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Thursday, May 23, 2019

Elizabeth Warren, Adlai Stevenson And Joe Biden

Image result for "pax on both houses" on the menu
Elizabeth Warren's Illustrated Quotations
Dear F and Jimbo,

REM sent the following link to Time Magazine's in-depth profile of Elizabeth Warren. 

I have copied a number of excerpts below but encourage you to read the whole article. 

I am reminded of the encounter between Adlai Stevenson and a campaign stop supporter who called out: "Mr. Stevenson! Every thinking person in America is behind you!" 

To which Adlai replied: "Thank you madam. Unfortunately, I need a majority."

And finally -- in keeping with my longstanding "prime political directive" of keeping lunatics out of office -- I still favor a Biden-Harris ticket.

But just as my view of impeachment is starting to shift, I do not rule out anything as we get deeper into the electoral "weeds." 

Evolving politics -- larger co-terminous with "perception" and not fully-fleshed context -- will, in the end, appeal to the "anti-lunacy pragmatist" in me.

Excerpts:

"Elizabeth Warren, née Elizabeth Herring, was born in 1949 into a lower-middle-class family in Oklahoma City. All three of her brothers were in the military; two are Republicans. Warren herself was a registered Republican until the mid-1990s, although she says she was not very political at that time. Her family’s financial struggles mirrored those of many alienated voters in middle-class America today—a visceral experience that she says has defined and informed her politics.  
Warren’s first foray into Washington politics didn’t come until the late 1990s, when she came to D.C. to fight a bankruptcy bill she believed unfairly penalized families by making it more difficult to discharge credit-card and medical debts. As part of her effort to quash the legislation, she lobbied then First Lady Hillary Clinton, who ate a hamburger as Warren made her case. By the time the brief conversation was over, Clinton was sold: she persuaded her husband to pull support for the bill, and it died. It was Warren’s first political ­victory—but a short-lived one. In 2005, the same piece of legislation again came up for a vote, and that time it passed.
The defeat marked the first time Warren locked horns with Biden, then a ­Delaware Senator and now a top rival for the Democratic nomination. During a February 2005 hearing, the two went toe to toe: Biden, whose state hosts some of the biggest financial firms, took the credit-­card companies’ side, while Warren advocated on behalf of the families who she said had “been squeezed enough” by interest rates and fees. Biden was not swayed but ended the debate by acknowledging Warren’s skills. “You are very good, professor,” he said, according to a transcript. Biden voted for the bill both times.
Warren has introduced more substantial bipartisan legislation during her time in Congress than nearly all her rivals in the Democratic primary field, according to the nonpartisan website GovTrack, including Sanders, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, California Senator Kamala Harris and New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, who has touted his propensity for reaching across the aisle on the campaign trail. (Only Biden and Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar have introduced more.) Most recently, Warren collaborated with Republican Cory Gardner of Colorado on legislation pushing for state control of marijuana laws and with Republican Bill Cassidy of Louisiana on an effort to make colleges’ graduation and employment data more transparent.
Her singular achievement in the wake of the financial crisis was persuading Congress to create a new watchdog agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), as part of the Dodd-Frank law. The goal of the CFPB was to protect and advocate for consumers against sloppy, abusive or predatory financial firms. From the start, Warren’s agency was controversial, in part because corporations staunchly opposed it. After its creation in 2010, the CFPB became one of the most feared watchdogs in Washington, forcing financial firms to pay back billions of dollars to consumers. In 2013, Ocwen Financial Corp. paid a $2 billion penalty to underwater homeowners for engaging in what the agency called “deceptions and shortcuts in mortgage servicing.” In 2018, Wells Fargo paid $1 billion to borrowers with home and auto loans.
A 2017 poll by consumer-­advocacy firms found that three-fourths of Americans, including 66% of Republicans and 77% of independents, supported the CFPB. Yet since 2017, the Trump Administration has worked to defang the agency. Its former acting director, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, who previously co-sponsored legislation to abolish the CFPB, ordered a hiring freeze, slow-rolled enforcement measures and stood in the way of new rules that would have restricted payday loans.
