Fox News's Howard Kurtz is flummoxed. "Why is Warren depicted as a populist true believer and Cruz as a wacko bird?" Kurtz
wondered in a piece titled, "Media Swoon: Elizabeth Warren, unlike Ted Cruz, hailed as a principled crusader."
But conservative pundits aren't the only people making the Warren-Cruz comparison. Since Warren's budget stand last week, many journalists have talked about the Massachusetts senator being the Ted Cruz of the left.
Here's six reasons why Elizabeth Warren is no Ted Cruz:
1. Warren is not running for president
She's said it repeatedly and, despite the rise of her political star last week, Monday was no exception. NPR's Steve Inskeep pressed her three times about 2016 Warren fever and here were her answers:
"I'm not running for president...
I am not running for president...
I am not running for president. You want me to put an exclamation point at the end?"
This means that any fight Warren takes on in the Senate is actually driven by a desire to govern and affect policy, not grease the wheels for a presidential run.
Head below the fold for five more reasons.
2. Warren has been championing consumer protection issues for most of her career
In 1979, Warren started researching average Americans who wound up in bankruptcy court. "I set out to prove they were all a bunch of cheaters," she said in a 2007 interview at the University of Berkeley. But after studying hundreds of personal bankruptcy stories, Warren discovered the human side of the data she was mining.
"These were hardworking middle-class families who, by and large, had lost jobs, gotten sick, had family breakups, and that's what was driving them over the edge financially. Most of them were in complete economic collapse when they filed for bankruptcy," Warren said. "It changed my vision."
Ever since making that discovery, Warren has devoted her career to protecting average Americans from abuse by big money interests in banking and finance, in particular.
No such cohesive story exists for Cruz. He may arguably be a successful lawyer whose career is punctuated by some high-profile posts and victories in the court room. But, to say nothing of his politics, no singular inspiration has become Cruz's life work as it has for Warren.
3. Warren is not universally despised by her own caucus
In fact, Warren was elevated to a leadership position in the Senate Democratic caucus last month. And on the heels of her performance last week, fellow Democrats are now following her lead on opposing the confirmation of Antonio Weiss to a top post at the Treasury Department.
[P]rogressive Democrats are lining up behind Sen. Elizabeth Warren to fight Obama over the nomination of Antonio Weiss – a Wall Street insider the president wants for a top Treasury Department job. If confirmed, Weiss’ portfolio would, in part, include implementation of the Dodd-Frank laws.
Cruz, on the other hand, is fast becoming
the pariah of his caucus. Some Tea Partiers in the House may like his firebrand politics, but most GOP Senators are openly rebelling against him, especially now that his weekend stunt is resulting in the confirmation of dozens of Obama nominees. Here's what Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah
told the Dallas News:
"You should have an end goal in sight if you're going to do these types of things, and I don't see an end goal other than irritating a lot of people."
Then there's
Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire.
“I think this is ridiculous.”
4. Warren is working for all Americans, not just one specific wing of her party
Last week, Warren worked to help protect every single American taxpayer from a potential 2008 redux—when taxpayer funds could once again be used to bail out big banks that make bad bets.
It wasn't popular the first time around, even in retrospect. At the five-year anniversary of the 2008 bail out that rescued several financial institutions, a New York Times/CBS poll found that nearly 60 percent of Americans didn't support the move even though it likely helped save the economy from a death spiral.
In fact, the bail out was found to be even more unpopular among Republicans than Democrats.
Nearly three-quarters of Republicans said they disapproved, compared to 6 in 10 independents, and 4 in 10 Democrats.
That means almost 75 percent of Republicans substantively agreed with the position that Warren championed last week.
Last year, Cruz railed against Obamacare during the government shutdown, and over the weekend, he bemoaned the president's executive actions on immigration. Cruz is routinely focusing on hot button Tea Party issues that have special resonance with his wing of the Republican Party.
5. Warren didn't use a fool's errand to shut down the government
In 2013, Cruz helped convince House Republicans to shut down the government over a rider that would defund Obamacare. Even though the measure passed the House, it had no future in the Democratically-controlled Senate.
Last week, Warren raised awareness about a provision that was added to the budget bill in the dark of night. It was entirely possible that Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi would be able to deny Speaker Boehner the Democratic votes he needed to pass the budget bill. Then the Senate could have conceivably followed suit since absolutely no one in the chamber wanted to stand up and defend the Wall Street hand out. Sadly, the White House lobbied for the bill and it passed the House.
Cruz was near universally blamed for the disastrous shut down that had no chance of accomplishing his end goal. But ultimately, Warren did not filibuster the budget bill and she did not shut down the government.
She explained why to NPR:
"Once the House passed an Omnibus bill with this in it and threw it over to the Senate... at that point there was very little choice but either to pass the Omnibus—even with this thing in it—or shut down the government. And we didn't want to shut down the government."
6. Warren is creating a movement not a moment
Ted Cruz road the fervor of an already organized movement—the Tea Party—into office in 2012 and is now leveraging its issues to raise his political profile. He is simply telling Tea Partiers what they want to hear about issues that already exist.
Warren is putting issues on the map that would have never been there. Certainly one could argue that a populist movement was already on the rise in America when Warren took office in 2012. But it was a movement that lacked a cohesive battle cry with a tangible end game, which is one of the reasons that Occupy Wall Street eventually fizzled. Warren is not only giving voice to that movement, she is providing it a strategic roadmap that wouldn't otherwise exist.