    WaterGirl

    @Baud: I think he also has integrity. From what I saw in the senate race, he answered the questions he was asked and didn’t say one thing to one group and another thing to a different group. He stood up for a lot of progressive values while running in Texas.

  85. 85.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Kay: I don’t agree with her on everything, and I’ve got more than several concerns about the self declared Justice Democrats, but she’s got plenty of energy, plenty of heart, is good at communicating, and is clearly already under the skin and in the heads of a lot of Republicans and conservatives. And that’s a good thing.

  90. 90.

    debbie

    @WaterGirl:

    Apparently not. But I sure as hell won’t be deciding who to vote for by their cooking video. The next two years are going to be unbearably long. ?

  91. 91.

    jl

    At this stage, I don’t see the point in worrying that much whether this or that announced or might announce candidate will win. I think more important to get a few good candidates who can articulate progressive causes and force a good public debate that will get into public view whether the corporate dominated media wants it or not.

    Warren is a good start.

    I don’t think any way to know how public will react to a candidate, and no way of knowing what decisions the candidate will make that will sink or help the campaign. I listened to a speech Biden made, that seems to be a debut of his campaign act, that seemed so over rehearsed and invested in a potted story telling uncle Joe schtick, that I couldn’t figure out what he was saying for big parts of it (edit: and from audience shots, I don’t think they could figure it out either). It’s like Biden had O’Malley’d himself. Uncle Joe will have to drop out after making almost no impact if he keeps that up, just like in his previous runs. But some polls put at having most support among potential candidates.

  92. 92.

    tobie

    @Redshift: It was hard to figure out what exactly she meant because her comments were so general. Maybe the fault lies with Maddow as interviewer. She didn’t ask Warren more pointed questions like, How can we bring stability to the Middle East or What can we do about manufacturing or How can we renew the social contract, and Warren didn’t take it in that direction. I dislike populism pretty intensely but can take it in small doses if it’s accompanied by interesting policy suggestions.

  95. 95.

    Steve in the ATL

    @tobie:

    How can we bring stability to the Middle East

    Pretty sure the old “Nuke it from space” is the only possible way

  98. 98.

    jl

    @debbie: Well, I will judge them by their cooking videos. AOC put funny stuff on top of the mac and cheese in the video I saw. And Beto was not strong and manly enough in how he dealt with not being able to ‘flatten the chicken’ (whatever that means) in the frying pan.

    I just don’t know how I can trust them to make important decisions now.

  99. 99.

    Chip Daniels

    @tobie:
    I was reading Thomas Jefferson’s words, and the way he kept referring to “We The People” just seemed condescending to me.

  102. 102.

    Steeplejack

    @Steve in the ATL:

    Harry Belafonte, “Jump in the Line.”

    Okay, that sounds like an artifact from “You remember that one crazy weekend we had in New Orleans?”

    There was a club there back in the ’70s with a really tight band. When they were going on break a girl in our group asked one of them if they would do “Stormy Monday” when they came back. He asked if she wanted jazzy or bluesy. “Bluesy, please!”

    After a short while they came back one by one, and what started out sounding like retuning and mike checks turned into a great bluesy version of “Stormy Monday.” Memorable. I think it might have been Clarence “Frogman” Henry’s band, but I couildn’t swear to it.

    Jazzy: Lou Rawls, “Stormy Monday.”

  104. 104.

    Ohio Mom

    @Steve in the ATL: Blue Ash is real, it’s where I live. It is also the reason you have to fly into Kentucky instead of Ohio.

    In 1955, the City of Cincinnati bought up land in what was then an exurban township in preparation for a new tristate airport. The locals did not like this idea.

    They quickly incorporated into the City of Blue Ash, leading to Cincinnati selling off its holdings, and the new airport ending up (inconvienently) across the river.

  107. 107.

    Another Scott

    @Chip Daniels: This reminds me. There was an earlier mention of Brad DeLong in an earlier thread today.

    DeLong – George Washington’s conviction that Thomas Jefferson was a French puppet (from July 2018):

    Note to Self: I have been looking for this for a while: Washington’s judgment that Jefferson was, at best, not an American patriot but rather an agent of influence for the corrupt French Republic.

    It is thought that “John Langhorne” was not Thomas Jefferson, but rather Jefferson’s favored nephew Peter Carr. The extent to which Carr was acting on his own rather than for Jefferson is not clear to me. Carr was certainly a “Jeffersonian”—and thus distance between him and Jefferson (like distance between Freneau and Jefferson) seems to me much more like plausible deniability than true divergence:

    George Washington: To John Nicholas, 8 March 1798: “Nothing short of the Evidence you have adduced, corroborative of intimations which I had received long before, through another channel…

    …could have shaken my belief in the sincerity of a friendship, which I had conceived was possessed for me, by the person to whom you allude. But attempts to injure those who are supposed to stand well in the estimation of the People, and are stumbling blocks in their way (by misrepresenting their political tenets) thereby to destroy all confidence in them, is one of the means by which the Government is to be assailed, and the Constitution destroyed. The conduct of this Party is systematized, and every thing that is opposed to its execution, will be sacrificed, without hesitation, or remorse; if the end can be answered by it.

