Elizabeth Warren Can Win
Can a true policy wonk win the White House? This time, yes.
Polls are beginning to reflect a tightening in the race for the Democrats’ 2020 presidential candidate, with a top tier that consists of Vice President Joe Biden, Senator Bernie Sanders, and Senator Elizabeth Warren. Everyone else trails. And yes, it’s still early days, most voters aren’t paying attention yet, etc. But Sen. Warren’s polling trendline has showed a very slow, very steady creep upward (she’s the only candidate for whom that’s true), and there’s no reason to believe anything will interrupt that climb. And this is good, because with all the talk about Biden as the most “electable” candidate, the one who can truly bridge the political divide is the former schoolteacher from Oklahoma.
That’s because the political divide, sharp though it may be, has one major point of convergence. Voters to the left and the right may think they hate each other, but in fact they agree on one very important issue: they hate big business more. Of all the candidates in the race, Warren has decades of bona fides on exactly this issue.
She was originally a non-political Republican law professor who studied bankruptcies in detail for years, expecting to find that most bankruptcies were the result of people getting greedy and over-extending themselves. But after doing the hard research, going to courthouses and looking directly at the documents of hundreds if not thousands of cases, she ended on the other side of the issue, after realizing that most bankruptcies were the result of sudden health care losses, and predatory banks convincing people that they could handle more than they could.
A recent New York Times article describes this “road to Damascus” moment in detail, and quotes Sen. Warren as saying, “I quickly discovered that every single Republican was on the side of the banks and half the Democrats were. . . . But whenever there was someone who would stand up for those working families, it was a Democrat.”
This is what began her political life, when a non-political teacher began to feel a burning need to do something. That’s a great American story, right there. She saw how people were getting hurt and set out to make things better for them, no matter how powerful the forces arrayed against her. She’s the real deal, and has been for a long time.
Voters on the left hate the Big Oil companies, and the enormous damage they are willfully doing to the environment. Voters on the right hate companies like Monsanto that are poisoning their kids. And everyone hates the big banks that nearly wrecked the economy a decade ago, but suffered no consequences. Every voter knows someone who lost a job after it got shipped to another country in order to save a few cents for the company’s shareholders; every voter knows someone whose health care plan always finds a way to say No to life-saving expenses; every voter has seen someone they love get buried under debt, not because they were deadbeats but because the rates got raised and they just couldn’t keep up anymore. Every voter knows the American system is rigged in favor of large corporate interests, they resent it, and one major reason so many of them voted for Trump is because he declared “I alone can fix it.”
(Handy rule of thumb: anyone who says “I alone can do ___________” is lying to you. Anyone.)
Our politics for the past forty-plus years has been something like a pendulum, swinging wider with each arc. From Carter to Reagan and Bush, then back to Clinton, then back again to the younger Bush, then a wider return to Obama, and then a swing to Trump that very nearly set the whole thing spinning off its axis. The pendulum will swing again, but after the wildness of the past few years it won’t swing so far this time.
A left-ish politician will be elected. Not a centrist with decades in Washington, not an agitator who has long declared himself a democratic socialist, and not a pure outsider with a couple of good (even very good) ideas but no track record. The pendulum, already beginning to swing back, will instead find someone with some leftist views but also a solid and steady record on economic issues, someone who believes in the free market but who recognizes its limitations. Someone with the ability to describe big issues in a way people can easily grasp. The pendulum will find Elizabeth Warren.
The political advantage of Sen. Warren’s political evolution is that it gives her a multifaceted perspective. She understands the pro-business free-market point of view, and she understands the need for limitations on the freedom of the markets; she knows what it’s like to be one of the struggling poor, and she is now well-familiar with the gilded corridors of power. Attempts to brand her as an Ivy League elitist professor from Harvard are undercut by the fact that she’s still an Okie at heart and in manner, a woman whose sympathies will always be with the hard-working people struggling all their lives just to get by.
Then there is the Pocahontas issue. And while, yes, this president has a mind-boggling ability to make his opponents’ molehills into mountains while simultaneously turning his own mountains into tiny little grains of sand, and while we should never underestimate his ability to make people believe the lies he tells (the ancestry story was disproved by the Boston Globe last September), Sen. Warren has an easy response to it. It is to say something like this: Yes, I made a foolish mistake. I have apologized for it, and I’ve learned from it. I took a hard look at the plight of the Native American community that helped me create a comprehensive plan to make their lives better. This president, he likes to call me Pocahontas and, well, he can do that all he wants, I guess. But I promise that you’ll never hear that sort of childish name-calling from me, and besides, I think Pocahontas was an American hero. I can’t imagine why this president thinks it’s an insult.
The hardcore Trump supporters will never budge, of course. They will continue to mainline the rage-drug that is Donald Trump for as long as they possibly can. But their numbers have never been that large, and the soft voters, the ones who held their noses to vote for him in the first place, many of them won’t be able to do it again. They’ll be looking for someone who also professes anger at the rigged system, and they’ll find that this time, there is someone in the race who actually believes it, and who has years of solid evidence of fighting the system. Someone who persisted when others tried to shut her up. They’ll find themselves turning to Elizabeth Warren, with her ever-growing list of incredibly detailed, well thought-out policies.
The next election won’t be close at all, and Elizabeth Warren will win it.
