There’s a song by the Dodos, one of my favorite bands, with the lyric:
Success, success is failure
Failure’s assured
Sometimes you can’t win for losing; sometimes your success is inverted by others and touted as failure. It’s a fate particularly acute for conscientious female candidates — how about that.
Elizabeth Warren has been dumped on, not in spite of but because she has given up high-dollar fundraisers. The canny Harvard/McKinsey arbitrageur Pete Buttigieg detected an undervalued asset: Big money — lots of it, in big fistfuls! And with great enthusiasm, he has taken up ostentatious high-dollar fundraisers, hosted by prospective ambassadors to glamorous destination countries.
The big-money campaign era, punctuated by Citizens United, has short-circuited representative democracy. Given the massive amounts that the Koch networks et al will spend, it is not for nothing that mainstream Democratic politicians cite the need to post up on large donors. Buttigieg raised a strong $24.5 million in this fashion — manufacturing strength out of weakness. (On the other hand, Bernie Sanders raised a whopping $34.5 million this past quarter — outraising both Warren and Buttigieg.)
But in proudly granting special access to big donors — even counting it as a virtue! — Dem candidates separate themselves from their necessary role as defenders of the vulnerable and working class. The cleavage has not been lost on the public at large: Educated voters are trending strongly towards the Democratic Party, while white voters with less education (and presumably economic privilege) are trending strongly towards Trump. There are good reasons for educated people, who are revolted by Republican racism and proud ignorance, to flee the GOP. But if the Democrats don’t have a strong message for the working class, we’re toast — and we’ll deserve it. And high-dollar fundraisers put the language, culture, concerns, and methods of the wealthy in the minds and coffers of our candidates. There’s an unavoidable conflict of interest in campaign donations, but there’s also a class conflict, not to mention a cultural conflict.
Warren did attend similar such fundraisers in her Senate races. But in running for President, she decided to do it her way, and gave them up. She decided to build a different kind of power, which is the power of trust. When Van Jones’s perversely suggested that this represents “elitism”, Warren struck exactly the right note: In fighting a corrupt system, people at least want to know you’re trying. That’s not “hypocrisy”, the cardinal sin of the political media’s Church of Tim Russert. That’s growth and progress. If yesterday I failed, and today I succeeded; am I guilty of “hypocrisy”?
Warren has run the least cynical, most honest and forthright campaign, trying to lay everything on the table. Sometimes that helps her — “She’s got a plan for that”, a great slogan — and sometimes it was ill-formed, like with the DNA test. But she’s always trying. If this is the thanks that one gets for trying to do it right, why would anyone bother?
My unsolicited advice for Warren, or whomever wins the Democratic nomination: Stay on offense. Warren’s plans and conscientiousness give opponents — including the political media, and the Republicans — something big to shoot at. The plans are politically useful to her if they give her backup and support for her attacks on them and Trump: What’s your plan? Put up or shut up. If I have a reservation about her candidacy, it’s her ability to leverage good faith and idealism in her campaign.
It’s the fourth quarter. Time to play offense. She gave a good speech on New Year’s Eve … more on that later.
couves says
On some level, Warren seems to serve as controlled opposition for Corporate Democrats. How else do we explain Obama telling big donors not to worry about Warren’s populism, while having already said that he would personally intervene to stop Bernie? The corporate media has likewise been quite a bit more friendly towards Warren than other progressives — Bernie, Tulsi and Yang — although Warren has noticeably lost some of her media advantage over the last 6 weeks.
Having said that, it could all be worth it just to get Warren’s wealth tax. I don’t necessarily see it as the windfall she suggests (very wealthy people have a knack for keeping their wealth). But it would be a huge boon for democracy, by maintaining the threat that voters could further raise the “Oligarch Tax” at will.
Charley on the MTA says
I don’t believe that, seeing as it contradicts basically her entire career of the last 30 years. “How else to explain” is the opening for all manner of fallacious mischief.
couves says
Why do you think Obama favors Warren over Sanders?
Christopher says
If we don’t have the money to be competitive it doesn’t really matter what our message is.
jconway says
Bernie just outraised the entire field this quarter, including the major candidates taking corporate dollars. $36.5 million dollars is nothing to sneeze at, half of it from new donors with the average donor contributing $18. Grassroots money allowed Bernie to run dollar for dollar against Clinton who outspent Trump 3-1 and still managed to lose the election on an uninspiring message of continuity.
