Jamelle Bouie outlines a smart case for Joe Biden selecting Elizabeth Warren as Vice President.
This would be a signal to skeptical progressives that Biden is serious about implementing a progressive agenda, it would also be a signal to the rest of the electorate that this is a team ready to govern on day 1. While many of the women on Biden’s short list are excellent choices in their own right, none come close to Warren’s expertise on financial regulations, implementing direct payments to consumers, and restructuring the economy around working families. Bouie cites all three as ‘exhibits’ in his case for Warren, using her 2016 role as a key policy adviser to the Clinton campaign.
Warren personally lobbied the Clinton transition team, spoke with the Clinton policy team ahead of her endorsement in June 2016, and had placed several allies among those responsible for staffing a second Clinton White House. Had Clinton won the election, Warren would have been among the most influential Democrats in the federal government, on account of her relentless focus on personnel.
This experience will be a vital asset to a President Biden:
Warren has never served in executive office. But she has a powerful grasp on the power of the bureaucracy, of the influence of federal agencies and the reach of their authority, of what you can do by organizing and wielding that power effectively. If empowered (much as Biden was under President Barack Obama) a Vice President Warren would be an invaluable asset in directing and implementing a New Deal-style program.
While many have talked her up as a Treasury Secretary, having her old job as CFPB Executive Director, or leading a new cabinet post or task force for the COVID Response, the best place for her to be is as Vice President. Every VP since Mondale has been treated as a ‘minister without portfolio’ who can aid the President on key priorities. In the case of Biden this was the Stimulus implementation as well as the Iraq withdrawal. For Warren it could be the science based response to fighting the Pandemic itself as well as the economic recovery agenda.
There are no doubt downsides. She was an uneven presidential candidate, she did not even in her home state in the primary, she botched her health care plan rollout and the DNA test. Yet, at the same time, she will take the same 2 x 4 to Trump-Pence that she previewed against Mike Bloomberg. She and Biden have both put the middle class front and center in their economic agenda. He is already adapting her policies as his own and calling her on a near daily basis for advice. This could be a powerful governing partnership, which could ultimately be smart politics too.
Voters over 65 flock to Biden as Trump support drops 22 points:
2016 exit polls: Trump 52 2o2o CNN national poll : Biden 57
Clinton 45 Trump 42
Elizabeth Warren doesn’t need to be on the ticket to take her 2×4 to Trump-Pence — not disagreeing, just observing.
As much as it pains me to say it, I’d like to see a much younger black woman on the ticket.
Then maybe Kamala Harris (though I’ve long preferred her for AG) or to go a bit outside the box Ayanna Pressley endorsed Warren in this race. Val Demings is also a possibility. Please not Stacey Abrams, though, who has never gone beyond party leader in a state legislature.
I think Harris it the likeliest choice, and I also think she is a strong one. Jennifer Rubin made a very good case for her as well. https://pressley.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-pressley-senator-harris-introduce-groundbreaking-bill-support-smallaimed at ending the relief disparities between big and small businesses. I think that’s the kind of star power this ticket needs, and a vital thank you to the most important constituency to turn out in the Democratic party.
Harris is the conventional wisdom’s best choice. I’ll accept her in the ticket, but not a fan. She plays it way to safe and conventional (hence the conventional wisdom support) and look how that turned out for her presidential race. A great ticket for the 2020 election, a poor choice for anointing a successor that we need to lead us into the digital age.
I liked Abrams in the past, but there is still too much on the job training she would need to step into the Presidency and her naked campaigning for the job has turned off a lot of people close to Biden. Abrams should have run for one of the two increasingly competitive Georgia senate seats. Instead we are likely to see Ossoff and Matt Lieberman (son of Joe) advance to the runoff against weak Republican opponents. Abrams would have made that a marquee race. Just as Hickenlooper and Bullock put the party before their presidential ambitions, it would have been nice if she had as well. Stacey Abrams, Beto O’Rourke, and Andrew Gillum are now all rising stars from 2018 who faded in 2020 for different reasons. While I hope the former two can make a comeback, the latter is definitely finished.
