Elizabeth Warren

Updated 1,792 Days AgoPublic

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Elizabeth Warren’s politics aren’t impressive, and they never have been; all she has ever leaned on is a rigid obsession with the sort of basic financial regulation that barely mitigates capitalism’s greatest crimes. She’s not charismatic and appears to have absolutely zero understanding of what voters want in a candidate, as indicated by her pre-campaign soft launch on a bit of specious family lore about Native American heritage. Literally, no one cares, and yet she keeps doubling down on it. She chokes, she flinches, she reacts every time Trump insults her, and thus the public is far more familiar with her defensive “Orange Man is Mean to Me” ethnic delusion than they are her “Accountable Capitalism Act” (really inspiring name there, Liz).

Warren, who didn’t stop voting Republican until 1995, said in 2011, “I was a Republican because I thought that those were the people who best supported markets. I think that is not true anymore.” Again displaying her tone-deaf penchant for doubling down when the situation desperately calls for changing the subject, she explained further that “I was a Republican at a time when I felt like there was a problem that the markets were under a lot more strain. It worried me whether or not the government played too activist a role,” and then she declined to say if she voted for Ronald Reagan. (Incidentally, these quotes came from a Daily Beast interview titled “I Created Occupy Wall Street,” an ungenerous fudge on Warren’s original statement that she “created much of the intellectual foundation of what they do,” and her professed support for the Occupy insurgency. One might still accuse her of taking too much credit for the “movement,” but given the futility and ultimate failure of Occupy, I’d argue it’s actually pretty fair to call her its Fairy Godmother.)

--Amber A'Lee Frost, It's Bernie, Bitch

Basically just believes things can be solved by putting soft-claws on Capitalism. There's at least an intellectual consistency there, but it means she very often falls short of even bare minimums, like actual support for Medicare-For-All. So she's a mile ahead of most of the candidates, but a mile behind Sanders.

Campaign Timeline

• 2018-10-15: Warren releases results of a DNA test, playing into Trump's taunts of her and pissing off a lot of Native Americans
• 2018-12-31: Warren announces her exploratory committee
• 2019-01-24: Warren proposes wealth tax on ultra-millionaires, which is actually the approach to taxation of the rich and powerful that economists often argue for; arguably a positive example of her combination of economics wonkery and populist rhetoric.
• 2019-01-30: Warren introduces anti-firststrike bill to legally preclude the U.S. from using a nuclear weapon first in a conflict.
• 2019-02-18: Warren introduces a childcare plan to be paid for via a wealth tax, which the NYT likes, although there are some practical concerns.
• 2019-03-08: Another big proposal, a rubric for breaking up big tech companies: "Companies with an annual global revenue of $25 billion or more and that offer to the public an online marketplace, an exchange, or a platform for connecting third parties would be designated as “platform utilities.” These companies would be prohibited from owning both the platform utility and any participants on that platform." Heralded as something that would break up Amazon, Facebook, and Google, oddly leaving out Apple.
  • Among the objections, Mike Masnick on Techdirt brings up that "It doesn't open up new opportunities for a protocol-based approach, and simply assumes that the world will always be managed by giant platform companies -- just slightly smaller, and highly regulated, ones. And that might actually lead us to a much worse future, one that is still controlled by more centralized systems, rather than more decentralized, distributed protocols where the users have power."
• 2019-03-09: When interviewed by Nilay Patel of The Verge, Warren does agree that the rule would apply to Apple. "Either they run the platform or they play in the store. They don’t get to do both at the same time."
• 2019-10-21: While polling increasingly well, party elites remain uncommitted and wary of her.

A Warren administration would probably be less likely to hire former Clinton (Bill and Hillary) and Obama aides in key posts than, say, a Biden, Booker or Harris one. So people connected with the party establishment (like many DNC members) may be fine with Warren but prefer other candidates for more self-interested reasons.