Ya se van los warrenistas…
Porque vienen clintonistas…— paraphrase of ‘La Cucaracha”
You would think that Democrats, horrified by the way the Tea Party has pulled the GOP to the extreme right, would immediately and utterly reject any efforts to pull their own party toward populist extremism.
And yet, we keep hearing that there are some who seriously want to see Elizabeth Warren mount a challenge to Hillary Clinton.
Today, we have this piece in the WashPost, headlined “Democrats see rising populist sentiment. But can it shake Hillary Clinton?”
Well, let’s hope not. In fact, the sooner Hillary Clinton publicly repudiates the Warren movement and all who sail in her, the better. Assuming that she wants to get elected in the fall of 2016.
Because folks, I rather like the Wall Street-friendly, hawkish Hillary (admittedly, I like the hawkish bit better than the Wall Street bit), and don’t want to see her having any truck with the self-appointed guardians of the 99 percent.
And you know, I’m the guy you’ve gotta please. I’m the swing voter. I’m the constituency that decides elections, even though you don’t hear much about us, what with the media being obsessed with the left-right dichotomy.
And with things sort of uncertain on the GOP side (it could be Jeb Bush, but it could also be Rand Paul), I find it reassuring that there is likely to be at least one (reasonably) acceptable candidate on the November 2016 ballot.
With that in mind… Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if there were a fairly robust challenge to ex-Sec. Clinton from the left, as long as she in no way kowtowed to it, and soundly defeated it. That could have a salutary effect….
Related Posts
“And you know, I’m the guy you’ve gotta please. I’m the swing voter. ”
You’re not the swing voter Hilary Clinton is looking to attract. You’re not even a swing voter – you’re in a niche group that’s even smaller than the Tea Party and the Loony Left. It includes all the worst parts of both – big government healthcare and regulation plus big defense and anti-gay marriage and anti-abortion.
I’m the worst parts of both? Yikes!
To answer this from Wyeth Ruthven:
Here are some links… here and here and here.
But you’re still not going to get a lot of detail, because I’ve never had much occasion to write about Sen. Warren. I don’t see much point in discussing her at any length, since my distaste for both populism and ideological rigidity sort of count her out at the outset.
As y’all probably know, I’m also turned off by politicians who use the word “fight” a lot. I actually took Hillary Clinton to task for it back here.
My impression is that Elizabeth Warren is the sort who says “fight” a lot…
Warren is objectionable from both a policy and a personality perspective. Two strikes and one could only hope she was out.
It is truly amazing the number of Warren bumper stickers puttering around Massachusetts. It’s like distilling the Tea Party down to just one pol…and just as clueless.
Hate to remind you, but when it comes to SC, it won’t matter which way you swing, because the state’s electoral votes are already locked in for the GOP, no matter which candidate the party chooses.
Wellll… I was speaking for voters like me…
Not sure what is extremist about Warren. She sides with consumers over the HUGE banks that brought our economy crashing down. Is it extremist to regulate an industry that has proven to be reckless to the financial welfare of the country? I’d call that pragmatic. Is it extremist to reject a decade of foreign policies that have cost us thousand of lives and trillions of dollars?
The extremist is someone who pushed for war against an utterly benign nation. The extremist is someone who wants to repeal a minimal level of responsible regulations to reign in reckless banking practices. It’s extremist to label the fifth report that largely exonerated the administration “crap”.
I define extremism as someone who continues to get it wrong. And that extremist label fits the ever more dangerous Lindsey Graham.
If there is anything Brad doesn’t like it is populism. If they are sucking up to the hayseeds at the mercantile, it’s time to take out the trash. He frets over the Old Roman Virtues. Especially if the virtue runs counter to our ideals, then it’s seriously time to fret over the amount of water in the wine.
Elizabeth Warren lied about her Native American heritage and rode the free ride as far as it would take her. She is an opportunistic populist who has tapped into the “bud” ideologists on the far left. Democrat or Republican, a liar is still a liar and cannot be trusted. If she would lie about something so important to Native Americans and take away money and opportunity from deserving Native Americans, what is it that she wouldn’t lie about? As far as I am concerned, this alone is worth 3 strikes and you are out.
Elizabeth Warren is a multi-millionaire, where did she get her money? From HuffPo, 2012 – “Warren earned more than $700,000 from Harvard, book royalties and consulting fees, and lives in a $5 million house, the report shows. She has multiple mutual funds and stock in IBM, the sole individual stock she owns. The total portfolio is worth nearly $8 million.” Guess what, Warren is a member of the 1% in good standing. Another hypocrite using populist speeches to further her agenda.
