This
week, news surfaced that President Barack Obama’s preferred candidate for 2016
is Elizabeth Warren, based on the president’s concerns that Hillary Clinton
would undermine his agenda – based on the book by author/journalist Edward
Klein “Blood Feud.”
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| Warren.Senate.gov |
My
most recent piece for the Capital Research Center is about Elizabeth Warren’s
campaign infrastructure in challenging the Clinton machine. It comes from the
nonprofit group Demos:
Sen.
Elizabeth Warren, the freshman Massachusetts senator who pioneered the “you
didn’t build that” philosophy, is using her new book, Fighting Chance, to throw red meat to the Left and position
herself to the left of Democrats like Hillary Clinton, who are more comfortable
with Wall Street donors. Warren’s book tour was well received among fawning
liberal supporters across the country, many of whom are looking for an
un-Hillary in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary.
“I’d
spent nearly twenty years fighting to level the playing field for the middle
class, and I’d seen millions of working families go over the economic cliff—and
it was getting worse,” Warren writes in her book, explaining why she decided to
run for Senate in 2012. “What kind of country would my grandchildren grow up
in? What if the conservatives and the big banks and the big-time CEOs got their
way and Washington kept helping the rich and powerful to get richer and more
powerful? Could I really stand on the sidelines and stay out of this fight?”
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| State.gov |
The
New Republic has called Warren “Hillary Clinton’s Worst
Nightmare,” and much reporting since has followed similar themes, even as
Warren feigns uninterest in presidential politics (just as she claims public
clamor forced her to run for the Senate).
Still,
many political observers claim former Secretary of State Clinton is invincible.
Of course, similar claims were made in 2008. That year, in addition to her
official campaign organization, Hillary had close allies in the nonprofit
sector propping her up, such as the Center for American Progress (founded by a
former Clinton White House chief of staff, John Podesta) and targeting her
enemies, as Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) did.
How
can Warren compete with that?
Should
Warren run, she will likely have her own infrastructure in place with Demos,
the research and advocacy group whose slogan is “An Equal Say and Equal Chance for
All.” Notice the similarity to the title of Warren’s book.
Of
course, the Left’s vision of equal opportunity is usually based on some absurd
equality-of-outcome scheme, which is part of the core policy positions of
Demos: to spend more, tax more, redistribute more, restrict political speech
more, and convince the public that big government is good for them. The
organization’s mission statement even calls for “rethinking American capitalism
as it exists today as a system of political economy.”
The
name Demos is actually an ancient Greek word meaning “people” or “the mob.” The
Greek term is the root of the English word democracy—and also of demagogue.
Before
she was a senator, Demos honored Warren at its 10th anniversary gala in 2010
with its “Transforming America” award, because Warren was the architect of the
Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation (New York Times, April 10, 2010). Demos aggressively advocated for the Dodd-Frank bill
and has long supported Warren. In 2003 Demos helped promote Warren’s previous
book, The Two Income Trap. But that’s understandable, given that the senator’s
daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi, is a co-founder and currently chairman of the
governing board for Demos.
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