Warren had a great lane, to the right of Bernie ideologically but just as strong on fighting corporate influence in our politics and defending the interests of working and middle class people. Even stronger when you look at her actual record of achievement and her ability to articulate issues and solutions. Someone with brains should have been able to leverage that into more clear positioning in the field but it didn’t happen. Instead she got sucked into three months of figuring out how to sell Bernie’s health care plan.
Then there were the debates and what for me was the biggest debacle of all which was the wine cave attack. Whoever advised her to do that should have been pushed aside and muted for good. The problem with Buttigieg’s approach to funding isn’t the method of fundraising, it’s the sources. Talk about his bundler Tony James of Blackstone, a company whose political contributions helped kill a law that would have addressed surprise medical billing, something that happened just the week before that debate. Get into the guts of your signature issue which is corruption and show people how they are being hurt by it in real time. The stage was set; she and her team pushed him to release the names of his bundlers, got the information and made the decision to talk about friggin wine caves...All that did was open her up to charges of hypocrisy for the money she raised in 2018 using the same methods. Inept.
There are other examples; one of the foremost authorities on bankruptcy in the country hasn’t brought the issue up once in a debate. Nor was it ever featured in any detail in her stump speech. How is that even possible? I could go on, but Warren needed much better guidance than she got. It sickens me because she is a rarity in our politics, a soulful policy wonk, and her team hasn’t helped her make the most of the opportunity.
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