    If the person whom you suspect, was really the Author of the letter under the signature of John Langhorne, it is not at all surprising, to me, that the correspondence should have ended where it did; for the penetration of that man would have perceived at the first glance of the answer, that nothing was to be drawn from that mode of attack; In what form, the next insidious attempt may appear, remains to be discovered. But as the attempts to explain away the Constitution, & weaken the Government are now become so open; and the desire of placing the Affairs of this Country under the influence & controul of a foreign Nation is so apparant, & strong, it is hardly to be expected that a resort to covert means to effect these objects, will be longer regarded…

    Everything old is new again!

    :-/

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  111. 111.

    tobie

    @Chip Daniels: “We the people” appears just once in the Constitution. Jefferson does not “keep on repeating it.” Maybe you’re rereading the first three words of the Preamble. I don’t blame you. They have a kind of magical ring to them.

  116. 116.

    FlipYrWhig

    @Fair Economist: OTOH I have a friend who is a widely-published professor of Native American literature and studies (though he is not Native himself), and he is about as far left and woke as it is possible to be, and he is and remains genuinely peeved at Warren for the whole thing. So it’s not *just* cooked up by Republicans or other opportunists.

  122. 122.

    Steve in the ATL

    @Steeplejack: this actually popped up on my iTunes shuffle this morning while I was in the elliptical!

    ETA: I’m surprised that you didn’t go with the Go-Gos cover of it //

  124. 124.

    Steeplejack

    @Steve in the ATL:

    I’m so old the original is seared into my memory.

    After King Curtis, it took me forever to remember the song that had the line “Gimme a little bass with those eighty-eights.”

  129. 129.

    Gretchen

    @Jeffro: Berniebros criticize her for having been a Republican when she was in college, while Bernie still isn’t a Democrat – today!

  130. 130.

    nativeprof

    @FairEconomist: That Huffington Post article paints a very one dimensional picture of opinion in Indian country. The issue is extremely complicated. I and others are holding our tongues because the damage and racism from a Trump presidency is so much worse. We are not stupid. And totally aside from identity, Warren has the only coherent policy agenda for dealing with the poison of deregulation.

    But calling it a hoax like Hillary’s emails…that’s a low blow. We talk about these DNA tests all the time. It is poisonous; all these millions of white people playing Indian with genetics. I am on the more paranoid end of the spectrum; I think of Termination policy in the 1950s and how the only thing holding that dam from breaking again is a cultural consensus that our claims to sovereignty are not bullshit. The DNA tests erode that with a biocentric view of being native, and Warren’s decision stings hard, since it feeds the fire. She also did not consult with the Cherokee Nation.

    Here is a view that is more forgiving than mine: https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/opinion/changing-elizabeth-warren-s-story-to-one-about-native-america-pG7k5kLvkkKfeb023EFhqA/

    I suggest reading Indian Country Today instead of Huffington Post on these matters. We are demographically irrelevant, I realize this. But it is bullshit to say this is a hoax. It feels like gaslighting; I’m not imagining years of conversations. DNA has been a touchy subject long before Warren, and Kim TallBear is not some rando; she’s a leading scholar.

    This discussion is also quite nuanced compared to my own views:
    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eMHY9HAQKcA

  131. 131.

    Chris Johnson

    I freaking love Warren. She is the original ‘she persisted’. People on the hard left who aren’t literally Russians will just have to deal with the fact that she wants to fix capitalism rather than burn it to the ground, ???, profit! (or whatever the socialist replacement for profit is).

    I can tell who doesn’t like Warren by the funny names coming out of nowhere and trolling against her. Tobie, the hell. I’m not sure your dislike of populism is relevant or useful. If we weren’t in trouble before Trump, we absolutely are now: he got elected by FULL-ON lying about being a populist wanting to fix problems with our economy in the dumbest possible ways, and if Clinton had the grass roots she would have won against Donald Russia Trump in spite of all the cyrillic fingers on the scale.

    I wouldn’t have given a penny to Bernie if Warren had been running, meaning my pennies wouldn’t be in a pile with rubles I didn’t know about. Apparently now there will be no rubles going to Warren, judging from the troll quotient. She is definitely not on Putin’s buddy list.

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