Updated below (on Wednesday, January 2, 2019)
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts celebrates her election to a second Senate term in Boston in November (above), and yesterday she declared her intention to run for the White House. She’d make a good president, but match-up polling has her barely beating “President” Pussygrabber in November 2020, while both Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, the clear front-runners for the Democratic nomination, both beat Pussygrabber in the match-up polling by double digits.
I guess that maybe Elizabeth Warren deserves a political Brownie point or two for having gone first this time around, that is, for being the first upper-tier Democratic Party presidential candidate to have formed an exploratory committee for 2020.
But I just can’t forget that in 2016 we pretty much heard crickets from her, and she isn’t polling well right now; she has yet to hit double digits in any nationwide poll of Democratic presidential preference taken over the past three months.
By comparison, both Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders have hit double digits in all of those polls.
Bright and shiny new object (to lift from Claire McCaskill) Beto O’Rourke only sometimes hits double digits in those polls, as does Billary Clinton when she stupidly is included in them. (I put the chances of Billary running yet once again at maybe 1 percent or 2 percent. Oh, I’m sure that she’d still very much like to be president, but even she probably doesn’t want the embarrassment of running again and failing spectacularly again.)
According to the nationwide polling, right now it’s really down to Biden and Bernie, but I’m not one to say, anti-democratically, that someone shouldn’t run, even if he or she doesn’t have much of a chance, as is the case with Warren. If you qualify to run for president and wish to run for president, knock yourself out; the voters will sort you out.*
As I’ve noted, Warren as of late unfairly has been attacked, and it’s been rather sad to watch her implode instead of explode, perhaps especially over her Native American DNA campaign.
I don’t think that she did anything wrong by pushing back against “President” Pussygrabber’s perpetually calling her “Pocahontas,” but apparently the whole episode backfired on her in the court of public opinion.
I think that Warren would make a good president, but I also think that as a presidential candidate she’d be smeared as just another Massachusetts egghead, a la Michael Dukakis and John Kerry. It’s not fair, but all is fair in love and war and politics.
Also unfair is the fact that while I always thought that Billary Clinton’s and the Billarybots’ claim that Billary faced sexism/misogyny always was bullshit — voters haven’t liked Billary primarily because she is unlikable and untrustworthy and reeks of corruption, not because she is a woman — I think that as a presidential candidate, Warren would face actual sexism and misogyny.
That’s not her fault, and you easily could argue that she shouldn’t be punished for it, but the larger issue is whether or not she can beat Pussygrabber in November 2020.
A Morning Consult poll taken in August showed Warren beating Pussygrabber in a hypothetical match-up, but by only 4 percentage points, while that same poll showed that both Bernie and Biden beat Pussygrabber by 12 percentage points each.
Recall that months before the November 2016 election, Billary Clinton led Pussygrabber by only single digits in most polls. By the time Election Day arrived, she was ahead of Pussygrabber by only a few percentage points. We all know how that ended up.
Unless the match-up polling changes, it would be too risky to make Warren the 2020 Dem nominee, especially when both Bernie and Biden do much better in the match-up polling against Pussygrabber.
(In that August Morning Consult poll, by the way, both Cory Booker and Kamala Harris lost to Pussygrabber, by 2 points and 3 points, respectively. They are non-starters, in my book. I mean, sure, go all-out for craven identity politics, but then also ensure that Pussygrabber gets a second term! Woo hoo! Smart!)
I’m OK with Warren being the 2020 Democratic vice-presidential nominee, but with both Bernie and Biden also being from the Northeast, should one of them snag the presidential nomination, as I expect to be the case, I don’t know that either of them would pick another Northeasterner as his running mate.
In the end, Elizabeth Warren might remain in the U.S. Senate for the remainder of her political career, which wouldn’t be a bad thing for the people of the nation. The Senate has few progressive fighters like she.
In the meantime, I’m focused on the Democrats nominating the most progressive candidate possible who also has a very good chance of beating “President” Pussygrabber (polling against “Pussygrabber” by at least double digits is where my own comfort zone is).
That candidate right now is Bernie Sanders. He fulfills both requirements, while no one else does. Everyone else is either not progressive (enough) or probably can’t beat Pussygrabber, or both.
Update (Wednesday, January 2, 2019): Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi has written another thoughtful-as-usual piece on the unfair treatment of Elizabeth Warren by the corporately owned and controlled media.
I agree with most of what Taibbi has to say, and I too am concerned that the corporate media aren’t reporting the news so much as they are trying to influence the outcome of the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primary contest. (As I’ve noted, it would be no shock that the corporate media bash a candidate who promises to rein in corporations!)
That said, when I get behind a presidential candidate, over time I give him (or her) a lot of money (in proportion to my income, anyway), my time and energy (OK, mostly that’s blogging, but still…) and my emotional investment. Therefore, the candidate’s viability, as best as it can be discerned, matters to me.
Fact is, Warren isn’t looking great right now. (Yes, that might change, but right now… [I make no predictions as to who the eventual Democratic presidential nominee will be, but I can and I do look at and report what the current polling indicates.]) Even among those of her own party, Warren can’t get double digits in the nationwide polls. If she doesn’t excite her own party, how can she excite the national electorate?
That aside, Bernie Sanders (who gets double digits in the nationwide polls) generates more enthusiasm within me personally, perhaps because he remains necessarily critical of the Democratic Party where appropriate and when necessary, and also because yes, I do at least somewhat believe that it’s his turn.
He did a great job in 2016, given what he was up against, winning 22 states and garnering 46 percent of the democratically earned delegates to Queen Billary’s 54 percent. Had the Billarybots within the DNC and elsewhere within the establishmentarian party machine not rigged the process, who can say that Bernie wouldn’t have won the nomination?
Any other candidate who had done as well against party juggernaut Billary as Bernie did would be the heir apparent right now, but because he’s a democratic socialist instead of a Democratic Party hack, Bernie’s accomplishments in 2016 (and before and afterward) largely are ignored.
That’s some fucking bullshit, and I think it’s (past) time that we reward him by making him the presidential nominee this time.
Taibbi writes about “electability,” and yes, ideally that should be for the voters, not the corporate media, to decide. Yet there is a synergy between the voters and the media; both influence each other, for good and for ill, and there probably is no way around that.
Team Warren, in an e-mail it sent to Warren’s supporters today (I’m on her e-mail list), spoke about “commentators [who] spend more time covering Elizabeth or any woman’s ‘likability’ than her plans for huge, systemic change to make this country work for all of us.” (The e-mail makes it pretty clear that Team Warren views claims that Warren isn’t likable to be rooted in sexism.)
I never have seen Warren as anything other than likable (I gave her another donation today), but electability is, it seems to me, a valid concern, as long as it isn’t rooted in something like personal sexism, racism, homophobia or xenophobia, but is rooted in political dynamics, such as recorded in reputable polls.
Taibbi, quoting another writer, suggests that “Democratic voters should ignore such punditry, and simply vote for whichever candidate they would most like to be president.”
Well, I would most like Bernie Sanders to be president, and I am supporting him again for 2020, but, truth be told, I also want “President” Pussygrabber out of office as soon as possible — yes, I also want to win — and, as I already noted here, with Bernie, I believe, we get that two-fer.
Elizabeth Warren remains my second choice, and if she grows in popularity within the Democratic Party to the extent that she poses the largest clear and present danger to Pussygrabber’s “re”-election, then she might even steal me from Team Bernie.
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*Well, a corrupt Democratic National Committee aside, that is. The corrupt DNC most definitely tipped the scales for Billary in 2016, but some reforms have taken place since then, so we’ll see how 2020 goes.
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