She seems to be the only one willing to take on the big banks and institutionalized cronyism.
If she continues to refuse to run, I have something to say to Hillary Clinton: this is what a Democrat should sound like.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
JFC PZ, relax. She’s running. She said she wasn’t running and still occasionally calls Hillary Clinton out and makes speeches directed to both parties. These are really obvious telegraphs that she’s running.
I’d like to, but I’ve been told repeatedly for a couple of decades now that if I don’t vote for a conservative, I run the risk splitting the vote and ending up with a conservative being elected.
Yeah, she couldn’t possibly think that being a Senator on committees, making actual legislation, would be better than being a reviled show pony forced to be ‘bipartisan’ all the time, and spending most of her time performing for the useless media.
She’s loved for her integrity – so why is everyone so sure she’s lying about not running? I’d love to see her be President. But how’s about we try believing a woman about herself, just for a change? Shocker coming: not everyone wants to be Preznit.
@3 It’s not lying in any meaningful way. Saying you’re not running for president is often saying you are. Very few successful campaigns have started with people saying they’re running.
CaitieCat @ 3
As much as I love the idea of Elizabeth Warren as president, I feel like she’s far more effective where she is. I’m extremely ambivalent about all these campaigns pressuring her to run.
CatieCat: I agree with your key point, but take issue with the ‘show pony’ bit. There’s a couple ,key places where the POTUS is more important than that. First off, there’s the issue of if, when and where to send troops, and how many to send. By the time the War Powers Act kicks in to restrain the President’s decisions in this arena, we’re generally ‘committed’ to whatever scheme he’s come up with.
More significantly in the long term, Supreme Court nominations are vital–and having yet another freakin’ centrist (or worse, a Republican) make the next round of appointments would be nothing short of disastrous. We simply cannot afford to lose another seat from the left wing of the court, and even the status quo is leading us pretty far astray. So while I do, in fact, believe she’s not planning to run, I’m hoping to non-existent deities that she’ll change her mind.
Ahem.
IF SHE WANTS TO RUN then I will very excitedly get behind her and support her enthusiastically.
And the work she’s doing right now is really meaningful and important. And this is huge.
I want Elizabeth Warren to be president if only so that we can finally realize the dream of short-term, low-interest loans from the post office. I feel like she’s the only person advocating for that, despite the fact that it is the world’s easiest and most obvious solution to the payday lending crisis.
Those expecting her to run…get used to disappointment.
She doesn’t have a machine, she doesn’t have money, she doesn’t really have name recognition (outside us particular circle-jerkers). The likelihood of her running is about the size of a Planck length.
She’s no dummy. Who needs the tsuris? Not her.
According to New Republic Warren’s foriegn policy positions are a mystery. Except that she supports Israel uncritically, and believes “United States must take the necessary steps to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.” She’s said nothing at all about drone strikes.
Here’s Warren on Israel, from Slate:
The same article says that:
So on foreign policy, Warren sides with the bipartisan elite consensus, not her liberal supporters.
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/08/28/elizabeth-warren-speaks-israelgaza-sounds-like-netanyahu/
Well, her courage is obviously limited in very important ways. The Israel issue is a great litmus test for such things.
Of course, the “lesser of two evils” garbage will come around again, ad infinitum. Hasn’t anyone learned anything from 6 years of the “progressive” Obama? He sure talked a good game before he became President but now he’s appointed a legion of Wall Street-friendly ministers and advisers. At this point Warren has done little to change the status quo except give decent speeches, much like Obama did before 2008. Are progressives lining up to take yet another kick at Lucy’s football?
While I’m sure her being in a position of greater power wouldn’t work out as bad as electing say Ted Cruz, America is now in an era of politics as kayfabe. The entire system is rotten – switching out the suits working the levers isn’t going to do a damned thing in the long run. Voting for Team X instead of Team Y isn’t going to fix anything and leaning on your representative isn’t going to make a difference, because there are literally hundreds of lobbyists for each politician that act as their education on basically every issue as well as their daily reminders that crossing Big Business or Wall Street means electoral defeat in short order. Nothing short of mass civil disobedience will come close to having a chance of granting some economic and social justice to the country. And even then the window of opportunity is shrinking.
