Opinion by: Saagar Enjeti
The grim future of an Elizabeth Warren presidency was put on full display this weekend in a series of deep dives into her campaign.
The first began with a New York Times writeup on the fluid nature of the 2020 Democratic primary.
The Massachusetts Senator is apparently trying to contrast herself with Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, and Bernie Sanders by vowing to wear a pink planned parenthood scarf during her inaugural address and sprinkling her campaign stump speeches with reference to gender.
I can’t think of a more perfect symbol for how I’ve described here before as one whose presidency is almost certain to be marked by a failure to pass any substantive legislation on healthcare and financial reform while issuing a flurry of woke social justice executive orders that will rip the country in half along cultural lines. She is increasingly making it clearer that despite her rhetorical flourishes calling for Medicare for All, she falls far closer to Joe Biden’s theory of the case than she does Bernie Sanders’.
Just listen to this exchange with voters this weekend in which she touts her public option choice for phase one of her healthcare plan rather than the full transition:
“Now I understand Medicare for All has a supplemental, is that correct? Medicare period. Even the Frech have supplemental” “We’re going putting together is complete health care coverage for all the basic elements that doesn’t cover things like cosmetic surgery and certain things like that. But it’s to cover basic health care. Just so everyone knows that includes vision, it includes dental and includes the all important long term care.”
Warren’s entire healthcare plan is designed to reap the electoral benefits of calling something Medicare for All, all while basically proposing a robust public option. Now remember, her so-called transition plan calls for biden/pete care in the first 3 years of her presidency before hopefully trying to pass a follow on bill in the 3rd year of presidency and somehow finding some time for immigration reform in there.
So, this is simply fantasy. As I’ve said here before, she just doesn’t believe that healthcare is the number 1 threat to the daily lives of the American worker. She was marked in the fights of 2008 and the financial crisis. She believes institutional reform in that regard is what’s needed. The problem, of course, is that healthcare is the number one concern of Democratic voters and that her transition plan revealed just how unserious about it that she is, hence the massive drop in her poll numbers.
Warren’s singular focus on financial issues highlights another grim feature of her presidency, and that is the return to a largely neo-con washington centric foreign policy. Journalist Zaid Jilani has commented on this show before that Warren appears to be running for Secretary of the Treasury more than president, especially given how little that she talks about foreign policy. As he so aptly put it, when you don’t have anything to say on a topic then it almost always just gets colored in by whatever the establishment wants when you’re in power.
She already let the cat out of the bag this weekend in a Guardian op-ed…
Titled “Donald trump has destroyed American leadership, I’ll restore it.” the op-ed whined about how Trump alienated the NATO alliance, it bashes him for meeting with so-called autocrats from Moscow and Pyongyang, and questioning international agreements that the U.S. is party to.
Now, I swear I’ve heard all these criticisms from a Morning Joe panel or CNN expert analysis with the likes of Max Boot and Richard Haas at the Council on Foreign Relations. The entire op-ed is a dream come true for the cable news syndicate and it could have been written by a foreign policy speechwriter for George W Bush or Hillary Clinton. She literally writes “As president, I will recommite to our alliances – diplomatically, militarily, and economically.” Heard that before.
The sheer normalcy of this op-ed is what should scare you. Normalcy means a default to the military industrial complex, to the current system of subsidizing the entire world at the expense of the U.S. taxpayer and above all, it is a lack of critical thinking about America’s position in the world and how to use its military might to effect major change.
All of this is to say is that Elizabeth Warren has thought very deeply about one thing, financial power in this country. And I don’t think any of us have doubts about that, but her total embrace of women’s march identity politics, playing political games on where she exactly stands on healthcare, and a neo-con lite foreign policy shows that she basically wants to please establishment Democrats so badly that she is almost certain to be co-opted by them if she were to ascend to the presidency.
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