Friday, June 24, 2016

Dancing to the Symbols

Elizabeth Warren has endeared herself in popular liberal politics, and there is considerable clamor to have her run on the national ticket with Hillary Clinton. Clinton, it is said, has Warren on a “short list” of three candidates being vetted for that position.

This demonstrates my point about liberal popular politics being more interested in symbolism than substance. Warren is certainly articulate and has a nice line of invective against Wall Street, and recently against Donald Trump, but in substance, in terms of experience and accomplishment, she is an empty suit.

A Harvard law professor who served an appointment overseeing the infamous TARP, she then served in an appointed position overseeing the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Her ivory tower approach created so little teeth that almost no one knows that the bureau exists eight years later.

In four years in the Senate she has introduced one bill on her own initiative; an affair having to do with student loan interest rates which has languished in committee without so much as a vote for cloture and is a prime example of empty symbolism in any case, because interest rates are not what’s wrong with student loans. The problems with student loans are that they cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, and that they exist at all due to the atrocious cost of higher education which necessitates them.

She has not raised her voice in support of any other specific measures in the Senate in any meaningful way, but has been pretty much a “place holder,” voting on issues in the manner that the party instructs her to vote. She has spent her time in the Senate travelling to New York to rail against Wall Street and economic injustice without actually doing anything to reign in the first or correct the second.

Despite Warren’s complete lack of any foreign policy credentials whatever, and her apparent disinterest in domestic policy beyond Wall Street, she has become the darling of the liberal wing of the Democratic party and forced Hillary Clinton to adapt her campaign strategy accordingly.

Notwithstanding Clinton’s assertion that a running mate would have to be someone “entirely ready to become commander in chief,”  she allowed it be known that Warren was one of three people being considered. This was a sop to the left wing of her party and illustrates that Clinton’s campaign is a mile wide and an inch deep.

1 comment:

  1. Ms Warren is an empty suit with a megaphone. I've always seen her as a strident voice for... ultra liberals and gasp! socialists. Well, those leftists and what not that see "the people" being oppressed by corporations, etc.

    All well and good, I suppose, the disadvantaged need a voice and a way to right wrongs done to them. But there is a lot of talk and no substance here. Shades of Obama coming into office in 2008, actually.

    I hope Ms. Clinton does not pick her. Not that I'd vote for either in any respect, but still...

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