Sen. Elizabeth Warren will probably not be a presidential candidate in 2016. Despite that, she will continue to play an important role in how the Democratic Party is perceived by voters -- and that could have implications for whoever ends up as the nominee. A recent focus group found that Warren's message had resonated with most of the panel, even those who identified as Republicans. As her clout grows, she will have the potential to be one of the Party's greatest assets, lending Main Street credibility to the candidates and causes she champions.
It is in this context that Warren has arrived at her Rubicon moment. Her recent maneuvering against the Affordable Care Act, at the same time she is fighting efforts to rollback Dodd-Frank, puts into stark relief the choice she faces. She can choose to defend the interests of the coalition that elected her and President Obama, or become populist window-dressing for the Clinton campaign in 2016.
The fates of Senator Warren and President Obama have been interlinked for some time. After all, it was this administration that made her signature achievement, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a reality. There's also a case to be made that Obama helped Warren over the finish line in her Senate race -- the President won Massachusetts by a 23 point margin while Warren's margin of victory was 7.5 points. In a low-turnout off year election, Warren may not have been able to pull off victory against her well-liked opponent.
So it was surprising that Warren's memoir, A Fighting Chance, presented Obama in such a negative light. She writes, "The president chose his team, and when there was only so much time and so much money to go around, the president's team chose Wall Street." Regardless of the veracity of the statement, it's a judgment of character that Warren does not apply to Hillary Clinton. In fact, Warren uses the book to whitewash her previous criticism of the former first lady and bury an instance of Clinton flip-flopping:
“As First Lady, Mrs. Clinton had been persuaded that [bankruptcy-related] bill was bad for families, and she was willing to fight for her beliefs,” Warren wrote in “The Two Income Trap,” the 2003 book she co-wrote with her daughter. “As New York’s newest senator, however, it seems that Hillary Clinton could not afford such a principled position. . . . The bill was essentially the same, but Hillary Rodham Clinton was not.”
However, Warren softened her tone in her latest book. Recounting her meeting with Hillary Clinton in 1998 to discuss the proposed bankruptcy legislation, the then-first lady, according to Warren, said she would fight against “that awful bill.”
As the New Republic first noted, in “A Fighting Chance,” Warren doesn’t make reference to Clinton’s subsequent vote in favor of the bill.
Obama, who has been supportive of Warren, gets an unflattering portrayal. Meanwhile, Warren employs revisionist history to boost Clinton. It comes across as posturing ahead of the next election, trying to win favor with the person many believe will be President Obama's successor.
Far more serious and potentially damaging is Sen. Warren's support for repealing one of the Affordable Care Act's key funding mechanisms, the medical device tax, which helps fund subsidies for people who enroll in Obamacare exchanges. Repealing it -- as the medical device industry has spent millions lobbying Congress trying to do -- would remove $29 billion in available funds for people trying to purchase healthcare over the next decade. Why is Warren siding with the GOP and her state's big business interests against the best interests of the disadvantaged "little guy" she seeks to empower?
Warren's stance in some ways dovetails with Clinton surrogates trying to distance the former Secretary from the President. In November, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who endorsed Clinton for 2016 just months after Obama's second inauguration, raised doubts about the focus on healthcare reform early in the President's first term, saying that, "when Democrats focused on healthcare, the average middle class person thought, ‘the Democrats are not paying enough attention to me.'" He also said pursuing ACA was not worthwhile since those helped by the law were unreliable voters.
Schumer's false opposition between working for the "average middle class person" and those who benefit from healthcare reform plays into racialized perceptions of the law.
Beyond the fact that healthcare reform regularly registered as a top priority for voters in 2008, Schumer's remarks are a form of dog whistle politics that have no place in our system, especially in the modern Democratic Party. Yet a Warren spokeswoman said the Massachusetts Senator agreed with Schumer.
One bad vote and a few questionable lines in a book cannot take away from Elizabeth Warren's tremendous accomplishments. What they can do is raise uncomfortable questions, especially since her cursory positions on non-Wall Street issues have sometimes been inconsistent with her progressive persona. Her hardline stances on the War on Drugs and Israel's shelling of Gaza schools and hospitals put her to the right of the President and on the wrong side of history.
Elizabeth Warren commands her own wing of the Democratic Party. Ultimately, only she decides whether it becomes a force that reshapes the political landscape or one that merely defends the left flank of less courageous politicians.