Don’t believe me? Look how many people around are openly justifying the torture of innocents in the off chance that some hand-waving quality intelligence might be gained from it, and being praised for it as defenders of American values. You think a society as sick as that can be repaired by voting in a slightly friendlier talking head?
SCOTUS.
SCOTUS, SCOTUS, SCOTUS.
Another Republican administration would doom civil rights entirely.
Imma just gonna leave this here: http://www.shakesville.com/2014/12/welp.html
And this: http://www.shakesville.com/2014/11/welp_14.html
“No” means “no”, doesn’t it, until the person hirself says “yes”. No?
We ought to have SOMEONE on the left run, if not Warren — just to hold Hillary accountable to the progressive wing, and get her on record making some statements that she may feel obligated to live up to. Not that that worked very well with Obama.
I wouldn’t wish the Presidency on Warren. It’s a shit sandwich of a position, governing what is becoming a shithole of a country.
The right would unite against her, and the left would abandon her before she’d finished taking the oath of office. Hell, as some comments above make clear, some can’t even wait until she’s declared her candidacy to abandon her. That’s why the left will never prevail in American politics–too pure.
I don’t want Warren to run for President. We need staunch progressive Senators in the Senate to help generate pressure for progressive legislation and do good oversight, and Warren is definitely that.
See what I mean?
Like I said, we CAN’T vote for her, we need to vote for a conservative or else with might get stuck with a conservative.
Warren would make a more effective candidate, and a better President, than Hillary Clinton. Clinton isn’t evil or stupid or crazy or a bigot, and she’s worked hard within the Democratic Party — but her past track record is one of tone-deaf, stumbling, opportunity-missing, needlessly-capitulating failure as a political or ideological leader. She spent the ’90s letting the Republicans walk all over her and dominate the public discourse with their insane rhetoric, which she simply let stand unchallenged, when she could easily have exploited it as proof that Republicans were insane. (The media haven’t been all that helpful either.) And since then she’s been too easily manipulated by neocons and other “Third Way” crap-artists. She’d never be able, or willing, to energize the liberal/progressive base, and she’d never establish enough credibility with “independents” either.
So yeah, it’s Warren, at least by default. Get ready for the next well-crafted Republican smear campaign.
What about Bernie Sanders?
As others have said only if:
1. She wants to. Being a Democratic President while being not a white male seems to have significant downsides regarding stress level and amount of bullshit one must wade through. No sense forcing someone into it.
2. We can duplicate her so we can keep Senator Warren while having President Warren. (This one is optional: if she wants to be President Warren, I’ll print the campaign buttons, but be a bit sad we won’t get to keep Senator Warren.)
@15: “That’s why the left will never prevail in American politics–too pure.”
Yeah, demanding purity hasn’t worked out for conservatives at all, right? They only took complete control over the Republican Party, forced the Democrats to run farther to the right than the conservative parties of most European countries, and get basically every policy idea they want put into practice. Clearly it was a terrible strategy. That 1971 Powell memo – so unrealistic!
Sure, utopias never work out, and aggressive doctrinal challenges typically hurt your tribe (while perhaps strengthening your position inside the tribe, c.f. Jon Schwarz’s “Iron Law of Institutions”). However, that doesn’t mean you can’t have principles, and stand for them. If your electoral choice has devolved to between a giant douche and a turd sandwich then it’s time to change the system itself instead of playing their game. It really doesn’t have to be that terrible.
I was a liberal until I decided that 40 years of half-heartedly reacting to the right’s continual policy advances is a fool’s strategy. It’s time to take some initiative instead of happily munching on table scraps from corporate Democrats and those speechifying progressives who end up kowtowing to the same money as everyone else.
jackrousseau,
Uh, dude, did you miss the last 35 years, during which the REthuglicans built their winning “majority” and pioneered their voter suppression techniques? Ever hear of the “big tent”? Is it your contention that Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz are buds?
Another reason you guys on the left are so ineffective is that you don’t even understand your (and my) enemy.
Conversely, many a campaign has been spontaneously aborted by the prospective candidate saying “sure, of course I’m running” too early. The only thing we can tell from Warren saying right now that she won’t run is that, either way, she’s not stupid. We’re left with no evidence on whether she wants to run – let alone whether she’ll change her mind on whatever her decision, if any, is now.
Disclaimer: I haven’t formed an opinion on whether she should run by any criterion. I can’t vote in the US anyway.
