The False Apostasy of Elizabeth Warren

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

"I was a Republican because I thought that those were the people who best supported markets." Elizabeth Warren

In the interests of full disclosure, let me start by saying that Elizabeth Warren is my senior Senator. Yes, this Bay Stater proudly voted for her both times while still regretting neither time. In 2016 I'd even hoped, as had many others, that she would jump into the race at the last minute even though much of the early money had been vacuumed up. At the very least, we'd wistfully mused to each other on social media that she should give serious consideration to running for the White House in 2020.

     Then she did. And only then did all the troubling stories about her past start coming out.

    It's to be expected, one supposes. General elections are the time when opposition research companies get sleek and bloated on the campaign cash spent by presidential candidates seeking to drag down one top tier candidate or another in their years-long game of Capture the Flag. He or she who captures it (or, in this incarnation, a party's banner) goes on to the final two in the even more brutal mud wrestling for the White House.

     In this case, however, one needn't the cynical mercenary interference of an opposition research company to dig up the obligatory and inevitable dirt on Elizabeth Warren. Again, let me state that she is my senior senator and, up until the past couple of weeks, she was still marketed and sold to us as a suitable substitute in the likely event Bernie has the nomination stolen from him once again (Gavin Newsom, another fraudulent liberal, in Sacramento is doing his damnedest to make sure that happens, according to Greg Palast).

     Rather, one needn't go to such opposition research companies whose results may or not be fake news and listen, instead, to Warren's own words.during the debates, particularly the last two. She opened herself up to a lot of criticism in the next to last debate by attacking South Bend, IN Mayor Pete Buttigeig for his wine cave fundraiser. The phrase "wine cave" became the catch phrase of the PBS debate. Warren caught Mayor Pete with his pants down and Mayor Pete put her on her back foot by reminding the voters her net worth was 100 times his.

     But while she may have gotten the South Bend Mayor in a Gotcha moment, that only made people start to pay closer attention to Elizabeth Warren, specifically to her own fundraising history. As it had turned out, Warren herself had in June 2018 held a fundraiser that handed out "souvenir bottles" of wine that we can be reasonably sure weren't Ripple to those who'd contributed a certain amount. Those who'd donated $5400 as couples or $2700 individually got VIP seating and a photo session with the senator.

     So much for not selling access to her time.

    When yours truly met Elizabeth Warren in 2012 when she first ran for office, she still bore the marks of Mitch McConnell's palm on her face as he consistently pushed her to the wayside and refused to let her have a hearing to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that she'd created. She was warm, gracious, generous with her time and it was inside and outside a breakfast place called Harvest Bagel in Hudson, Massachusetts. Before it sadly closed, it was the kind of place that serves good coffee, not expensive wine, in which access to its bill of fare, as well as to any Senate candidate making a train whistle stop, was first come, first served.

     Elizabeth Warren has changed. That's to be expected to a degree. She's been in the United States Senate for eight years now and being that close to the nerve center of the most powerful government on earth will have an effect one way or the other on you. Her impact on Capitol Hill was felt immediately. She was our Ted Cruz, a headline-grabbing freshman senator who instantly landed on page one above the fold. Except, unlike Ted Cruz, she didn't do it by shutting down the government while reading Dr. Seuss. She made sense, holding hearings on the Senate Finance Committee and making regulators and bankers sweat like whores on confession day.

     Then Monday came and the long knives came out.

Talk to the Hand

In a now infamous piece by CNN (which, coincidentally, would go on to host last night's debate in Iowa), Warren first "leaked" the disclosure that in a private conversation at a dinner late 2018, Bernie Sanders had told Warren that a woman couldn't win the presidency. Then Politico, never a bastion of actual progressivism, picked up on it and pretty soon Warren'\s unfounded allegations went viral. 

     It seemed every couple of hours, we'd be treated to another breathless story on Politico sporting headlines such as, "Warren and Sanders race to out-left each other", "Bernie campaign slams Warren as candidate of the elite" and, my personal favorite and one that will prove to be prescient, "Sanders and Warren voters have astonishingly little in common" (with the astoundingly clueless sub-headline [emphasis mine] "His backers are younger, make less money, have fewer degrees and are less engaged in politics.")

     Those among us who are proud Bernie Bros whether we're Millennials or Gen Z or those of us old enough to remember when Art Linkletter was one of the hottest stars on TV, are engaged enough in politics to know a fraud when we see one (at least eventually). In our defense, Sen. Elizabeth Warren is quite the Artful Dodger, one who has no problem calling a competitor on his wine cave fundraising while forgetting her own wine-drenched fundraiser in which only the wealthy who'd ponied up a certain amount of cash got direct access to her.

