A recent report on NHPR, about the coming primary, told the story of progressive Democratic activists, so torn between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, they were doing volunteer work for both of them. Yogi Berra spoke of coming to a fork in the road, and taking it.
Molly Grover is a Sanders coordinator in Concord. She and Mary Lupien worked for Sanders in upstate New York in 2016. When the Vermont senator crossed paths with them there, he wasted no time in urging them to run for office themselves. If they could not both run, Sanders suggested, one should manage the others’ campaign. Lupien made her association with the Sanders “revolution” a key part of her bid for city council in Rochester, NY (my home town). Mary won on her second try, with the actual support of that city’s famously insular and establishment dominated Democratic committee. When I texted her last summer, asking if she still “felt the burn,” she hedged with praise for Elizabeth Warren, also noting the Bernie was “doing well.”
Warren and Sanders are reported to be friends, and they have both been in the vanguard of populist progressive politics, with a particular emphasis on economic issues.
Sanders hoped Warren would challenge Hillary Clinton four years ago. She didn’t. He did, running far better than expected. This time the left lane was more crowded. Warren’s plan laden effort surged last summer. In October Sanders had a heart attack. Since then, Sanders has rebounded, as Warren sank. All last year, Sanders and Warren have disappointed pundits expecting them to go after each other. As the crowd of Democratic aspirants set about knee capping each other, Senator Harris decrying political “food fights” before dumping a tray of mashed potatoes and gravy on Joe Biden’s head, Bernie and Liz remained a mutual admiration society.
The rupture has come in the new year, in the home stretch of the Iowa/NH campaign, just as this publication was launching.
The Sanders/Warren clash has become a primary within a primary. They can’t both win. They can’t both carry the progressive flag against the incrementalists who have owned the Democratic party since the 1990s. Trump is seen as a unique menace. The stakes are high. Human factors may overtake good judgment.
This has happened before.
Bobby Kennedy and Gene McCarthy battled each other for the mantle of the anti-war left in 1968. Kennedy held back on challenging LBJ in 1968. McCarthy famously drew first blood against Johnson in New Hampshire. Kennedy got in. Then he got shot. LBJ abdicated. Humphrey was nominated, losing narrowly to Nixon. McCarthy, a heroic figure to many in 1968, became consumed by bitterness, spending the rest of his life as something of a public crank.
Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern were close friends, midwest liberals, next door neighbors in Washington. Humphrey desperately wanted another shot at Nixon. When McGovern unexpectedly sprinted ahead of him for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination, Humphrey launched desperate and wildly distorted attacks on his old friend. McGovern was nominated. Nixon made good use of Humphrey’s attacks. McGovern and Humphrey never recovered from the battering, politically, perhaps emotionally.
The Warren/Sanders choice can no longer be postponed. Who can win? Whose claims hold up under scrutiny? Who has best kept the faith over the years? Who can govern? Politics is a rough business at any level. A presidential campaign is an enormous investment, emotionally and otherwise. Candidates and their supporters would not be human if misguided resentment and entitlement did not effect their judgment. The questions that must be asked can never be answered with certainty. They need to be examined with humility, a generous heart, and a cold eye.
There are reasons a lot of people admire both Sanders and Warren, whatever the campaign excesses are.
Warren has emerged as less the Harvard professor, and more the girl from Oklahoma, who saw her parents struggle at the “ragged edge of the middle class.” That is a good thing, because the latter is the person who can compete with Trump. Her talent as a champion debater in high school propelled her to college, and a teaching job. Then she married and had children. Consistent with her traditionalist roots, she was delayed in developing her own talents, and when she emerged as an attorney and scholar, her marriage broke up. That is a painful conflict many talented women will relate to. Warren accepted oral family tradition about native American ancestry, a common thing where she grew up. She claimed no benefits from this. Indeed, her parents reportedly eloped because of reputed native american blood and disapproving kinfolk. In the tradition of trumped up smears, and far right 21st century disinformation — Willie Horton, swiftboating, emails — Warren has been bloodied by an asinine personal attack about this, which has endeared her to many progressives. The same can be said of Righty efforts to stop her from leading a consumer protection agency she practically invented, in the wake of the Great Recession, and her invocation of a letter from Martin Luther King’s widow, warning us of Jeff Sessions’ hostility to civil rights. In an era of rising consciousness about politics and women’s rights, Warren is a compelling figure.
Elizabeth Warren came late to the economic justice issues she champions now. She was a Republican until the 1990s. A Republican after George H.W. Bush ran for president on Willie Horton, and the ACLU. A Republican after Newt Gingrich became the face of the GOP in 1994. She set out make a conservative case against freeloaders exploiting bankruptcy laws, and was converted to a progressive outlook by what her own research revealed. Reagan converted to conservatism in middle age. Conversions in politics often arouse suspicion, but there is little reason to doubt the sincerity of Warren’s.
Sander’s life-long concern for economic justice derived from growing up in Brooklyn, and watching his own parents suffer from economic injustice, including lack of access to decent health care. He has fought these battles his entire life, whether in or out of fashion. He put his personal safety on the line in the civil rights movement. While his sense of dignity and privacy keeps him from exploiting his personal feelings, his work leaves little doubt as to what he believes. Establishment hacks and pundits find this off-putting, but the game is moving away from them. The public has warmed to Sanders’ integrity and authenticity. The attacks on Sanders by the media and party oligarchs, stuck in the 1990s, are particularly odious.
