The Massachusetts progressive, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who had seemingly positioned herself to bridge the gap between the aging establishment dinosaurs in the Democratic Party and the younger more wild-eyed radicals who make up the party's base is finding the going rough these days.
A New York Times article has brought her up on progressive race crime charges over her Native American DNA test fiasco while the leading leftist newspaper in her home state has declared her too polarizing a figure and called on her to abandon any plans for a 2020 run for the White House. Two very different critiques with one unmistakable message behind them: Dems just aren't excited about Warren.
Dems just aren't excited about Warren.
Media Turn on Her
"Warren missed her moment in 2016, and there’s reason to be skeptical of her prospective candidacy in 2020," the hard-left Boston Globe ominously asserted in an editorial on Dec. 7. The paper notes Republican Gov. Charlie Baker won more votes than Warren on Election Day Nov. 6. "[H]er margin of victory in November suggests there’s a ceiling on her popularity," the paper added.
Citing a poll that showed Massachusetts voters were "more enthusiastic" about a potential run by former governor Deval Patrick, who would have had exactly zero chance of winning the Democratic nomination, than they were for Warren, the Globe laments that "she has become a divisive figure. A unifying voice is what the country needs now after the polarizing politics of Donald Trump."
The stinging editorial comes one day after the ever-ludicrous New York Times featured an article tossing Warren into the leftist identity politics briar patch over her disastrous DNA test showing that she may have 1/64 Native American ancestry.
The article spent almost all of its focus on propping up the anger of the perpetually aggrieved "racial justice advocates" that have done so much to distance the Democratic Party from regular Americans in recent years. One excerpt should serve to describe the entire tenor of the frothing piece:
"Jennifer Epps-Addison, co-director for the Center for Popular Democracy, a progressive group that has previously been supportive of Ms. Warren, said, 'If she wants to be considered the leader of our party or the leader of the progressive movement, she needs a reconciliation.'
'And that reconciliation should center Native voices and make sure that their stories of loss and theft of identity come front and center, not, you know, one white woman’s tale of understanding her DNA,' Ms. Epps-Addison said."
Good grief. We're only one month removed from the midterm elections, and already progressives are devouring their own. Of course, it is delightful to observe the haughty Warren, who frequently flashes the woman identity card when it suits her political purposes, having the progressive outrage machine turned on her.
Fading Star
But it's far more meaningful to ponder just why two large leftist newspapers would lash out at Warren from two different directions on consecutive days. It's more than just the DNA flap, which was most definitely a political error of high magnitude but something a top-notch presidential candidate could successfully weather during the primary season. And it's not just that she is too polarizing, because Democrats, lurching more to the left by the day, are not expected to nominate a candidate eager to reach out across the aisle to people their most dedicated followers consider to be racists, sexists, and homophobes.
No, it's clear that, as the Globe wrote, Warren has indeed "missed her moment." Her time was 2016, when she could have served as a more progressive yet less radical alternative to establishment candidate Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries than self-declared democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) turned out to be. That was Warren's best chance on the national stage. Having passed on serving as a fresh option two years ago, she now finds herself looking remarkably stale as 2020 approaches.
By playing the good soldier for Hillary in 2016, Warren may have been thinking about reaping political rewards from the Dem establishment down the road. Yet that decision also alienated her from the younger radical Dems who gravitated toward Sanders in 2016. These are the ones now demanding generational change and a real commitment to a progressive politics utterly devoid of any attempts to claim the "center." They will be a factor in the next primary season as well.
Warren's best opportunity to dance between the establishment and the radicals is now in the past. One pictures her sitting, stunned, in her Senate office chair and wondering how the "fiery populist leftist firebrand" of a couple of years ago is now the bungling, white-privileged polarizing figure who can't unite Democrats and can't beat Trump.
Elizabeth Warren looks very much like a candidate with a firm expiration date rather than a secure path to a nomination.
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