Elizabeth Warren Has One Quality We Hardly Ever See in Presidential Candidates and it Just Might be Her Key to Unseating Trump.
Corbyn = Warren?
There’s been a lot of anxious speculation on cable news this week as Great Britain handed a stunning defeat to Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in the most recent election called to try and shore up a parliamentary majority to carry Brexit through the finish line. Many American pundits are anxiously reading the tea leaves of this absolute shellacking of Britain’s Labour Party as a sign that Elizabeth Warren’s proposals for universal healthcare, childcare, forgiving student loan debt and a wealth tax (to name just a few) could be the kiss of death to any current presidential campaign to unseat Trump.
And so we hear the natural follow-up again and again: Joe Biden. White working class voters trust him. African Americans like him. He’s the safe bet. Mustn’t rock the boat. Not when we cannot afford to lose.
Oh my dear fretful Democrats! Why are we always framing our arguments from a place of fear? Fear of spooking the electorate with notions of a government at work.
When will we learn that all our fretting gets us nowhere?
Truth is, it’s our crippling fear of losing that hands us defeat. Republicans never admit to a shred of doubt about their next big win, even when, as was the case with Trump in 2016, they harbour private doubts. Democrats on the other hand love to worry in public, on television, in Op-Eds and as sociologist W.I. Thomas so clearly observed: If you define something as real, it is real in its consequences.
But extrapolating lessons for an Elizabeth Warren candidacy from last week’s defeat of Corbyn is only possible if we squint hard enough to allow us to see only the two in terms of their economic policy proposals without taking into consideration the myriad qualities they don’t have in common such as their personalities, career histories and controversies on issues unrelated to the economy. Jeremy Corbyn’s approval ratings are among the lowest ever recorded in British history. And Elizabeth Warren seems to have charm to spare.
Swimming against the tide was yesterday’s wonderful reality check in GQ offered by Democratic Strategist Ken Gude.
Let’s face it. Corbyn’s essentially a sourpuss… an unpleasant whiner who shares a strikingly obvious personality disorder with our current president: he seems absolutely incapable of interpreting any of life’s challenges from anything other than a position of injury and victimhood. And to make matters worse, he’s been known to apply lazy analysis to foreign affairs resulting in bigotted views. Take, for example, his views on Israel. No matter what one thinks of Israel’s current government, outrage over Netanyahu’s reactionary and oppressive policies toward the Palestinians does not naturally and logically extend to an outright rejection of the very idea of a Jewish homeland.
Elizabeth Warren, on the other hand, doesn’t ever come across as a whiny victim. Take a look at this footage from her Congressional testimony regardimg the impending formation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
There’s a throughline running through much of her work over the past few decades and if Dems want to win in 2020, we’d best not gloss over it, or worse, deny its importance. It insists on revealing itself to us in everything she’s touched professionally from her tenure on the faculty of Harvard Law School to her advocacy on behalf of working families in the 1990s and straight through her Senate record to her prolific output of substantive plans for the nation under a Warren Presidency.
It can best summed up as a nose-down relentless pursuit of detailed answers to fundamental questions of liberty and the role of good government in protecting it. Both her farreaching policy proposals and her sharp attacks on Trump the man and Trumpism the nightmare feel as though they’re borne of the same wellspring — a boundless optimism about America’s enduring fascination with and capacity to mend itself.
Trump’s Secret Sauce
Trump has one unique super power that makes him one of the toughest candidates to beat.
What is this power? Well it’s really quite simple.
He doesn’t care.
Not caring about policy frees him of the burden most of the others carry with them into debates, media interviews, stump speeches. That is, of course, the fear of getting something wrong. The fear of inadvertently saying something (Think George HW Bush: No new taxes. Read my lips.) which might later be twisted to your disadvantage.
And because he doesn’t care whether or not he makes sense, knows about anything of which he speaks, or appears to be unprepared, because of all this, Trump speaks directly, with authority and confidence and without much, if any, editing of any kind.
His willingness to speak in public without careful thought or consideration and his willingness to just make things up when it suits him… this is Trump’s secret sauce.
It creates the illusion of a man who’s a straight-shooter when, of course, he’s anything but. It’s because he never hesitates when speaking, and because his syntax is awkward and his accent still carries the lilt of his Queens roots, he sounds more working class than he has any right to. And so, a lot of people, particularly those who come to the presidential choice with a natural suspicion of government and the “pin-heads” who enforce its regulations, are drawn to the guy on the debate stage who genuninely seems to be enjoying himself, taking cheap shots at his oponents but even moreso taking aim at government institutions and their elites.
Against Hillary Clinton in 2016 the chemistry proved deadly. Hillary Clinton has actually been shown to have been one of the most honest politicians in the percentage of misleading or false statements she makes.
Up against the guy who will literally say anything to win an argument in the moment without a care or concern for accuracy, truth, logic, coherence or even plausibility, the woman who was able to keep her cool through eleven hours of relentless Benghazi hearing testimony didn’t stand a chance.
Think about it. In eleven hours, Hillary Clinton never misspoke. Or if she did, she quickly corrected herself. She barely broke a sweat. And she didn’t provide those GOP attack dogs with anything close to an off-the-cuff tactical error or inconsistency in her assessment of those events. This took a great brain but it also took a steely demeanor, kind of the opposite of the way Donald Trump enters a room.
