Everybody wants 2018 to be a fight about Elizabeth Warren
We may find out how Warren sells in places where factory owners who built companies that provide jobs are valued, not derided.
Elizabeth Warren is emerging as the symbol of “resistance” to Trump, despite the attempts of Clinton World to slide Chelsea into that slot.
That’s not by chance.
Republicans are desperate to find someone to run against in 2018. Republicans need a new foil.There is no obvious Democrat to run against, because there are no big name national Democrats left. Pelosi and Schumer are old news. Bernie has had his day in the sun.
Warren fits the bill.
First,Warren has a tainted public image because of her Cherokee problem — her claim as she was climbing the law professor ladder to Harvard Law School that she was Native American. There is no evidence that Warren has any Native American ancestry, and she never even tried to live as a Cherokee. She only started claiming to be Native American in her 30s, and behind the scenes in a way that would make her more attractive to law schools seeking faculty diversity.
Warren deserved to be mocked for what she did, but I don’t agree with calling her “Fauxchohontas” or any of the other pejoratives that people — including Trump — use to mock her. It’s insulting to real Native Americans and Cherokee, including the Cherokee researchers like Twila Barnes who have done the hard research to prove that Warren’s Native American story was just a story. I think it’s a mistake to use such verbiage, additionally, because it allows Warren to distract from what she did to exploit Native Americans and then to drop them after she obtained tenure at Harvard.
Second, Warren is a monied-socialist, even worse than Bernie. She goes on and on about how the system is rigged, but she has been involved in and beneficiary of that rigging. We have documented the counter-narrative of her life story at ElizabethWarrenWiki.org, from representation of corporations against the little guy and gal, to the accumulation of great wealth that she tries to hide. There is a lot more data to be mined.
Third, Warren’s class warfare rhetoric won’t sell nationally. Warren can rant about how factory owners didn’t built their companies on their own, but that narrative is anathema to an economy desperate for factory jobs, particularly in swing states in the midwest and non-coastal portions of states like Pennsylvania.
Fourth, Warren is viewed with suspicion by the Bernie wing of the party because she sat out almost all of the primary, and endorsed Hillary in the end (but only when it was clear Hillary would win anyway).
So bring it all together, and Republicans should want to run against Warren. That goal fits nicely with Mitch McConnell raising Warren’s national profile by cutting off one of her rants in the Senate. The pussy-hat Women’s March crowd now adores Warren as a symbol of someone who persisted, but those are almost entirely liberals already.
Democrats, by contrast, desperately need a rock star. For all the reasons Republicans want to run against Warren, liberals want Republicans to run against Warren. In many ways she’s the epitome of the modern liberal — sharp tongues, “nasty” and proud of it, with the sharp elbows she’s always had since her time in academia.
Warren’s Twitter fights with Trump must make liberals feel good, but I’m not so sure they do anything other than pidgeon-hole Warren into someone who offers no personality alternative, and who is a whole less likeable than Trump in the eyes of swing voters.
Mother Jones is picking up on this dynamic, Republicans Are Trying to Raise Elizabeth Warren’s Profile. So Are Democrats:
But there were some who theorized that McConnell was, as ever, two steps ahead. Reporters and pundits debated whether McConnell had intentionally elevated Warren’s public profile because he wants the Democratic Party to be defined by one of its most liberal members. Not long after, a report in Politico corroborated this theory: Republicans have decided to use Warren as a sort of boogeyman ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, when 10 Democratic senators are up for reelection in states Donald Trump won. By late February, the committee tasked with electing Republicans to the Senate launched digital ads attacking vulnerable Democrats by stating how often they had voted with Warren….
What’s strange about Warren is that both parties seem to agree that she should be in the spotlight. Democrats say they welcome Republicans’ decision to elevate one of their most populist voices. Ultimately, they believe Republicans’ strategy will backfire because Warren’s reputation and message resonate across the country.
What this means is that Elizabeth Warren will be at the center of coming political fights. She’s led a charmed life in academia, and in liberal Massachusetts.
We know Warren will sell well on the coasts, and will not sell well in the South. In 2018 we’ll find out how Warren plays in the “Alabama” section of Pennsylvania and across the midwest, where factory owners who built companies that provide working class jobs are valued, not derided.
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Comments
Warren is just another hillary wannabe. She is against almost everything that is good for America but bad for liberals. She acts like there is no history of her business dealings where she used every connivance under the law to get ahead at other’s expense. She lied in college to get ahead and she has insulted almost everyone she has spoken of on the right. Trump, Gorsuch and Sessions are just a few examples of her vitriol. Finally, she has offered nothing to help the working man and woman, only more onerous rules to make employment harder.
r u sure you haven’t mixed her up with Trump – except for the part about Gorsuch & Sessions. Those are the only 2 Trump hasn’t heaped vitriol on.
Warren might be just what the doctor ordered. She can shoot her mouth off like Trump, but she knows what she is talking about. By 2018, the WH will be smelling quite ripe. Even LI won’t have enough perfume to cover it up.
Too bad no one is taking your troll bait, eh?
It is starting to get ripe.
She knows what she is talking about? Examples?
FWIW Why is disparagingly calling her Fauxchohontas or Lieawatha, etc demeaning to anyone but her? She is the one who gamed the system and earned the scorn not the people she pretended to be.
When has anything Warren ever said even remotely approached reality, let alone sounded like she knew what she was talking about? In particular, her responses to questions about policy are always overflowing with hyperbole and non sequiturs. She’s far less capable than Hillary was, because she’s much more like Bernie: wild-eyed, unreasonably vitriolic, and buried in a socialist fantasy land.
Professor she screams for mocking… But I can understand why Fauxahontas and similar can be insulting to real Cherokee.
How about ‘Squats with Unions?” (Local radio commentator’s favorite)
The Death of True Political Satire, Mockery, and Justified Ridicule of crazy politicians was the first victim of PC in the Clinton Nineties.
The Death of True Political Satire, Mockery, and Justified Ridicule of crazy politicians may have ended – by democrat media of democrat figures – but it did not end on our end.
Witness ‘Fauxcahontas.’
I am sure that if most people had to choose between Fauxcahontas and investing in a Trump casino or going to Trump U, they would start making tomahawk chops.
I am also sure that within a year and a half, buyer’s remorse will be a national epidemic – unless all those coal jobs come back and we have great health care, for all, at a fraction of the cost. Can’t wait to start breathing air I can see.
I have no problem with calling her Fauxchontas or Lieawatha; both names sum up the Warren problem accurately and succinctly. She’s a fake. A fake Indian, and a fake progressive/socialist/communist.
That could make her attractive to the upper-echelon D’rats. She can make reliably communist/socialist noises in hopes of enticing the earnest young morons who were so excited about Bernie the Red. But since everybody knows that her rants are fake, there’s no danger that she’ll scare off the Wall Street money bagmen the Dems need.
Unfortunately, her glaring insincerity means that she probably won’t be able to attract the Young Communist League types after all. They were spoiled by Bernie, who’s barking mad and obviously sincere about it; the real deal. Warren is just a whiney, scolding harpy, and that can’t compare.
Now, just why she doesn’t seem to have the dumb college girls who fantasize about glass ceilings swooning all over her isn’t clear to me. Maybe they can work on that. They managed to overcome Obama’s early problems of not being “black enough”, so maybe they can do something similar with Warren.
We’ve seen Warren-types before.
She is a natural to play the nasty head of an orphanage who treats her wards like slaves while getting rich in the process.
She talks and acts like the women prison matrons in the movies who abuses her prisoners and gets rich in the process.
She would certainly lead an Indian reservation and treat her wards nastily and get rich in the process.