Can Elizabeth Warren Unify Democrats? | The New Yorker - 0 views
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Tim, and that he meant to ask his question “in all due respect.”Warren, a year and more than a hundred and fifty town halls into her Presidential campaign, seemed to know what was coming. She said, “Why does this make me uneasy?” People in the crowd laughed, and then, with a spirited, resigned air, she said, “Go ahead, Tim.”Tim said that he was an evangelical Christian, and that he found himself “continually bombarded by Democratic candidates who demonize my beliefs, calling them bigoted and intolerant.” On issues like abortion and same-sex marriage, he said, he and Warren were bound to disagree, but he wanted to know what she might offer to voters like him. A man in a “Make America Great Again” hat stood and applauded vigorously, as if something brave had been said.
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“I was born and raised Methodist,” Warren said. “I’ve been a Sunday-school teacher. Most of the scripture I quote is still King James. I’m old school on this.”
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“I understand that you and I may have differences—there may be a lot of different views in this room,” Warren said. “But here’s what I’m certain about. And that is, a woman who is in the position of trying to decide what she’s going to do about a pregnancy that she may not have planned for, may not have hoped for, may have been forced upon her, is a woman who should be able to call on anyone for help. She should be able to call on her partner, she should be able to call on her mom, she should be able to call on her priest or rabbi or pastor. But the one entity that should not be in the center of that very hard decision is the federal government.”
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Some political reporters noticed that, on Twitter, Warren staffers and surrogates had started pitching her as the “unity candidate,” the figure who might span the breach between the party’s Sanders faction and its establishment one.
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Warren had subtly deëmphasized the poverty of her upbringing—I did not hear a tale, which she often told earlier in her campaign, about how her family nearly lost its home, after her father suffered a heart attack, and her mother put on her best dress and psyched herself up for a job interview at Sears, pacing at home and repeating, “We will not lose this house.”
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It might help her campaign to remind voters that she, with Amy Klobuchar, is one of just two Democratic candidates left on the debate stage who are not white men. And yet the news that Warren could plausibly lay claim to both the mantle of “unity” and to Clinton’s voters is a clear expression of a deep historical turn, in which the Party’s base is steadily becoming more female, more educated, more progressive. Sanders envisions a transformative coalition of the working class, and the two other leading candidates, Joe Biden and Buttigieg, each want to summon different versions of a bipartisan consensus.
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For anyone who has paid attention to the past Democratic primary, “factionalism” carries a particular meaning: a repeat of the conflict between Sanders and Hillary Clinton, and between a left-populist alliance that relies on young working-class voters and a progressive one built around educated women.
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Warren’s account begins with her humble beginnings in Oklahoma, where as a child, she says, she used to line her dolls up against a wall and conduct class; she says that her only ambition was to be a teacher.
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Now Warren’s introduction is more focussed on her own path, and it is more obviously about the obstacles she has encountered as a woman. The gestures are the same—the fist in the air to emphasize a point, the aw-shucks quality that fades once the questions begin and her professorial persona resurfaces—but the story has a specificity that Clinton’s never really did.
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The specificity of Warren’s campaign has won her a cadre of devoted, talented staffers and volunteers, many of them women in their twenties, that seems unmatched in the Democratic primary.
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the irony of Warren’s candidacy is that, having spent her professional life describing the economic and legal burdens of the working class,
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she is now, at the critical moment in her political career, struggling to win the support of voters without a college degree, who have generally favored Biden or Sanders.
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shepherding the Democrats in the crowd toward a consensus. “If there is a decision made in Washington, I guarantee it has been influenced by money,” she said in Dubuque, and then circled back to emphasize the point again. “Money, money, money, money.”That used to sound like an outsider’s position, even a radical one. It doesn’t now. It’s not at all clear which Democrat will win the most in the early primaries, and stand to determine the future of the Party. But right now the most likely way to hold the Party’s center might be to combine a progressive policy vision that resembles Sanders’s with an educated electorate that borrows from Clinton.