Repeal legislation that protects the consumer from banking interests you say? Try this one on for size. In 1999, Bill Clinton led the way to repeal Glass-Steagal with the aid of Phil Gramm and replaced it with Gramm-Leach-Bliley. Clinton got what the Democrats wanted, less regulation on loans to unqualified borrowers and placed the ultimate responsibility on the shoulders of the taxpayers via Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Gramm got what Republicans wanted by removing the same restrictions on banking. Guess what? It backfired and the country ended up with the 2007 financial disaster. Problem is that the blame has been placed mostly on the guy who was earning $25k and bought a home worth $250k but that guy was in the minority, the majority of bad loans were due to greedy speculators on the right and left taking advantage of the lax regulations and over-extending their ability to cover the loans when they were called in. The housing inventory was at historic highs because of all of the get-rich-quick flipping opportunities both sides used. The latest budget submitted by congress and signed by the president contains language that repeals or invalidates many of the Dodd-Frank restrictions. Now, tell us again, did Obama veto the budget or approve it? Didn’t it take both houses to pass the budget? When the budget was passed in the senate, I believe Democrats were still in charge, right? But, 1% Warren was against it, right? Therefore, all previous lies and hypocrisy are irrelevant, right?
She didn’t “lie” about her heritage. She may have allowed exaggerated ideas about it to float.
“She may have allowed exaggerated ideas about it to float.” Kathryn
So, what is the difference? If you allow “exaggerated ideas” to continue, then you are supporting a lie.
Bart, take your partisan hat off for a minute. Warren does have a small amount of Indian blood so this cannot be regarded as a lie. But perhaps some measure of unwarranted exaggeration is present in her life story. So what?
Instead let’s focus only on the banking issue itself. Plenty of blame to go around but zero involving Elizabeth Warren. On the issue itself we need a champion for the consumer and taxpayer. Elizabeth Warren is about all we have right now. Everyone else, Dems and GOPers alike cater to the big bank lobby and their endless stream of money. Let’s get behind Elizabeth Warren now before the Plutocrats take over the country. Sadly that day is closer than you think.
Take my partisan hat off for a minute? Only if you take your blinders off.
As for the claim of Native American heritage, so far, there is no “documented” proof, only verbal claims. As far as claims go, on my dad’s side, according to verbal information, my great great grandmother was a full blood Cherokee but I don’t claim or use it to any advantage, “exaggerated” or otherwise.
When Elizabeth Warren liquidates her mutual funds and sells her IBM stock, get back to me. Until then, she takes advantage of the system to build personal wealth and is no different than anyone else who capitalizes on the capitalist system.
So why is it objectionable when someone like Warren also makes money? Did she not earn it? Or did she steal it from consumers like the big banks she attacks?
Warren is very smart and very focused, but she’s no politician. She’s more useful on the sidelines, yelling questions that embarrass the rich and powerful.
LOL
I wouldn’t vote for her based on her stupid “You didn’t build that” mantra. She demonstrates a scary lack of understanding of basic economics, especially when it cubes to student loans. I bet she can’t even balance a checkbook.
Cubes= comes..
Hey, let’s not get on people who can’t balance checkbooks. Those suckers are TRICKY.
I’m actually quite good with numbers. I did well in math in school, all the way through calculus. I had a very high math SAT score, higher than my verbal. Yeah, I know people generally tend to do better on math than verbal, but I’m such a word guy.
But in my experience, checking accounts don’t act like a calculus problem. They’re much more slippery, and messy and illogical. Expenditures don’t go through in chronological order, so that you can almost never get a one-to-one comparison of what you think you have and what the bank thinks you have at a given instant in time. And there are so many types of transactions — check, debit, electronic transactions — that all flow through the pipeline differently.
I think they operate on something akin to Bistromathematics.
The thing that gets me about checkbooks is that you THINK they’re going to behave logically, like math problems in school. But the numbers are way messier and less precise.
As I’ve mentioned before, my wife handles all our accounts, save one — the account I set up to deal with advertising revenue from my blog, and related matters. I use that account to pay for my gasoline, lunches, my Capital City Club bill, and such. Aside from the Cap City bill, I mostly use it to pay for those little things that people used to carry cash for in the last century.