I don’t think Warren wants to be President. I do think, however, that she could do something very positive: publicly be a nuisance to whatever “centrist” the Dems nominate (probably Hillary Clinton) and make them kowtow less to Wall Street, etc.
You’re way more optimistic than me, PZ. For 2/3rds of my life the president has either been a Clinton or a Bush, so at this point I can’t see anyone but Hillary getting the DNC nomination (admittedly it’s almost two years away). This is part of the reason people refer to D.C. as Hollywood for ugly people; the nepotism is immensely powerful.
Still, I hope she at least runs just so the Democrats will have to talk more about issues that actually affect voters’ everyday lives. Maybe even Bernie Sanders will run for a few months to really piss off the two-party system diehards, since the DNC is only “left” in the sense that they are to the left of the GOP.
@22:
“Uh, dude, did you miss the last 35 years”
It was before that. As I mentioned, the strategy started with the Powell memo in 1971, and it has indeed been remarkably effective – but in the final analysis it is an extremist strategy, prescribing the hijacking of the media, all three branches of government, and the education system among other institutions. There was no moderation, no compromise, and no mercy.
Cruz and McConnell probably aren’t buds because at least one of those seems to be a sociopath and they tend not to care about other people very much. But do you really think they aren’t on the same side politically? That one of them is somehow less “my enemy” (and yours)? They have the exact same goals, as do pretty much all the other Republicans along with the Third Way/Clinton-Rubinite Democrats: pushing the logic of the market into each and every aspect of human existence, then using the government to pervert the resulting markets to the advantage of favored concentrations of private capital. What’s left in DC besides for this bipartisan clique of neoliberals are basically a small contingent of right-libertarians and a dwindling handful of milquetoast old-style liberals who have been playing catch-up since John Lennon left this mortal plane.
The amount of shade some liberals insist on throwing on leftists in order to ideologically police them is depressing, but I have a feeling it won’t work much longer as the situation becomes more clear. Liberals frankly don’t have any solutions anymore – they are (appropriately) as intellectually dead as the New Republic. I don’t mean this to attack liberals as people, they have their hearts in the right place and their ethical motives are not suspect, but the liberal philosophical project has collapsed. Its only real response to the savage and triumphant mockery of the right is to try and keep leftists with fresh ideas out of the boxing ring to continue the fight.
What would you rather read, TNR or something like the Baffler or Jacobin? It’s not even a close contest.
I had contemplated a write-in vote for her as a means of signalling my dissatisfaction with the Democrats.
Whoever wins the Democratic nomination, I know what we’ll get if the Republicans win.
We’ll get the best government money can buy.
What I would rather read is immaterial. What matters is whether the next Supreme Court Justice is a clone of Ginsberg or Scalia. Yes, I agree that the whole creaking edifice is rotten, but how do you propose to change it if you cannot elect a majority who want such change? The thing is there is a semi-progressive majority. They just can’t be bothered to vote in off-year elections.
The thing is there is a semi-progressive majority. They just can’t be bothered to vote in off-year elections.
Excuse me? Did you sleep through the entire Republican voter-purge campaign? There were plenty of people who would happily have voted progressive, had they just been allowed to. There are now at least two news sources Salon and al Jazeera America, who have shown credible evidence that Republican voter-purges, not voter indifference, made most of the crucial difference in the 2014 elections.
Raging Bee,
Of course there are Rethuglican voter purges, but there a lot more folks just couldn’t be bothered to vote. There were voter purges in 2012 and that didn’t stop the Dems from having a pretty good year despite some weak candidates.
It is the off year elections that are killing us, and 2010 meant that the Rethugs controlled the redistricting process. Progressives have to be a lot more strategic. The Rethugs are going to cheat. They have to. They couldn’t assemble a majority otherwise.
yes this what a democrat should sound like!
I do not care if she runs or not because it will take much much more than one progressive liberal to get anything done about fixing the fucking mess conservative policies had generated.
They are continuously keep saying 2+2= 5 and no one even takes the questioning of there proposals seriously.
One or two voices will not be enough.
uncle frogy
for the umpteenth time, I post the link to the people in the US who push for progressive candidates:
http://www.pdamerica.org/
if you are looking for someone to support, START THERE.
voter interference likely accounts for less than 5% influence on voter turnout.
it does not explain a 36% voter turnout.
people entirely disgusted with the status quo fully explains it, even if that seems ironic.