Christopher says
You too with the Trump-Clinton spending comparisons?! It’s nice to not have to spend when the media do all the work for you:(
jconway says
They are going to do the work for him again too, so we should be prepared with a consistent message of ethics and accountability against his corruption and lawlessness. It taints a candidate proclaiming to be the champion of the working class to meet in underground wine caves or promise jittery CEO’s “nothing will change”. We need fundamental changes that cannot happen unless we have a new president, but those changes are less likely to happen if the new president comes in owing favors to donors.
petr says
mindlessrepetitionisboringmindlessrepetitionisboringmindlessrepetitionisboringmindlessrepetitionisboringmindlessrepetitionisboringmindlessrepetitionisboringmindlessrepetitionisboringmindlessrepetitionisboringmindlessrepetitionisboringmindlessrepetitionisboring
Hillary outspent Trump 3-1 and outpolled him 65,853,514 votes to 62,984,828 votes.
The problem is not that Hillary Clinton did not run the better campaign. Her campaign was manifestly better, in each and every conceivable metric, than Trumps and indeed it was better than most any others in the history of our country. Hillary Clinton’s campaign was not the problem.
The problem was, and remains thus…
THERE ARE CITIZENS WHO ARE ALLOWED TO VOTE WHO POSSESS A WHOLESALE IMMUNITY TO THE BETTER CAMPAIGN.
Nothing that Warren, Biden, Buttiegieg or Sanders will, can, might or should do is going to change that one simple, and most salient, fact.
NOTHING ANY DEMOCRAT WILL, CAN, MIGHT OR SHOULD DO WILL CHANGE THIS FACT.
The Democrats are not responsible for the state of the nation. Stop pretending they are.
jconway says
Nobody is disputing that Hillary won the popular vote, but thanks again for reminding us. Traditionally the candidate who becomes president is the one who is considered to have won the election and traditionally that candidate is said to have run a better campaign. It is clear you hold an alternative definition of winning an election that you are entitled to, my father always said McGovern ultimately won because Nixon got impeached vindicating his campaign against Nixon’s illegal actions at home and abroad. Hopefully a similar vindication can occur for Hillary Clinton.
My broader point was, Trump won the electoral vote despite getting outspent 3-1 . Similarly, Bernie has matched both 2016 Clinton and 2020 Trump dollar for dollar without resorting to corporate donors or wine caves. So can any Democrat in this cycle. I even give Biden credit for increasing his small donor percentage to 50%, I am confident even he could reject corporate cash and be competitive and get to 100%. I’m less confident that Mayor Pete can, and as Pablo documented in his thread, we have seen how he’s already changed his positions due to these conflicts of interest. So those are the issues at stake.
Christopher says
Hillary got caught up in a constitutional fluke, and while maybe a perfect campaign may have gotten the right votes in the right states you can’t say it is a bad campaign that got the highest raw vote totals. Also, I could argue McGovern DID run a better campaign because he didn’t cheat, though the tragic irony of Nixon is he probably could have won without doing so. Had there been no Watergate and Nixon still won by similar margins, CREEP might have gone down as one of the greatest presidential campaigns in history.
SomervilleTom says
I suggest that trying to evaluate the effectiveness of the McGovern campaign in 1972 is a fool’s errand. The campaign was still-born from the beginning.
The irony of the Watergate coverup is that the entire episode had absolutely zero effect on the election.
Watergate was not a factor in the 1972 election. It remained buried until James McCord resurfaced it in his now-famous letter to Judge Sirica in March of 1973, well after Mr. Nixon’s landslide victory.
The Nixon administration “cheated” in its failed attempt to suppress the Pentagon Papers and then illegally wiretap Daniel Ellsberg during his trial.
The Pentagon Papers were published in 1971, a year before the election. They demonstrated a long history of government lies and illegal activity in support of the Vietnam war.
Those had ZERO effect on Richard Nixon’s popularity.
The Democratic Party’s 1972 campaign was an utter and complete disaster. It was the first presidential election after the massive restructuring of the party in the wake of the embarrassing 1968 convention.
The party was deeply split between the radical left, southern racists, and mainstream “moderates”.
George McGovern was MUCH more moderate than the several leftist candidates that began the campaign (such as Eugene McCarthy and Shirley Chisholm). The George Wallace campaign was strong and getting stronger when the assassination attempt effectively ended it.
Mr. McGovern was too moderate for the left wing, too radical for the middle, and a complete looney-tune to mainstream American voters of 1972.
As far as alternate realities go, I strongly suspect that George Wallace would have been elected President in 1972 if he had not been shot early in the primary season. His vicious and explicit racism made Donald Trump look like a saint.
It is meaningless to talk about how good or bad the McGovern campaign was — the result was the largest landslide loss in modern history.
Christopher says
All we ever hear about is how far to the left McGovern was. As for Watergate in 1972 I have read several books on this and based on what they say WAS known publicly before November has always left me scratching my head as to why it was not a bigger factor.
