The candidacy of Elizabeth Warren has now entered into a new and dangerous phase. IMHO, that phase, which might be called the Howard Deanification of Elizabeth Warren, poses a mortal threat to the survival of the Warren campaign.
Older readers will remember, and some will share with me, the agony and the ecstasy of the Howard Dean’s campaign for President in 2004. (Disclaimer: I was an active, full time volunteer in that campaign.)
For some months prior to the Iowa causes, Dean was the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination, a highly intelligent, articulate and mildly leftish candidate with the same kind of down-to-earth, populist appeal as Sen. Warren.
Like Sen. Warren, Howard Dean was NOT the candidate of the Democratic Party Establishment.
I was disappointed when Howard Dean came in third in the Iowa caucuses. His candidacy might, IMHO, easily have recovered from that setback, but for two factors. First there was “the scream,” an event in which a part of his concession speech was orally magnified and distorted and sent out to the world as if it had been the cry of a madman, and second -- IMHO the most critical factor — was the universal, intense, hysterical opposition of the Democratic Party Establishment to the Dean candidacy . IMHO, that opposition was the true cause of the end of the Dean campaign.
In an ever-increasing drumbeat before the Iowa caucuses, The Word on Howard Dean --the Great Wisdom emanating from The Great Minds on the Potomac --was that Howard was “too left” to be able to win the general election. Those great minds were led by the execrable Rahm Emmanuel, a man who had long been a passionate Dean adversary; they were backed up by the sage, beard-stroking and reassuring voices of the Washington Commentariat, and they were echoed on editorial pages throughout America.
The Establishment of the Democratic Party killed Howard Dean and brought us the leaden, lifeless and soporific candidacy of that Great Man, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry. If someone does not wake up and smell the coffee, the Warren candidacy will be crucified on the same cross that ended the candidacy of Howard Dean. Just like Howard Dean 15 years ago, Warren is now being labelled by the Great Minds of Washington as “a wonderful candidate, but obviously ‘too far left’ to win the general election.”
The most visible contemporary spokespersons for this point of view are the loathsome Donnie Deutsch, a self-proclaimed ‘friend of Donald Trump’ who tells his listeners every Saturday night that, “if Warren is the nominee, the Democrats will lose 49 states;” Deutsch is backed up by Mika and (former Republican Congressman) Joe Scarborough, two prominent cable commentators who repeat the same mantra every morning, and by an endless stream of commentators, editorialists and other Graybeards who thankfully are available to reveal their Great Truths to lowly earthlings like you and me: Don’t vote for Warren, she’s too far left to win the General Election.
Apparently these wise men want us to support Joe Biden, the man who Michael Moore calls the Hillary Clinton of 2020. (I might say as an aside that I think Biden is a wonderful man, and I think he’ll be cut up like sausage meat by Donald Trump.)
IMHO, people who want to see Warren as the Democratic nominee must speak up NOW to challenge this latest propaganda from the Republican Wing of the Democratic Party. We must tell our neighbors and representatives and anyone else who is willing to listen that Warren is NOT too far left to win the General Election, and that in fact she represents points of view that are supported by the overwhelming majority of American voters. The idea that she is ‘too left” to win the general election is, as Donald Trump might say, bullshit.
Voters of the Left, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your cable news commentators!