This should not be hard, and yet at some point early in the life of the account, I missed an expenditure somewhere, and to this day, the bank says I have 20 dollars or so less than I should have by my calculations. After I first discovered this, I spent like whole weekend afternoons going back over a year’s transactions, one by one, trying to find an explanation for the discrepancy. I couldn’t find it.
I’ve never made another error in these nearly five years, but that one endures. I continue to be about 20 bucks off. I HATE this. My wife would, at some point, just accept the bank’s version and adjust her own figures to make them match. I will not do this. I expect numbers to be perfect and to match exactly, and for there to be an explanation for every penny. Because numbers are the one thing that SHOULD be that way, neat and perfect.
But they’re not. They’re a fraud. When money is involved, numbers are just as messy as the rest of life…
Not saying she didn’t earn what she was paid but when one is worth an estimated $8 million, a large part in mutual funds managed by TIAA-CREF. TIAA-CREF is no different in principle that any other mutual fund manager when it comes to obtaining the highest return possible on investments. It is primarily geared for people working for and engaged in non-profit organizations, i.e., academic, medical, cultural, governmental and research fields. You know, hundreds of thousands over the past few years from Harvard, the federal government, and other sources of income that are non-profit related.
I like Warren’s economic ideas. What Wall Street doesn’t like about her is her insistence on transparency and accountability. In my book, only the deceitful run from transparency and accountability. Her wealth has come from, for the most part like a lot of Americans, buying years ago and building equity.
If Brad thinks Warren represents left wing extremism, he needs to get out more. She’s nowhere near the far left, and is only somewhat less an incrementalist than is Hillary. Her proposals supporting lower-income workers and on regulating the huge bite the financial sector takes out of our economy coupled with the warnings about the danger many would subject us to with crass speculation and creative bookkeeping are hardly extreme.
The criticism aimed by other posters is primarily personal attack (a common political strategy and logical fallacy) and vague generalization without any serious debate or critique of policy – unless dismissive comments about checkbook balancing or lack of understanding of “basic economics” are considered substantive.
I could go into details about her economic naivete but what’s the point? She thinks students should be charged the same interest rate as banks charge each other. That is pure ignorance of the concept of risk and would lead to more defaults and fewer banks willing to lend students money. She has no clue about economics.
Libertarianism is the gold standard for economic naivety
Yes, bud, except for all the others.
Letting the market decide prices is just pure stupidity, I know. Better to have prices fixed by government and monopolistic companies. That’s working very well.
The tea party is/was nothing more than the Me Generation grown old and crotchety. Warren may be a populist to a degree, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. After all, it was the populism of the late 19th and early 20th century that provided much of the impetus for the reforms, policies and programs of the New Deal. Warren represents a more reasoned, constructive approach to some of the same issues that originally gave rise to the tea party. With respect to Wall Street, for example, her views seem to me appropriate, especially given the fact that, as folks like Michael Lewis point out, Wall Street has increasingly decoupled itself from the real economy most of the rest of us operate in. I’m not sure Warren would make a great national candidate, but I wouldn’t be opposed to her having an influence over the positions taken by the nominee.
I just can’t see Warren as an extremist, although her approach and manner are certainly more confrontational than that of many others who hold the same or similar policy positions. This can be abrasive for some, but not necessarily extreme. Many of her positions boil down to wanting more effective regulation of banks and other financial institutions to minimize risk to the general public. That risk lies in taxpayer guarantees for high-risk investment strategies that do not benefit the general public (do not efficiently allocate capital for the benefit of the overall “real” economy), as M. Prince has noted. She opposes the expansive growth of institutions to the point that the mismanagement of single private entities risks the entire economy and demands public bailouts.
I think it is a tribute to the marketing skills of the financial industry that they have managed to portray any efforts to place restraints on their activities as extremist. They must have studied NRA marketing strategies. Any restraint on complete freedom of action is extreme. Debate after citizens have seen their jobs and their savings destroyed by reckless financial institutions is too heated, too emotional. Everyone should step back and cool off and – ideally – forget about it until the next time.
If there is a non-emotional way to get the citizens of this country to objectively consider, and force their politicans to consider, the tradeoff between benefits and risks of the activities of financial institutions and make policy decisions accordingly, I’m all for it. It doesn’t seem to be happening.