SomervilleTom says
@ All we ever hear:
I lived it, you did not.
What you do not hear is how close the Democrats came to nominating George Wallace. You don’t hear that because NOBODY wants to admit or talk about how racist the party and America was — then and now.
This was the first campaign after the party expelled its southern segregationists after the 1968 convention. Those expelled segregationists had strong support throughout the south, and were embarrassingly strong outside the south.
George Wallace was, like Donald Trump, an effective campaigner, effective demagogue, and a powerful politician. His campaign was large and growing. The media did not want to admit or talk about that, just as they did not want to admit or talk about the growing strength of Donald Trump in 2016.
A key difference between 1972 and 2016 is that Donald Trump was not the victim of an assassination attempt.
George McGovern was “far to the left” of the electorate. He was by no means to the left of the most radical of the candidates, and those candidates were barely acceptable to the “radical left” that was driving the anti-war movement.
The White House coverup of the Watergate break in succeeded until James McCord’s letter to his sentencing judge in March of 1973, after the election.
The break in occurred in June of 1972, and was immediately characterized as an act of a few disaffected Cuban “radicals” with no connections to the campaign or the White House.
ALL the national media other than the Washington Post accepted and republished that lie.
The news media absolutely failed to accurately report the truth, even though Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bernstein were on the right track.
Christopher says
I guess I do mostly know the WaPo version of Watergate and have to remember it wasn’t the powerhouse it later became (thanks largely to Watergate). I am definitely aware of the strength of George Wallace, but yes, meant left compared to the electorate which made me assume McGovern was always the far left candidate.
SomervilleTom says
@Trump won the electoral vote despite getting outspent 3-1:
How much do you think Russia and Russian-controlled organized crime spent on the disinformation campaign against Ms. Clinton? How much do you think the extreme right spent in total since 1992 trashing Hillary Clinton?
Saying that Donald Trump was outspent 3-1 is like saying that natural gas costs half of electric, or that gasoline is cheaper than the alternatives — it’s only true if you ignore the “externalized” costs.
I think Donald Trump — and the Trumpist GOP — has been the beneficiary of BILLIONS of dollars spent on manipulating the American public.
jconway says
Let’s get back on track. We are getting lost in some of the examples I used to illustrate my main point: our nominee can be competitive in 2020 without corporate money. Perhaps the examples I provided were not the best case test of this strategy working in the past, but I think it is still a worthy goal to shoot for in 2020. Let’s debate that.
Even Biden now has 50% of his money from small donors, I think 100% is a new standard any Democrat can aspire to. Bernie and Warren have seen initial success so far in pursuing this strategy this primary. Their campaigns are not wanting for money, Bernie’s in particular has out-raised his Democratic opponents and nearly matched Trump. I get pushing back against it as a litmus test, but we should at the very least hold it up as a goal. I celebrate Biden getting halfway there.
petr says
You think competitive is wholly dispositive and if she didn’t win she wasn’t competitive–That’s the upshot of your bass-ackwards analysis. But our nominee was ‘competitive‘ in 2016 and… still… the election went the other way.
What if competitive is not dispositive? What if the best campaign with the best candidate comes up short in the face of bigotry, sexism, nativism and xenophobia? What if, as noted, some citizens remain immune to a competitive campaign? What if competitive isn’t the skeleton key you think it is?
You STILL want to blame the candidate, saying it was her fault it went the other way. That she was ‘uninspiring.’
You’re making it the responsibility of the next Democratic candidate to overcome an electoral problem that has, it appears, very little to do with the quality of a campaign. The next candidate can run a campaign equal to that of Clinton ’16 and still lose, and it won’t be his/her fault.
bob-gardner says
Four different type faces, Petr? At least there’s no emoji’s. I’ll give you credit for that.
jconway says
Warrens facing two major problems that could serve as the death knell for her campaign.
The first is that she’s not pure enough for the Bernie voters (see Jacobin, Chapo, or anything on lefty twitter) and too left wing for moderate voters. Like Harris before her, she is being squeezed on her left by Bernie and her right by Buttigieg.
The second is that all her big complicated plans are too big and complicated for most voters to understand. Corbyn nearly won power in 2017 on the simple slogan of “for the many, not the few” and lost a historically high number of seats two years later running a Rube Goldberg multistep process for Brexit and complex plans addressing problems nobody had. Walking back on her big scary fully paid for MFA plan to back essentially a public option has now given credence to Bernie that he’s the only consistent advocate for single payer in the race. Even though he has provided next to no details on how he’ll pay for it.
