Elizabeth Warren will be disastrous for the Democrats – 7 myths busted
Step aside Tea Party, the left-of-center Democrats are determined to take away your 2008 and 2012 Clowns’ Crowns for choosing the most ridiculous and pathetic losers as presidential candidates. All the Great and the Good, though certainly not the Best and the Brightest, are running to embrace Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts as their lady knight on a white horse to rescue them from the fearful dragon Hillary Clinton incinerating her own party in 2016.
Well, everyone needs their myths and sweet, comforting dreams though I find it easier to have faith in Bilbo and Frodo Baggins myself.
But for those brave souls ready to endure an occasional Arctic blast of reality, here are the seven reasons a Warren presidential candidacy will leave you longing for Barack Obama.
First myth: So you think you can follow a twice-elected Harvard professor who is plunging in the polls with another Harvard professor? The absurdity of that question, once posed reveals its self-evident answer.
Second myth: The idea that a Massachusetts senator can woo and win the Heartland.
The Dems have already forgotten decent John Kerry in 2004 and farcical Michael Dukakis in 1988. Massachusetts senators and governors are poison in national elections, they are sudden death. Look what happened to Mitt Romney for the Republicans in 2012.
The reason for this is simple: The ultra-brainy, ultra-progressive People’s Republic of Massachusetts is a Narnia unique to itself. Its most successful political leaders still live in the Harvard-Nantucket Bell Jar. No one, absolutely no one who shoots to the top of Massachusetts politics ever wins in a national poll.
The only person ever to break those odds was John F. Kennedy in 1960, and it took even him some highly suspicious voter returns in Cook County, Illinois (courtesy of Mayor Richard Daley, Sr. of Chicago) and across Texas (thanks to Sen. later Vice President Lyndon Johnson) to do that.
Third myth: “Warren’s ‘narrative’ as a single mom pulling herself up from poverty will carry her all the way.”
How infantile regressive can you be? You are not going to sway independent voters, let alone your own traditional Hispanic and Black constituencies with a farcical fairy tale out of Barney the Dinosaur. Get real.
Fourth myth: “Elizabeth Warren is bold, courageous and has new answers.”
She doesn’t have any new answers. Only a few tired old ones. It would no doubt help several million people to raise the minimum wage. But what good would that be if the jobs weren’t there for them? And does anyone seriously believe raising the minimum wage would solve any of the deep structural problems ailing the U.S. economy and American society?
In any case, does anyone truly imagine that any voters care about raising the minimum wage? They never have before.
In fact, the people who would benefit most from the change almost never bother to vote.
What are Warren’s solutions to the problems of border security?
In fact, Warren hardly has any answers at all, not even any old ones. She knows nothing about international security and cares less. Have you heard her open her mouth on how should we deal with the emerging Caliphate in the Middle East? Reduce our ruinous annual trade balance with China and other East Asian nations? Create scores of millions of well-paying new industrial jobs?
How would she compensate for trying to crush one of the brightest and most effective engines of American Heartland industrial economy – the Fracking Revolution?
The hard, cold, clear truth is that Warren has never run a business or administered any real agency or corporation in her life. Her supposed “mastery” of economics is limited book-learning, as irrelevant to reality as the theologies of the Dark Ages are to modern chemistry or engineering.
Warren takes endlessly about the need to “rebuild America’s middle class.” I am all for that. But she has no conception of the role that domestic manufacturing industry plays in generating all those well-paying jobs and follow-up services. She hasn’t a clue about the role of protective tariffs in generating America’s awesome rising to economic hyper-power status, or why the destruction of those tariffs, the walls of economic security, destroyed that industrial hyper-power. (I tell that story in my 2012 book That Should Still Be Us).
Fifth myth: “Warren has proved she can reach audiences all across America.” You hear this one every time yet another unelectable Democratic albatross flutters to the head of the pack. In fact, the cheering audiences she reaches are all the last geriatric survivors of Americans for Democratic Action and their ilk. People in the liberal fantasy bubble, the same demographic that goes weak at the knees for Peter, Paul and Mary reruns on PBS cheer wildly for Warren. Outside that bubble, she’s toast.
Keep dreaming the dream, folks. That’s the only place you’re ever going to see it.
Sixth myth: “Senator Warren will convince people by the superiority of her intellect.”
Well, if it’s so superior, how come she knows absolutely nothing about defense, foreign policy or the real dynamics of industrial revival? Dems, take your warning from Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson, a loser on such a scale he made Dukakis look respectable. During his 1952 campaign, the first of two times he was blown out of the water by Dwight David Eisenhower, Stevenson was encouraged by an admirer, “Governor, every thinking person in America was is with you.” He had the wit and realism to reply, “Yes, but I need a majority.”
In fact, “Thinking America” was with Eisenhower hook, line and sinker: It was the romantic, marginalized losers who were taken in by Stevenson’s “thoughtful” and “scholarly” entirely fake exterior. (John Kennedy and Harry Truman both despised him.)
Seventh and final myth about “embracing principle” and nominating Warren: “Things will be different this time.”
Yeah, sure. And the Redskins are going to win the Super Bowl.
Martin Sieff is an editor at Sputnik, the Russian-owned news organization. He is the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East (2008), Gathering Storm (2014) and Cycles of Change: The Three Great Eras of American History and the Coming Crisis that will Lead to the Fourth (2014). Follow Martin on: @MartinSieff
Specifics please?