President Obama is right.
I don’t usually say that, but when it comes to Elizabeth Warren, the president is spot on.
{mosads}Obama told Yahoo News last week that the Massachusetts senator is “absolutely wrong” when she says giving him fast-track authority on trade could roll back powers under the Dodd-Frank Act and that her assertions “don’t stand the test of fact and scrutiny.”
The left loves Warren, in the same way it used to love Obama.
When he first ran for president, the Illinois senator broke all kinds of social media records on new platforms like Facebook.
These days, it is Warren who is the darling of the Internet generation. According to CNN Money, “Warren has been featured in more than 40 Upworthy posts. Three of those stories have generated more than 1 million page views — more than any other public figure who’s been covered by the site. Those posts rank among the top 5 percent of all of the stories published in the site’s three-year history.”
Warren might not be running to replace Obama, but she might as well be. Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) was Warren before Warren was Warren, and his brand of Democratic socialist populism is forcing 2016 front-runner Hillary Clinton to be more like Liz. As The Christian Science Monitor pointed out, “Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D) of Massachusetts, darling of the liberal left, isn’t running for president in 2016. But in a way, she’s still very much in the race. Just listen to Hillary Rodham Clinton speak in these early days of her campaign, and the populist, Warren-esque language on income inequality and social mobility is unmistakable.”
Warren might be potent politically, but if her populism were implemented, it would be disastrous.
She claims that the “Big Banks will own our democracy,” and wants the government to break them up by fiat. But American banks, by global standards, aren’t particularly big, and provide a necessary stabilizing force in our economy. Small businesses get the vast majority of their loans from America’s biggest banks, homeowners get the vast majority of their mortgages from the biggest banks, and consumers get greater access to credit at lower costs from the biggest banks.
Breaking up the big banks would prove to be terribly destructive to our economy and would hurt American small businesses the hardest.
Similarly, Warren has lashed out at the Federal Reserve. She wants lawmakers to have greater control over the one institution that kept the economy from going completely into the ditch during the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Without Ben Bernanke at the helm, I shudder to think how long and how deep the depression might have been, had the former Fed chairman not had the ability and the vision to pump resources into a dangerous deflationary period.
Warren also has special hatred for Wall Street, and she realizes that this line of attack is especially politically potent. That’s why she is making the charge that passing trade promotion authority could somehow lead to the gutting of Dodd-Frank.
The White House calls her accusations “baseless,” “desperate,” “with no bearing or relation to anything we are doing,” according to Politico.
But the facts don’t seem to matter to Elizabeth Warren. What matters to her is the narrative, and the narrative is pretty simple: The American people are getting screwed, and I have a plan to fight back. And that plan involves throwing bankers in jail, breaking up the banks and spreading the money around to everybody else.
It’s hard to get to the left of Obama. He is, by all measures, a pretty progressive fellow. But even he has had enough of the Elizabeth Warren sideshow.
Speaking at an event in Oregon on Friday, the president said of Warren and some of her colleagues, “I actually think some of my dearest friends are wrong. They’re just wrong.”
He’s right. Elizabeth Warren is wrong, and not just on trade — her brand of populist, left-wing socialism is bad for the economy and bad for the American people, no matter how good her rhetoric might sound.
Feehery is president of QGA Public Affairs and blogs at www.thefeeherytheory.com. He served as spokesman to former Speaker of the House Denny Hastert (R-Ill.), as communications director to former Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas) when he was majority whip, and as speechwriter to former Minority Leader Bob Michel (R-Ill.).