Bernie Sanders, end of story.
CaitieCat @ 3
For fuck’s sake, THIS.
SHE’S. NOT. RUNNING.
You know why the media keeps pushing this? Because it sets up a catfight dynamic with her and Hilary Clinton. Because Warren has a fanbase that turns into page hits. There is no other reason (aside from the endemic misogyny of our culture) to refuse to believe a woman when she says no other than this.
Meanwhile Bernie Sanders – former mayor, 8 term member of the House, now Senator – has suggested he may run. The media treats that as if it’s so outlandish it’s laughable. Cause Ted Cruz is a total fool but he’s a “serious” candidate, but Bernie Sanders isn’t, because he doesn’t give the media a good horse race story to tell.
And you know who Elizabeth Warren looks up to? Bernie fucking Sanders.
This week Elizabeth Warren nearly single-handedly killed the White House’s plan to pass the budget because she was trying to defend Dodd-Frank. If you seriously think she shouldn’t stay exactly where she is, where she is beyond question able to do more good than she would in the White House being obstructed exactly like Obama has been, you’re a fool.
a_ray_in_dilbert_space@15
You can’t “abandon” someone you never supported. And if we’re looking to recent American political history for our lessons, it wasn’t Obama’s supporters who abandoned him, but the other way round. On economic and foreign-policy issues, American liberals, and their European counterparts, “social democrats”, have spent the past 30 years abandoning one position after another in the name of “big tent” politics – with the result that they are in the weakest position they’ve been in since before WWII, while the proto-fascist right flourishes. In at least two European countries – Greece and Spain – new leftist movements have appeared which have reversed that craven defeatism – and are leading the opinion polls. This may be a flase dawn, and American politics is so dominated by the two plutocratic parties that that strategic route is probably closed off – but closing your eyes to the flaws in the latest Great Liberal Hope is certainly not the way forward.
We don’t need Warren for President. We need 2-3 more senators just like her.
drst @ 36:
It’s hard to see how Bernie Sanders would do any better than Howard Dean in the Democratic primaries, or for that matter how Warren would. That’s probably why she’s not wanting to run for President. OTOH, Ted Cruz isn’t a serious candidate in 2016, because the Republicans aren’t likely to nominate a Tea Party type for President, just like they didn’t in 2008 and 2012.
Yes, her energy and steadfastness is important in the senate.
Besides, her views (as far as I can tell) on the Drug War and prisons for profit are downright prehistoric. And that ain’t gonna work anymore…
There’s plenty of signs that she might be running, like this or that or whatever. I don’t think that’s terrible speculation, as politicians do that kind of stuff all the time. Hasn’t Hillary Clinton also said she’s not running? This is just BS news channels trying to get people in the election before it’s even close to relevant, because they don’t want to talk about real issues like honest journalism.
But the real thing that annoys me is that Elizabeth Warren can kick ass in the Senate and do good there. I don’t understand why we’re supposed to care about this at all at the moment. She’s doing awesome stuff right now. How about we talk about the Presidential Race when it’s actually happening?
Nick Gotts,
If you expected the first African-American to be elected POTUS to be a bombthrower, you are delusional. He was always going t be a moderate and to seek compromise. I remember in December 2008 listening to Democracy Now and hearing the left abandon Obama as soon a he named Rahm Emanuel his Chief of Staff. Ferchrissake, he hadn’t even taken the oath yet! Even the racist, rightwing fuckwads held their fire until they saw Joe Wilson get away with calling him a liar in the halls of Congress. The left couldn’t wait to give up on the first black President. That’s what I found amazing.
Well, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but there’s definitely this:
Besides clearly being frustrated by the media’s inability to focus on substantive issues, it also looks like she has no intention at all of changing her mind about this. Which is okay.
I’d agree, but when exactly is that?
I like her a lot better than Hillary who I find too hawkish and too cozy with Wall Street, but they share the same big donors. The money people have said that if Hillary is running she will be the one to get the money, not Warren. I think that pretty much torpedoes her chances and so our chances.
