Once More on Elizabeth Warren in Her Moment of Truth

There is another set of primaries tomorrow. Bernie and Biden are neck-and-neck in current total delegates, with Biden taking the lead in polling for tomorrow.

Warren has spent a week not doing anything but complaining about Bernie and going on a comedy show.

Today is the last moment Warren can endorse either Bernie or Biden and look like she means it. If she endorses today she can claim it was for impact on the next set of primaries.

If she doesn’t do it today, she clearly dithered.

The case for her endorsing Sanders is simple. His policies and politics are far closer to hers. So much closer that there is no comparison between Sanders and Biden in this regard.

But more than that, and perhaps worse, is that the bankruptcy bill Biden championed and helped force through is why Warren claims she went into politics. It is her political raison d’etre. It is her origin story as a politician.

If she doesn’t endorse Sanders, not only is she not supporting the politician who wants to do most of what she wants to do, she is failing to oppose the politician who she claims has been her nemesis.

On top of that, she will be forfeiting a leadership position in the left-wing progressive movement, a movement large and powerful enough to challenge the Democratic political machine.

In 2016, she slid on not endorsing anyone, but this time tens of millions of passionate Sanders supporters, many of whom feel they need universal health care to survive, student debt relief not to be poor, and a vigorous climate change plan to have a future, aren’t going to forgive sitting on the sides.

If she sits this one out, then she’s just a Senator again. Plus, she’ll probably be primaried.

I also keep seeing arguments that Warren owes no one anything, and I find that strange. She’s a sitting Senator whom millions of people supported in the primaries. It seems to me, at least, that she owes those people something; that if she believed in her policy platform, if she believed those policies were good for the country, that she owes her supporters an attempt to get something similiar through with Bernie, because Biden isn’t going to do it. Heck, he’s floated Jamie Dimon and Bloomberg’s names as potential cabinet members.

Meanwhile, we’re coming up on another finanical crisis, thanks to the Coronavirus and Russia deciding to crash oil prices at the same time as demand is already slumping. The big banks are going to need another huge bailout–again, Warren’s reason for being in politics.

She won’t fight to have Sanders in charge, so that Wall Street isn’t bailed out while ordinary people aren’t?

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that if Warren doesn’t endorse Bernie, it looks like she has no principles and doesn’t care about her followers. (No, don’t use electability. Sanders polls better against Trump and doesn’t have dementia.)

It makes it appear that she’s primarily concerned with only one person: Elizabeth Warren.

I hope that isn’t the case, but she’s running out of time to prove it isn’t. In fact, if you read this post by email tonight and she hasn’t endorsed him by then, she’s probably too late.

I confess to some anger over this, but I also feel sadness. When a politician who had a chance at greatness proves that they are primarily moved by self-interest, not by the principles they espoused, it is a cause for sorrow. We sneer at politicians precisely because so many of them seem to have no real beliefs, but it is ennobling when we find one of the few who aren’t like that.

I had hoped Warren was among their number, and my anger is genuinely partly moved by sorrow. As I said repeatedly throughout the primary, though I preferred Sanders I would have endorsed Warren if she were the nominee.

And everyone knows that if Sanders and Warren’s positions were reversed, he would have already endorsed.

May Warren prove her that followers were right to trust her, that her origin story was real, and that she stands behind her plans.

(If anyone else is getting bored of “all primary all the time,” yeah, posts on other subjects soonish.)

Edit: I changed the wording from “neck-and-neck” in first paragraph after commenters pointed out I obviously hadn’t read the polling from today and yesterday. Yup, Biden’s pulling ahead substantially, my bad, I had only looked at current delegate totals. Guess Americans really do hate the ideas of universal health care, their children not being debt slaves, and not dying like flies to climate change.

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