If Biden want to “signal” anything to me, he can do it by his actions as president.
If he wants to give Warren a job, let it be something substantive, such as Treasury. Otherwise I like her in the Senate.
I don’t see Warren bringing any voters Biden isn’t getting already. If he wants a shot at progressives who may stay home or vote third party, Nina Turner or Tulsi Gabbard would be my picks. As a veteran famous for getting smeared by Clinton machine, Gabbard would even bring in a few Trump voters. The choice would shock the political establishment, but that’s the whole idea..
You just named two people who if anything would turn people off! Gabbard is a professional thumb in the eye to the party and Turner represents the absolute worst of the Sanders cult. Warren would do much better at unifying the wings of the party.
Warren burned her bridges when she confronted her “friend” on national television a week before the Iowa caucus. Hardcore Sanders people will not forgive that.
If you want to convince people who are hard to convince, you might have to give them something that you don’t want. At the very least, have enough respect to not refer to them as members of a “cult.” That’s as bad as Trump calling them Communists. Biden has always shown Bernie that respect — his supporters would do well to follow his lead.
I don’t think a VP pick will matter much. Just like it has basically never mattered electorally in modern politics.
For Biden to move reluctant progressives, he has to offer good stuff, not just arm twist that Trump is so much worse.
Maybe, just maybe, he could start by supporting a health care system that doesn’t result in 27,000,000 Americans losing health insurance when they lose their jobs because lifesaving care is tied up with employment.
You’d think the pandemic alone would push Biden towards single payer. I’m not holding my breath, but we’ll see.
No, it won’t, Couves. Because what’s good for the country not part of the equation, either for Biden, or for Fred.
You both realize a public option is a push toward single payer, right? Or if that we build a truly viable single payer plan on top of our existing structure it will look more like Warren’s than Sander’s? Sanders home state could not absorb the budgetary shock of covering people to the extent that the law he endorsed required, and the voters turned against the proposal almost as soon as they enacted it.
I think if we built a public option tomorrow, we would have something close to an 80-90% of the public opting in within 20 years. Especially as smaller and midtier businesses drop their private health coverage to entice employees onto public option plans on the existing ACA exchanges.
At the end of the day policy design is about the art of the possible. I think a phased in public option with a single payer as the end goal like Warren or Harris proposed is exactly what a President Sanders could have passed by the Senate.
That’s 20 years for the insurance companies to undermine reforms and ensure that their profits are never threatened.
Even Sanders conceded it would take a few years to build a single payer system, it could not be built overnight to cover the pandemic. Even states that have them have endured similar struggles with the pandemic response. Obviously the NHS is doing much better than our system, but it is still handling a per capita caseload similar to us. It is not a panacea for the pandemic, but it would end the racial and socioeconomic disparities in treatment we are seeing here.
What if Warren is on the ticket and starts moving him in the direction of her health plan? What if her response package includes things like basic income, single payer, and wage insurance for the displaced? I think there are few people in the party smarter and more committed than she is to advancing progressive policies, and while Harris is a likelier successor to Biden in 2024, I can see Warren really being a policy dynamo on Bidens team.
Then it is a personality cult and not about ideas. Sanders co-chair Ro Khanna said that Sanders and Warren were in “90% alignment on the issues”. If the goal is to advance progressive policies, a Warren on the ticket with a substantial role spearheading the response to this crisis is a huge win. If the goal is about advancing progressive personalities, one in particular, than I do not know what to say about that other than I voted for him, he ran a solid campaign, but he fell short. He recognizes what to do next, so should the rest of his supporters.
I figured it out. Warren is an amazing executive and mixed bag campaigner. Harris is a strong campaigner, but was a mixed bag as an executive. Warren would make a kickass AG. She could go after financial wrong doers and reinforce civil rights while securing our democracy and establishing the truth and reconciliation commissions we’ll need to exorcise Trump and his cronies from the federal government.
Harris better compliments Biden. He’s a somewhat boring old, white, and male politician She’s a somewhat young, multiracial, and inspiring woman. I think they’d work together well and she’d eat Pence for lunch at the debates. She’s better capable of stepping up as the nominee in 2024, who could then turn to her AG as VP.
