Newly combative Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren
On Wednesday night, Elizabeth Warren earned rave reviews for her assertive, combative performance at the Democratic Party presidential debate in Las Vegas, Nevada. Warren spent most of her time going after Mike Bloomberg, and by many accounts, Warren eviscerated Bloomberg. But the question becomes, to what end? Warren was considered to be in the “left lane” of the nomination contest, and that lane is dominated by Bernie Sanders, yet Warren barely attacked Sanders. Likewise, Warren (and to be fair, her competitors onstage) barely laid a glove on Donald Trump, who, after all, is supposed to be the subject of their competition. So, what is Elizabeth Warren doing, and did it help her candidacy?
To understand Warren’s actions in going after Bloomberg almost exclusively at Wednesday’s debate, let’s look at two events involving her in recent years. First, Warren received national attention in 2011 with her impromptu remarks at a home reception during the beginning stages of her U.S. Senate campaign:
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 marauding 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.
These remarks by Warren placed her in a moderate/left position, essentially saying that capitalism and business owners should be rewarded, but that their success should also be recognized as the result of many labor and government actions that border on socialism.
Fast forward to March 2019, and this CNN town hall appearance by Warren that we have mentioned here many times before. Jake Tapper of CNN asks Warren whether she and some of her fellow Democratic presidential candidates are “socialists.” Warren gives a succinct and brilliant response, defending well-regulated capitalism and positioning herself to the right of the self-avowed socialist Sanders:
I believe in markets, and I believe in the value that we get out of markets. But, it’s got to be markets with rules. You know, a market without rules is theft. But a market with rules, a market with a cop on the beat to enforce those rules, that’s how it is that small businesses can get a chance to start and grow…. That’s how it is that we get new products.
Warren’s reply captures the sweet spot of Democratic Party values, going all the way back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal of the 1930s that brought us Social Security and many regulatory agencies designed to place rules on corporations that had run amok, which had led to the Great Depression.
So maybe Elizabeth Warren really is best positioned to occupy that unifying place straddling the left and moderate lanes in the Democratic Party that some previously thought Kamala Harris could occupy. If so, then it might make sense for Warren to play the game of Moderate Whack-a-Mole that Pete Buttigieg also seemed to be playing against Amy Klobuchar at Wednesday’s debate, in order to eliminate some of the many moderates that are now splitting the votes for the presidential nomination and essentially leaving Sanders to gain a plurality of delegates and possibly back into the nomination as the unchallenged far-left candidate. If so, then it may also make sense for Warren to try to knock out Mike Bloomberg first, because Bloomberg had been polling as the top moderate in recent days, and also because Bloomberg, viewed by many Democratic activists as an untrustworthy, Republican-lite billionaire, is the ripest target. Right now, that’s the best explanation we have for Warren’s singular focus on Bloomberg.
Photo by Phil Roeder, used under Creative Commons license. https://is.gd/fwoZdu
