Yesterday’s “big announcement” from Massachusettes Senator Elizabeth Warren was exactly what everyone has known for ages. She’s officially running for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president. Of course, it’s looked and sounded as if she was running for president since she first won her seat in the Senate. So what was her overarching message defining why she should be elected? America is a terrible place because of all the rich people and she’s going to teach them a thing or two. (CNN)
Sen. Elizabeth Warren officially launched her 2020 presidential campaign Saturday at a rally in Lawrence, Massachusetts, using the backdrop of Everett Mills — the site of a historic 1912 labor strike led by women and immigrants — to issue a call to action against wealthy power brokers who “have been waging class warfare against hardworking people for decades.”
Over 44 minutes in sub-freezing temperatures, Warren described a political elite “bought off” and “bullied” by corporate giants, and a middle class squeezed so tight it “can barely breathe.”
“The man in the White House is not the cause of what is broken, he is just the latest and most extreme symptom of what’s gone wrong in America,” Warren said of President Donald Trump. “A product of a rigged system that props up the rich and powerful and kicks dirt on everyone else. So once he’s gone, we can’t pretend that none of this ever happened.”
Warren has a proposal in place to fix the “rigged system” that favors the rich. She wants to enact a “wealth tax” that will hit anyone with combined assets in excess of $50 million at 2% annual rate and billionaires at 3%. Presumably, this modern-day Robin Hood has some plan to spread that wealth around to the poor, but it would most likely go into increasingly expensive entitlement programs and social agenda items. Where the government’s authority to impose such a wealth tax is found in the Constitution remains a mystery.
Does she have a shot? A recent CNN poll of Democratic voters puts her favorability rating at 52%, which isn’t terrible, but it’s not really great either. She’s well behind folks like Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris. Warren is also unlikely to leave the entire fake Native American heritage thing in her rear view mirror either.
But beyond that, this really isn’t a question of policies or proposals. Warren’s platform isn’t all that unique compared to the rest of the field. Though I’ve said this here before, I’ve seen nothing to change my mind about the fact that she’s just not a very good candidate. This isn’t a complaint about her “likability,” either. I’m sure plenty of people like her. But she’s terrible at giving speeches. Even in making her announcement yesterday she droned on for three-quarters of an hour and I couldn’t make it through ten minutes of the video without feeling the need to take a nap.
You’re not going to see Elizabeth Warren delivering anything like Barack Obama’s “Yes We Can” speech in New Hampshire back in 2008. Warren always comes across as if she’s lecturing you about not eating enough vegetables. The main difference is that she’ll propose to fix that issue by having the government force-feed you peas. Perhaps she’ll surprise me, but honestly, much like Kirsten Gillibrand, I’m just not seeing this campaign going anywhere.