Interesting take, though I’ve long though Harris would make a great AG.
We don’t know how good an executive Warren is, do we? The efficacy of her campaign may ultimately be measured by the extent to which her issues and policies are addressed and adopted by President Biden.
She did a good job staffing the CFPB and giving it the kind of big mandate it needed to do its job. Ironically, if the GOP wanted to make her go away they should have allowed her to complete that work.
Sanders voters just don’t buy Warren as a progressive anymore. She didn’t support Sanders in 2016, which most people were fine with. But when she actively tried to sabotage his campaign in 2020, people started to notice a pattern.. She puts the interests of the party establishment above the interests of the progressive movement. You can disagree with that belief, but when you call us members of a “personality cult” you are supporting the same smear campaign that has been used against progressives by the party establishment.
It’s telling that the party establishment continues to call Sanders and Gabbard supporters “cult” members. At a time when they need unity, they continue to prioritize marginalizing progressives over beating Trump.
To me doubting that Warren is progressive is a sure sign of being part of the never-satisfied caucus.
Doubting Ms. Warren while simultaneously advocating Ms. Gabbard is particularly telling.
On what issue is she no longer a progressive? How did she sabotage his campaign? By having the temerity to run in her own right? By attacking him on something he said to her in private on the debate stage?
From her perspective, he had a shot in 2016 and blew it. An argument could easily be made that Sanders should have endorsed her in 2020 and she might be the nominee instead of Biden. I literally see little difference between them on policy, I initially favored Warren precisely since she’s a bridge from the progressives to the establishment and would govern more effectively than Bernie. I voted for him since his campaign, at least until South Carolina, looked like it was going to perform better than hers. Under ranked choice voting they could have run as a team, as I suspect, they would have wanted to.
You’re the ones not valuing unity when you insist on a my way or the highway approach. And this Sanders voters and most of the ones I know still like Warren. It’s a fringe that does not. I hope so anyway. Make your own party and see how small and Insignificant it is.
I have to uprate for efficiency. It’s not often that someone can bemoan the “my way or the highway” and then, in the same short comment, invite that person to hit the road if he doesn’t like Jconway’s way..
In 15 years on this blog I have never seen a group of supporters of a primary loser this upset and uninterested in supporting the Democratic nominee against the Republican. It is downright dangerous, especially when it is this particularly Republican who has caged children, allowed tens of thousands to die on his watch, and who does not care.
The idea Biden is no better than Trump is complete horse dung and I’ll fight that idea every time it’s uttered here. If you wanna back Jesse Ventura or some other Green Party loser who could never get elected selectman, go ahead, it’s Massachusetts and you’re vote won’t hurt Biden. Don’t tell me you tried to stop Trump though, you valued your purity and ego over the lives this presidency is destroying. Don’t tell me you’re an ally of minorities or women or the LGBT community or labor. You’re not.
And the attacks on Warren are bogus and you know better. Where is she more right wing than Bernie on any issue? If anything she ran to his left on racial and social issues and was simply more detailed oriented in her policy prescriptions than he was. Red mass group would be happy to take a Warren basher, you want to make a green mass group go ahead. This site is about electing better Democrats. The only Democrat running against Trump is Joe Biden. And he’s putting AOC, Pramaya Jaypal, Jay Inslee, and other solid progressives on his team. He will govern from the center left.
Gabbard is no progressive. Voted against impeachment, had a long record of homophobic legislation as a state legislator, praises human rights abusers like Putin, Assad, and Modi overseas. Cheerleader for Trump foreign policy and someone who liked to go on Fox to troll Obama for not naming “Islam” as the enemy. Steve Bannon is a big fan. I really don’t get the appeal. She’s the Ron Paul of the Left.
Nina Turner? Really?
Oh my.
I respect Nina Turner as an advocate and state legislator, I just wish she ran for office in OH rather than being part of the Never Biden/Bernie or Bust caucus. AOC is wisely joining the Biden campaign and making nice with Pelosi. That’s how you govern. I’m sure she’s the next “sellout” to get attacked. I’d rather a President than a martyr.