It is charged that he is not electable, lacks the skills to govern, and is “not a Democrat.” Polls since 2016 have consistently shown that he is electable, beating Trump by more than anybody except Biden. In the things that matter, particularly matters of economic justice, Sanders has been a better Democrat than the hollow careerists and opportunists who abandoned core Democratic values, and hate Sanders for confronting them about it. It was Sander’s vote that secured a Democratic senate in 2007. It was Sanders whose efforts were crucial to turning Vermont from red to blue. His long record as a successful mayor, congressman, and senator refutes the assertion he understands government any less than his critics, with less impressive political or governmental credentials. He has championed women’s rights, civil rights, LGBTQ rights, and living wage economics longer and more consistently than anyone else in the race.
Hillary Clinton’s recent attacks on Sanders, and those of her GOP Lite camp followers, warrant some blunt truths. Electing a woman president, the breaking of that barrier, would have lifted everybody up, just as did the election of the first black president, or the first catholic president (or would have the election of our first Jewish president). This, however, can not be the only consideration. Most supporters of Warren or Sanders mourn Hillary’s loss to the Manhattan Mussolini, but by 2015, GOP Lite had taken the Democratic party to it’s weakest down ballot position since before the Great Depression. Clinton’s churlish assertions that Sanders shoulders primary responsibility for the failure of her smug, clueless, and entitled campaign display ill grace. Few people owe more to the patience of progressive Democrats than do the Clinton Democrats. The Clintons were not owed the silence of long abused progressive and working class Democrats, or of younger Democrats, nor was anybody obligated to forgo democratic process in the 2016 contest for an open nomination. Despite thumb on the scale tactics by Clinton allies, unwisely trusted to provide fair stewardship of party processes, Sanders braved abuse from some of his own supporters for rallying to Clinton’s support at the convention. The New Yorker called Sanders “one of the real champions” of the Clinton/Kaine campaign, in the fall of 2016. Sanders was far more gracious to her than she was to Obama in 2008. Remember the PUMA (Party Unity My Ass) antics?
Progressive populist Democrats, torn between Bernie and Liz, may resolve this dilemma by noting the mounting and unscrupulous establishment tactics employed against Sanders, and what is starting to look like Warren’s cooperation with them. “Nobody likes him,” Hillary Clinton said of the man who trounced her in NH, and almost took the nomination from her four years ago. “Nobody wants to work with him,” she sneered, as she declined to commit to supporting him against Trump, should he win the nomination.
To her misdirected expression of bitterness and disappointment, Clinton launched a broader attack on Sanders supporters, attacking “the whole culture around him.” Come again? The people who brought Dick Morris and Mark Penn into the upper reaches of Dem leadership lecture us about this?
Clinton’s unhappy example needs to be considered by Elizabeth Warre. After an admirable career and a remarkable campaign, her desperate flirtation with tribalism and sexist dog whistles was quickly exploited and amplified by old guard media and party hacks, who will turn on her in due course. It is not unreasonable for the Sanders campaign to point out that polling indeed shows Sanders running better against Trump than Warren does, or that Warren struggles with working class voters essential to a victory in November. Nor is it out of bounds to ask voters to consider Biden’s long record of policy mistakes, mistakes from an era when craven retreat from core Democratic values was mistakenly labeled “seriousness.”
What has been the substance of Warren’s case against Sanders? She invoked a private conversation from two years ago. She didn’t think it was important enough to raise until Sanders clearly began to overtake her, and her version of the conversation is disputed by the other party to the conversation. Since the rest of us did not witness the conversation, we can not know what was said. We do know that Sanders has never, in a long public career, given any evidence he believes no woman can be elected president. We can also reasonably weigh the plausibility of Sanders’ version, which is essentially that nobody disputes that Trump will weaponize anything — gender, anti-semitism, socialism, you name it — and that Warren may have misunderstood. This is a generous posture for Sanders to take. Warren’s open mic “you called me a liar” indignation, the suspicious timing, and the unethical conduct of colluding CNN moderators (invoking Warren’s unproven account as if it were established fact moments after Sanders denied it) all paint a clear enough picture.
Similarly, Warren claim of superior “electability,” does not withstand scrutiny. She correctly pointed out the 10 electoral defeats suffered by her male opponents, and pointed to zero losses by her and Amy Klobuchar. Warren further asserted that she was “the only candidate beat an incumbent in thirty years.”
Warren and Klobuchar won senate elections in Minnesota and Massachusetts, the only states won by George McGovern and Walter Mondale, in the 49 state GOP landslides of 1972 and 1984. These represent a fairly modest accomplishment in terms of ability to beat Republicans. Warren ousted Scott Brown from the senate with 54% of the vote, the same day Obama trounced the former governor of that state, with over 60% of the vote. Klobuchar’s opposition was token and underfunded. Sanders suffered multiple defeats over thirty years ago, but did so as he built a successful and durable progressive movement in Vermont. He defeated Clinton in the Vermont primary with 85%, which is no bad for a “non Democrat.” Republicans seldom bother to compete with him in what was not long ago the most Republican of states. Sanders ousted an incumbent Republican from congress in 1990, and won 10 more statewide elections since.
Progressives who admire and appreciate Sanders and Warren are weighing all of these things as the NH primary approaches.