She is older than I thought at 65, so this is probably her last shot unless Hillary falls out of the 2016 campaign or a Republican wins.
a_ray_in_dilbert_space@42
Setting aside your silly hyperbole, I didn’t expect much from Obama, since I recognised him as a moderate conservative, nor did I support him, except as the lesser evil. But his sheer spinelessness doesn’t get a pass because he’s black. The country – not just “the left” – was ready for a President who would stand up to the bankers, imposing at least some conditions on the bailout; and punish (politically, and where justifiable, legally) the liars and war criminals who had created a foriegn policy disaster – all of which was perfectly justifiable from the point of view of a moderate conservative.
@Jafafa Hots
*eye roll*
Why have this awkward choice between two major evils? Duverger’s law. First-past-the-post voting leads to two parties because of the spoiler effect.
But all is not lost. Get involved in the primaries. Also get involved in Senate and House and state and local races. The Presidency is not enough. We need all the Elizabeth Warrens we can get.
FPTP has had at least two examples that I’m personally aware of, in Canada and the UK, where there is by no means a settled two-party system. Canada has had three major parties or more for at least 80 years.
The difference isn’t the FPTP (which definitely has ill effects), it’s the money. The UK and Canada have publicly funded elections, with strict limits on contributions and penalties for exceeding them. Introduce money, and you’re right: oligarchs will develop monopolies if possible. And given the Democrat tendency to be known as The Slightly Less Evil Party, the new owners have basically succeeded in the US. But in no manner is a FPTP system guaranteed to converge on two parties.
CaitieCat@48 is right that FPTP does not invariably lead to a 2-party system, although it does tend that way. But I’m not sure money is the complete explanation for the very strong 2-party tendency in the USA – which has continued for a century and a half, without a change of party, and for much of the time without a clear ideological basis. Maybe the system which has judges and many officials directly elected, and allows the ruling party in a state to redraw electoral boundaries, has contributed by creating local party fiefdoms which are more or less immune to challenge (FPTP tends to produce these, but as examples in Canada and the UK show, locally-based third parties such as PQ and the SNP can upset them). The system as a whole appears extremely resistant to radical change – and specifically, money power will make it near-impossible to move the Democratic Party seriously left. So perhaps a revolution really will be necessary – but that can only happen if there is a serious split in the ruling elite.
sugarfrosted @1:
I’m with CaitieCat @3. She said she’s not running. Why not just take her at her word? Especially given consciousness razor’s link @43.
Why hasn’t she just been made head of the Fed? Problem fixed
Obama tried to make her head of a new agency for Consumer Financial Protection, but it got blocked. So she ran for the Senate, instead.
What we need is a couple of dozen more like her.
good point.
uh, if you want an actual progressive-minded president, you better have ALREADY started. you should in fact, be well underway with your plans for funding, advertising, market focus, and official platform statement.
you should be talking about it, in depth, right now.
I get people wanting Warren for president, but might that not make her less powerful and able to get stuff done than she is right now? As much as the GOP would like it if presidents could rule by fiat (unless that president is a Democrat), there is only so much a president can do simply using their executive power.
I don’t know if Hillary would go for it, but a Warren-Clinton ticket would be phenomenal. Clinton’s got the international experience that Warren lacks, so she’d make a formidable VP.
yup. sometimes a symbol is more important that the actual work though.
the US really NEEDS a progressive symbol as president, for once in my liftetime anyway.
QFT. Where are the consistently progressive candidates, other than Bernie Sanders? Where are the serious Democratic candidates of any politics who will be under 60 at the time of the election? (Wikipedia lists just one: Martin O’Malley). Nothing wrong with being over 60, of course, but a political party needs a flow of new people and new ideas.
Speaking selfishly as a resident of Massachusetts, I don’t want to switch senators again yet. Can’t we at least have a little time to get used to this one?
I mean, it was bad enough to get Scott Brown campaign ads this past fall when he wasn’t even running in this state.
re @58:
As a “Masshole”, myself [road-rage term for residents of Taxachusetts] I would really prefer Warren as Prez. If we elected Warren as our Sen, then maybe who we elect to replace her will capably “fill her shoes”. Wachathink? Don’t ever mention we elected Romney as our governor. Who turned our health insurance into Romneycare (from which Obama modeled the Affordable Care Act). Then again, why lose the one senator we have for us with a very slim chance of adequate replacement? But look at what the Repubs offer for ’16 Prez and how few the Dems offer. I think Warren for Prez is a risk worth takin. (she don’t have to resign as Sen BEFORE running, does she, only resign if actually elected?) IDK anymore.