Actually, the financial sector hasn’t really needed to engage in much marketing in order to stifle efforts to regulate their “industry”. As Steve Fraser points out in his The Age of Acquiescence, multiple factors and actors – de-industrialization and the increase in precarious employment that produced a general sense of disruption and social destabilization; the decline of the labor movement, leaving no broad-based institution to deal with that disruption; free-market triumphalism in the wake of the failure of the state-socialism; the rise of new forces in finance sector based on leveraged buyouts; greater social and economic individuation; neo-Horatio-Algerism and the glorification of the entrepreneur (i.e. “job makers”) – all these and more have conspired to produce greater public willingness to submit the so-called “dictates of the marketplace” in this, America’s “second Gilded Age”.
Lack of education and having limited skills that are worthwhile to the job market has contributed greatly to the income gap. A textile worker in South Carolina was doomed if he didn’t adapt and retrain himself.
Amen and Amen. Well stated, without over-generalizing, name-calling, or attacking any messenger.
Im with Lynn on this. Our national financial health should not be a partisan issue. Most Democrats and all Republicans side with the banks. Can’t we at least have one politician watching out for the ret of us?
Is the economy doing well now or not? If not, then why would we change anything?
Merry Christmas! I’m playing Santa to my three year old son and five month old daughter. Brisket is smoking overnight for lunch tomorrow. Drinking a Bell’s Winter Ale.
Have a Merry Christmas, everyone!
The economy is doing well for the big banks and stock marketeers. Not so much for the middle class. Warren is labeled a “populist” because she puts the financial concerns of the average citizen ahead of that of corporations.
Also, as of 2010. Student loans are primarily made through the government not private banks. The government is charging the interest. But student loan interest isn’t the real problem in affording an education, it’s the ballooning cost of the principal.
The ballooning cost is partly due to easy access to cheap loans.
WOW Doug. That doesn’t even make the tiniest bit of sense. Are you just utterly incapable of ever seeing greed in anything?
It’s called economics, bud. If you provide easy money to students, guess what happens ?
I can’t explain all of it to you right now, so…I’m going to give this job to Clemenza. I want reliable people, people who aren’t going to be carried away.
Greed has nothing to do with it, bud. Unless you are talking about the greed of universities spending excessively on activities unrelated to education and making millionaires of college presidents.
Too many students get too many loans they have no business getting. The biggest offenders are students who use loans to pay for non-education expenses.
And those who incur loans in excess of $100K to get junk degrees with no job prospects. I have a young relative who is carrying a $100K balance for a degree in Journalism from an out-of-state school. He’s now a police officer. Bad decisions lead to difficult consequences.
Student loans are non-dischargeable. Kids do not understand what that means. If they did, they would only take such a loan for a career track degree that offers the near certainty of quick repayment.
I am a true believer in liberal arts degrees – but a near cynic when it comes to debt accrual. I agree that easy debt offerings to students do far more harm that good, all things considered.
That said, the real issue is not the cost of higher education, it is the way many states have backed away from supporting (financially and by demanding accountability) universities. States, especially ones like SC, have a vested interest in higher education – it will pay significant societal dividends. Education is the way to increasing per capita incomes. What SC as a state has done is the worst of all worlds; creating a lottery funded “subsidy” program tied to cutting direct state expenditures was a recipe for tuition price inflation. Add to this a serious disinterest in committed oversight through appointing competent boards and we get what we got.
I almost hate to say this, but Clemson deserves credit for committing itself to academic excellence – along with a strong fan sports program. True the last president was ethically challenged with regard to his efforts to “boost” the school’s standing – but the university is trying to deliver. The same cannot be said of USC.
If a state is going to take responsibility for having a state sponsored higher ed system, then it needs to appoint competent boards instead of rewarding political supporters. Otherwise, it would be better for the state to cut all ties to the institutions and let them sink or swim under their own management and leadership.
Harris Pastides makes around 800k a year at USC and will make over a million in 2017.
is he greedy, bud? Did he earn his salary?
I was shocked at the way student loans were handled when my youngest graduated from USC. Each semester loan was individualized interest from the time of the semester. There was an initial offer to roll them all into one loan, but if you weren’t savvy, there were a ton of offers from other lenders (who knows how they got our name). When I was in school, interest was deferred until the date of graduation, and it was all one loan. I’m thankful my children worked hard during school, and we didn’t have too much to repay, but there are a lot of ways out there to be scammed.
Also, when you were in school, the state funded higher education considerably more, and students demanded fewer amenities, so tuition was a lot lower in real terms. Also, there were grants for a lot more students, and and and….
So true, Kathryn.