Warren repeatedly takes the bait from the reals her opponents lay out for her. From Trump on the DNA test to Pete and Biden on MFA. She does not have to have an answer to everything in order to win. In fact,
vagueness wins elections, specificity impresses Vox writers, but wins few voters in IA or NH. She should have run back in 2016 when she had a clearer political message and an easier foil in Hillary Clinton. Bernie would have endorsed her and never become the phenomenon he is now. I would have voted for her then, I hope I can still vote for her now before she drops out.
Charley on the MTA says
Do I have to?
jconway says
Haha, no. I think those folks suffer from a serious underpants gnome problem.
Phase 1 Elect Bernie
Phase 2 ?
Phase 3 Democratic Socialist America
There are still a majority of Americans including a majority of Democrats that are not on board with their agenda, yet they insist only they can win. One of the saving graces of this space is that we try to be reality based. I think Warren held up a model of reality based leadership and has been seemingly burned for it by the media and primary voters.
Charley on the MTA says
Ah, the underpants gnomes thinking goes before that, though:
1. Alienate everyone in sight
2. ?
3. Bernie wins!
… and only then do we get to make Congress disappear.
Christopher says
She’s my strong second choice largely because of her plans. I for one like candidates who appear to have done their homework.
fredrichlariccia says
Biden is the only candidate who wins the 270 electoral votes needed according to Real Clear Politics average polling.
jconway says
Like I said in my other post, a reset seems to be what voters want, not a revolution. This is something progressives will have to account for. We are becoming the fall in line party, precisely because the fear of four more years is overtaking whatever hopes and dreams we once had for a better government.
I do not doubt that Biden has the best present path to the nomination and the White House right now. Two things to keep in mind is that this can always change since no one has voted yet and that if he does win he still has a responsibility here to to reach out to the 70% of the party that wanted someone better.
doubleman says
Another thing to keep in mind – he hasn’t been campaigning that much.
I suspect a lot of people are basing support on a feeling of Biden from the Obama years, not an evaluation of Joe campaigning in 2019.
I could be wrong about this (probably am) but I think most people aren’t yet seeing his daily incoherence.
Christopher says
OK, but if he is ahead without campaigning much usually the flip side to that is just see how much he can gain once he campaigns more (and BTW, he’s campaigning plenty)
jconway says
She’s the only candidate who’s done her homework! Which is probably why she is not going to be president. I’m finally starting to feel the pain of Hillary 08’ and 16’ supporters. My heart swooned for male figures telling me what I wanted to hear while I got annoyed by a smart woman telling me what I needed to hear. Same dynamic here.
Even progressive women I know can’t stand Warren because she’s “too smart” and a “know it all” who “talks down to us”. Really? Whatever plans President Sanders passes will look awfully like hers, just as Obamacare ended up being Hillary’s 2008 plan.
SomervilleTom says
A very crisp and accurate summary of the dynamics of the Democratic Party in 2008, 2016, and 2020.
Christopher says
For the record, Warren has never struck me as a know-it-all who talks down to people, but then my desire for intelligence in leaders is pretty high so maybe I’m somewhat immunized to that feeling.
jconway says
The why are you supporting Biden?
Christopher says
Because I still prioritize relevant experience for presidential races (and I certainly do not think Biden is unintelligent if that is what you are implying), but I believe I have also said Warren is my strong second choice. Do you not think it’s possible to hold both views simultaneously?
jconway says
I honestly did not mean it as a dig against Biden. I am coming around to the strong possibility he is the next nominee and hopefully the next president if he is. I think he is very knowledgeable about world affairs. I still think Warren’s mastery of domestic policy blows the rest of the field out of the water. If you care about well thought out progressive proposals and policies she is the candidate to beat. I just do not see the same level of knowledge or curiosity not just from Biden, but from Bernie as well.
So much of their campaigns seem predicated on their greatest hits from past runs for president. Revolution or the Obama-Biden Reset. In many ways Warren is the one candidate who bridges this ideological divide in a substantive way that makes us a party of ideas again. Buttigieg bridges it only superficially and on the surface level. She’s…probably not winning this one, but if you really think her ideas are better you should give her your vote. I cannot decide between Biden or Bernie and might stick with my first choice even if she’s out by our primary.
jconway says
Put another way, I cannot think of substantive proposals given the same level of thought and detail from any of the other candidates. Biden would do well to borrow most of her plans, and I even like David Brooks idea of putting her in charge of breaking up big tech. She’d make a phenomenal AG, or FCC, or SEC chairwoman.
SomervilleTom says
I think she’d make a phenomenal senior Senator from Massachusetts.
One advantage of that role is that it is not dependent on the whims of a national electorate.
jconway says
She already is 🙂
SomervilleTom says
Heh … that’s my point.
Christopher says
I agree with your analysis regarding Warren, which is why for a long time she was my top bet for the nomination, but lately she seems to be sliding back.