Mr. Cynic, Meet Ms. Earnest
Elizabeth Warren, interestingly, is the opposite of Trump in terms of earnestness. She is completely committed. The Donald never is. Because when it comes to the business of policy, he really doesn’t give a damn.
And without question every other Democrat currently running for the nomination also care passionately about the issues; One need only revisit the last three debates to confirm this to be true.
But unlike Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, Mayor Pete and all the rest of them, Elizabeth Warren seems to me to be the one candidate who apparently isn’t afraid to lose.
Let me say this one more time. Cause this, I’m convinced, will be a requirement for a successful defeat Mr. Trump. Elizabeth Warren’s super power is her fearlessness. She’s not afraid of defeat. And she’s certainly not afraid of Mr. Trump.
Elizabeth’s Secret Sauce
There are always those moments in presidential campaigns when a candidate answers a question prematurely and then after consulting with their team or advisors, some policy or promise has to be walked back a little. Kamala Harris had a couple of these before she eventually dropped out of the race. And frankly, she did not handle them too convincingly. Whenever I heard her making a public attempt to reframe an earlier statement to conform to a newly revised position, the palpable subtext was inescapable: In order to win the Presidency, policy positions that don’t conform to the conventional wisdom on where the electorate stands today must be reframed, revised or simply finessed so as deny the opposition any red meat.
I wondered for a long time why it might be that Warren never seems to exhibit fear of failure in the way that it’s often unmistakeable in the answers given by Mayor Pete, Amy Kobuchar or any of the others we see making meticulously crafted calculations that straddle the distance between primary voters and the general electorate.
Maybe it has something to do with the way she first entered the public sphere. She didn’t run for office first and then educate herself on the issues, as most politicians do. She was a Harvard Law professor brought to Washington to provide expert testimony about the banking industry. And so a pattern was established which endures to this day: ideas of what’s broken and how it might be fixed are her primary concern.
In a way, one could argue that Elizabeth Warren is not simply running for President. What she’s doing feels larger than that. It’s almost as if she’s on a two-year campaign to convince the nation that we can and should be more aspirational.
She didn’t grow up dreaming of being the first female President and you get the sense that she’s less concerned with whether or not she wins than that the country give her ideas a proper airing.
Don’t Let the Coward Scare You
The only way to beat Trump is to fight him from a position of strength on terms he does not dictate.
The candidates who want to be President a little bit too much run the risk of always playing on a shaky foundation of fear. And, of course, since it’s all he ever does, Donald Trump intuitively understands ego-driven decision-making. He’ll make swift work of anyone who shares his vanity. Opponents who are driven by firmly held ideals rather than a petty guarding of their own power and status tend to most confound the man. (Think Pelosi, for example.)
As candidates’ fortunes rise, that fear of fucking it all up losing the battle for the country can have a crippling effect on credibility and message.
Elizabeth Warren doesn’t really seem all that worried. She’s got ideas to spare and a plan for practically everything and a passion for meeting people wherever she goes to campaign for them. If she doesn’t make it, it seems as though she’ll be quite happy to make her arguments about what needs fixing and how to fix it from her seat on the Senate floor.
When Trump tosses stink bombs onto the debate stage or into the political arena, the other person running to capture our attention will need to be unflappable, witty and driven by a conviction that the country and its future is really all that matters. Convincing us to do the work more than trusting her to make it so. Because Trump is the ultimate narcissist, a person who genuinely is more concerned with the nation’s future than her own fortunes will offer a stark contrasting backdrop to cast his self-obsession into stark relief.
The Charm Offensive
Elizabeth Warren comes by this naturally. And she generally does it with a smile and a healthy dose of humor. She’s charming. And as much as I hate to say it, so is Trump, in his deplorable way. Trump’s “charm” is borne of a seemingly inexaustible reservoir of bravado mixed with a willingness to say things and stumble into verbal blunders that more serious political animals would take care to avoid. For this reason, there’s a freshness (sort of) to the unexpected sound of the President of the United States using words like “bullshit” and “garbage” and “shit.” In this way, so far at least, he manages a kind of svengali sleight of hand whereby the crashing right through Presidential norms can be taken unconsciously as reflective of deeply held convictions which cause the man to toss verbal niceties and politesse aside in favor of getting something, anything, who-cares-what off his chest.
The problem for Trump (and for us) is that any vague sense we, his audience, might have for a moment that we’re hearing a man who actually cares about anything other than himself… that’s an illusion. And it’s ever so fleeting. Ephemeral really.
It’s ironic that the President who couldn’t care less has a style of speaking that on the surface at least — in volume, tempo, repetition and abrupt choppy sentence structure — sounds as though its coming from a place of such intense feeling so as to wreak havoc on syntax, grammar and sense.
Even at his most cruel and agressive, there’s a part of Donald Trump that is always having fun. He enjoys hurting people and his use of base humor makes that even more clear. It’s in finding and deploying a particularly ugly insult at one of his perceived enemies that the smile and the rhythm come closest to something appealing.
Elizabeth Warren also has a lot of fun campaigning. But her pleasure seems to stem from the comments and questions of the voters. And I think it’s going to take a superhuman sense of play to compete for the attention of a country that desperately needs something real for a change.
The sharpest tool we have to cut through the cruel bullshit of our would-be tyrant? Charm, charisma, wit and sass doled out by somebody we can actually imagine would be just fine, with or without this job.
