Elizabeth Warren the Magnificent
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)
This should be enough to put a smile on the face of even the grouchiest, most cynical progressive sourpuss out there. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the next senator from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren:
We got into this whole…we got in this hole one billion dollars, uh, one trillion dollars on tax cuts for the rich under George Bush. We got into this hole 2 trillion dollars on two wars we put on a credit card for our children and grandchildren to pay off. And we got into this hole one trillion dollars on a Medicare drug program that A) was not paid for, and B) was 40% more expensive than it needs to be because it was a giveaway to the drug companies. Which is four trillion right there! Applause. So part of the way you fix this problem is, like, don’t do those things! Laughter, applause.
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I hear all this, you know, “Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.” No! There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there—good for you! But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that maurauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea—God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.
Changing the system won’t come from dropping out and voting third party, nor will it come from blindly defending the Administration and hoping a Republican never holds the White House again in our lifetime. Changing the system will come from voting people like Elizabeth Warren into office all across the country, proving that they can win using this sort of rhetoric, and then holding them accountable to their campaign promises.
And here’s the little secret the Democratic consultant class either doesn’t understand or willfully refuses to understand: this sort of rhetoric won’t just win in Massachusetts. It will win in Omaha, too. It will win the day from Annapolis to Anchorage, from Kalamazoo to Kailua-Kona.
Will there be places this message won’t win, and voters whose heartstrings it won’t touch? Yes, of course. Most of those places will be heavily rural or bastions of the Bible Belt and the Deep South. But those places were unwinnable and those people unreachable anyway without destroying everything the Democratic Party is supposed to stand for.
The amount of contortion necessary for Democrats to win in places Warren’s message won’t work means those places aren’t worth winning in the first place.
The Democratic Party would be far, far better off maximizing voter turnout in places where this message does work, than in weakening its message so much that its support becomes a mile wide but an inch deep.
Most importantly, if the Democratic Party were to elect a bevy of candidates who talked this talk and then walked the walk while in office, the Party would actually succeed in moving economic policy significantly to the left while in power, and in stopping the Rightist juggernaut when eventually forced into the minority. It would actually do the job not just of getting elected, but of actually doing the things they were elected to do, which is the whole point of politics. Yes, it might lose some Wall St. cash in the process. But if that’s the overriding concern, it’s only a matter of time before violent revolution or totalitarian takeover anyway. So there’s not much to lose, anyway.
And the good news? Warren is up by two points over Scott Brown in the latest poll.
Help Elizabeth Warren win in 2012 by donating and/or volunteering. From there, 2016 is right around the corner. Ms. Warren would be a formidable candidate.
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