At a campaign stop in Hanover, Warren takes the stage at a near run as Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down” booms in the background. If you were to watch a video of Warren on the trail with the sound off, you might be forgiven for thinking she was conducting a high-tempo aerobics video: when she speaks, she rocks and bounces onto her tiptoes and pounds the air with her fists, her tone veering between outrage and empathy as she describes the challenges facing the middle class. Just as her diagnosis of the problem reaches a crescendo, she takes a step back and performs a rhetorical swan dive into crystalline pools of policy: and here, she says, is how we fix it. 
It’s a two-step presentation that can sometimes feel like therapy to supporters. “They’re happy that somebody is finally talking about it,” Warren says. In the Washington Bubble, as she calls it, the conversation is tone-deaf. Investments are up, unemployment is down, and pundits are arguing over whether the good times are thanks to Obama or Trump. And while it’s true that traditional measures of economic health, like GDP and stock prices, are indeed on the rise, many Americans inhabit a different reality: overworked, underwater and feeling crushed by powers outside of their control. “She knows me. She knows my life conditions,” says Greta Shultz, a single mom from Massachusetts. “I don’t care if Beto’s jumping on counters or Biden’s the front runner. She’s the policy machine who can fix it.”
Warren’s solution involves taking on some of the biggest, most powerful political and economic institutions in the country: ending unlimited corporate campaign spending, rebooting antitrust laws, breaking up big tech and agricultural firms, and reforming lobbying. She describes a wall of interlocking gears, each connected to the others, forming the American economic and governmental machine. Beginning sometime around 1980, she says, those gears stopped fitting together and the machine stopped working for most Americans. “If we want to make real change in this country,” she says, “it’s got to be systemic change.”
The foundation for Warren’s social-policy programs are two new taxes, a corporate tax and what she calls an “ultra-­millionaire” tax. The first is a 7% tax on businesses’ profits that exceed $100 million in a year. The second is a 2% tax on household wealth that exceeds $50 ­million annually. (The tax increases to 3% on anything over $1 billion.) It would affect roughly the top one-tenth of the richest 1% of Americans. “You built a great business? You earned or inherited a lot of money? Great, keep most of it!” she says. “But by golly, pitch something back in.” Warren estimates that, together, these taxes would raise $3.75 trillion over a ­decade—funds she would use to pay for many of her big social programs.
Warren’s solution involves taking on some of the biggest, most powerful political and economic institutions in the country: ending unlimited corporate campaign spending, rebooting antitrust laws, breaking up big tech and agricultural firms, and reforming lobbying. She describes a wall of interlocking gears, each connected to the others, forming the American economic and governmental machine. Beginning sometime around 1980, she says, those gears stopped fitting together and the machine stopped working for most Americans. “If we want to make real change in this country,” she says, “it’s got to be systemic change.”
The foundation for Warren’s social-policy programs are two new taxes, a corporate tax and what she calls an “ultra-­millionaire” tax. The first is a 7% tax on businesses’ profits that exceed $100 million in a year. The second is a 2% tax on household wealth that exceeds $50 ­million annually. (The tax increases to 3% on anything over $1 billion.) It would affect roughly the top one-tenth of the richest 1% of Americans. “You built a great business? You earned or inherited a lot of money? Great, keep most of it!” she says. “But by golly, pitch something back in.” Warren estimates that, together, these taxes would raise $3.75 trillion over a ­decade—funds she would use to pay for many of her big social programs.
Warren’s deeply liberal policies reflect a larger political bet: that her vision for the future will endear her to a nation—and a Democratic Party—in the throes of a populist resurgence. Trump won in 2016 partly by harnessing anti–Wall Street language. His campaign featured ads lambasting then Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein and pillorying Clinton as a stooge of Wall Street. Warren’s campaign wants to appeal to that sentiment. 
Her first step will be to convince voters that she can beat Trump. An April CNN poll found that 92% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said a candidate’s chances of beating Trump were “extremely” or “very important.” Biden’s perch atop the ­Democratic field may be in large part a function of that conviction. An April Quinnipiac poll found that 56% of Democrats believed Biden was the candidate most likely to oust Trump; Sanders came in second, with 12%.
While Biden and Sanders may be better known, Democratic strategists unaffiliated with 2020 campaigns say Warren has proven appeal. In 2012, the Obama-Biden re-election campaign found that of all the Democratic campaign surrogates, Warren resonated most powerfully in focus groups. “The sense was that she gets it, she understands us, she is fighting for the right stuff,” says a former senior aide to the Obama-Biden re-election campaign. “She had an authority that no one else had.”" 

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