     But the not altogether successful apostasy goes back decades and that's when things started to get complicated for my senior senator. At last night's debate that ended with the non-handshake seen around the world, Warren further doubled down on her suddenly tattered liberal bona fides by boasting that she was the only person on the stage who'd defeated a Republican incumbent in the last three decades.

     A quick pre-debate Google search would've informed her or her campaign staff, as Bernie immediately had, that Sanders himself had beaten a Republican incumbent in November 1990 to get in the House. At that moment, Warren seemed to lose touch with what defined 30 years and what didn't (In fact, Bernie won his first federal election in November, 1990, making it barely over 29 years ago).

     It was a screamingly embarrassing moment for Warren, one that prompted Bernie's campaign co-chair, Nina Turner, to remind us, "I know 30 years ago, she was a Republican." In fact, Warren was. While she may have run as a Democrat and beaten political nonentity Scott Brown in 2012, she was still a registered Republican voter until 1996. There are videos on Youtube of her old paid speeches at the Federalist Society in the early 90's.

     And when starts digging that far back, that's when Warren's skeletons come dancing out.

Tremors

The first tremors in her progressive credentials began rumbling when she stood by Hillary Clintion's side a little over three years ago right after she essentially mugged Sanders to get the nomination she'd nakedly said was hers by fiat. Those of us, including yours truly, were quite dismayed that Warren would tarnish her fledgling reputation as a truly liberal lawmaker by endorsing a woman who'd shamelessly vacuumed up hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars giving paid speeches to Goldman Sachs and other white shoe Wall Street firms who are openly hostile to anything remotely smelling of progressivism.

     We even shook off her shameless boasting about being part Cherokee, especially when she had the DNA test done that showed she had no more Cherokee blood in her than most any other American. An actual Native American got displaced by Warren so she could get that college berth but still we looked the other way. For once, Donald Trump, a man who by any reasonable measure can give a master class in fraud, had a good reason to taunt Warren about her Native American pretensions.

     Then the current election cycle creaked to life and the woman who'd collected $39,000,000 for her first Senate campaign in 2011-2, more than any Senate candidate that year, without one cent coming from a billionaire or Super PAC, was now attending fundraisers in Boston essentially selling access to her time.

     Five days ago, The Atlantic ran a piece about her right wing past that quoted Warren as once asking a friend in college, “Besides the Democratic Party, what other subversive organizations are you a member of?” It wasn't a hit piece. Far from it. Instead, the author, Russell Berman, openly asks if Warren should embrace her Republican past to appeal to right wing voters who may be disgusted by Donald Trump.

     So, it shouldn't be surprising that the "liberal" who's now running for the supposedly progressive party's banner calls herself to this day "a capitalist." It's understandable, as Berman writes, that she's reluctant to talk about her conservative past. Certainly, it's not because of any rightful shame of making the wrong ideological choices in her salad days as much as it is a chronic political omission. However, the person who once opposed the very idea of government regulation of anything would go to head up, before Trump's and Mulvaney's sledgehammering of it, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

     That's why it's laughable to read headlines such as Politico's that claims Warren and Sanders are trying to "out-left each other". Unlike Bernie, who was getting arrested for protesting housing discrimination in Chicago, Warren was just cobbling together her high school conservative belief system in the early 60's and cannot claim the unique decades-long progressive activism that Bernie brings to the table. Bernie doesn't have to "out-left" anyone because he's been doing it since before he first tasted Vermont syrup. It's Warren who's trying to "out-left" Bernie.

     Warren didn't do herself any favors among true progressive voters by backing away from Medicare For All when she was asked tough questions about how she would pay for the multi-trillion dollar program. Warren, who still stands by the term "capitalist", wants to work within an already corrupt existing system that automatically demands, at best, compromises such as the ACA with which we were saddled in 2010. Sanders wants to destroy the existing system and rebuild it from the ground up. And to see an example of this, listen to Bernie's ideas of infrastructure overhaul regarding the Green New Deal.

     There is no mistaking and no confusing Elizabeth Warren for anyone on The Squad (75% of which endorsing Sanders) and there should certainly be no confusing Warren for Sanders because she'd so shamelessly and easily co-opted the progressive label to which Sanders could and should lay sole claim. It's horrifying to those of us who thought she was one of us would weaponize her own gender, and disingenuously, to attack a man who to this day still honors the non-aggression pact to which he and Warren had agreed on the outset.
     In other words, we finally got rid of Hillary but she was quickly replaced by her one-time surrogate.