Not a "Great Liberal"

Elizabeth Warren is widely hailed as the perfect liberal, or progressive as they are called today, and the ultimate champion for the working class, and a growing number of blog denizens are clamoring for her to run for president in 2016. They claim that she is to the left of the Democratic party and is as much an enemy of the corporate state as you and I are.

I’m somewhat less optimistic. We elected a one-term Senator who had a gift for passionate rhetoric once before, and how did that work out for us?

The latest video making the rounds is one where she “unloads” on Chris Matthews, something that in itself I applaud regardless of who does it. Consensus is that she kills the topic of how we should put the working class back to work, but what I hear from her is a bunch of hackneyed partisan cliches and an avoidance of the actual solution.

First she chants Obama’s mantra about education, but we have a plethora of highly educated unemployed people already, and more education is going to do nothing in terms of putting people back to work. Then she speaks of roads and bridges, another Obama mantra, but her angle is that they are “investments which allow small businesses to grow.” Oh, please. Then she comes to the 1980’s when “Republicans changed the way we manage our economy” and a distorted, abbreviated view of the admittedly nonsensical “trickle down” economic theory, but she omits entirely the Clinton dual policies of “global free market” economics which resulted in our manufacturing jobs being sent overseas and of financial deregulation which began on his watch but which Democrats all blame on George W. Bush.

In rebuttal to his accusations that Democrats have been talking the game but not walking the walk, she goes into a self righteous tirade about how every time Democrats bring up their programs the Republicans claim “there’s no money” to implement those programs and yet Republicans will not “give up those tax loopholes.” What she fails to admit is that Democrats had control of both houses of Congress for four years and did not even make an attempt to get rid of those tax loopholes themselves.

What she fails to face up to is that even when they controlled both houses of Congress they were unable to prevent Republicans from passing their own agenda. Republicans, with a minority in both houses of Congress were able to get their bills passed, and yet Democrats, with a minority in only one house, are unable to pass anything at all.

Warren, like other Democratic politicians, is so blinded by her partisanship that she does not recognize the impact of her own words. “The Republicans are blocking us.” So when the Republicans are in control they get their agenda. When the Democrats are in control the Republicans get their agenda. So, what value does it have to put the Democrats in control?