David Dayen is an essential follow on Twitter, and he has exactly the correct take on this New York Times piece about Senator Professor Warren's fundraising, a story that otherwise seems to exist only to give that insufferable blowhard Ed Rendell another chance to stan for the early 1990s.



The open secret of Ms. Warren’s campaign is that her big-money fund-raising through 2018 helped lay the foundation for her anti-big-money run for the presidency. Last winter and spring, she transferred $10.4 million in leftover funds from her 2018 Senate campaign to underwrite her 2020 run, a portion of which was raised from the same donor class she is now running against.

As Ms. Warren has risen in the polls on her populist and anti-corruption message, some donors and, privately, opponents are chafing at her campaign’s purity claims of being “100 percent grass-roots funded.” Several donors now hosting events for her rivals organized fund-raisers for her last year.

“Can you spell hypocrite?” said former Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania, who contributed $4,000 to Ms. Warren in 2018 and is now supporting former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Mr. Rendell said he had recruited donors to attend an intimate fund-raising dinner for Ms. Warren last year at Barclay Prime, a Philadelphia steakhouse where the famed cheesesteak goes for $120. (The dish includes Wagyu rib-eye, foie gras, truffled cheese whiz and a half-bottle of champagne.) He said he received a “glowing thank-you letter” from Ms. Warren afterward.

The flying monkeys of conservative media have made a meal of Rendell's quote and, on social media, various Berniecrats have chimed in questioning SPW's progressive bona fides. (It also was revealed recently that SPW has spoken to—Horrors!—Hillary Rodham Clinton! Defeated presidential candidates are supposed to be sentenced to the dilithium mines on Rura Penthe. I was just chatting this over with U.S. Senator Willard Romney.) But Dayen was right in saying that...

For the record, I don't think candidates should be allowed to transfer money raised for one race to a different one. It's unfair particularly to governors who cannot do the same thing. It's legal, but it shouldn't be legal, like the rest of our campaign finance system.



And that's the point. (I didn't know governors couldn't transfer money. That really is very weird.) The whole campaign finance system in this country has been banjaxed ever since the Supreme Court handed down Buckley v. Valeo in 1976. And then, in 2010, Citizens United managed to screw up a fck up and nothing has been the same since.



U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren speaks during the New Hampshire Democratic Party State Convention on Saturday. Nic Antaya for The Boston Globe Getty Images

The fact is that, when SPW took herself out of the big money game, she took an enormous risk. (Read the news stories from when she made that announcement. It was the dumbest move a lot of the Really Smart People ever saw. Her campaign was doomed, I tell you. DOOMED!) And she has held to her policy ever since. And the fact that she used to be a Republican? What are the purists arguing? That she can't be trusted not to turn out to be a stealth agent for Goldman Sachs or ExxonMobil? You might as well worry about her really being an undercover Klingon. I mean, really, people, this is the campaign-finance equivalent of But Al Gore flies in a private jet! or What does a millionaire like JFK/FDR know about common people like me? The whole "traitor to his class" argument never has been more than a pile of straw.

You knew that, once she rose in the polls, there would be increased scrutiny and increased nonsense. The debate this week should be spirited on these grounds; I don't think the detente between SPW and Sanders can hold if the latter keeps letting his staff and acolytes snipe at her. (Filmmaker Josh Fox even trotted out the whole Native-American canard. As a progressive, he makes a good Segretti.) But the early evidence is that she doesn't much care. On Monday, she endorsed two progressive challengers to Democratic congressmen, and she also endorsed Kendra Brooks, a candidate from the Working Families Party who is running for the Philadelphia City Council. (Her eye is on the sparrow.) I'd like to believe she did that simply to get further up in Ed Rendell's grill, but I'm sure she has a better reason than that.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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