Elizabeth Warren Rises Again
Joe Biden won the battle, but the war is being lost. Elizabeth Warren may have the answer.
This fall, my wife will give birth to our first child. Our due date is September 22nd, three days after her birthday. This child is all we’ve wanted for a number of years, and after multiple financial roadblocks and a miscarriage in July of 2021, we’re finally and hopefully going to feel the joy we have been chasing for half a decade. For years, we poked at each other about the sex of the child. I wanted a boy, as many fathers do, because I wanted the opportunity to teach him the lessons that I felt had not been taught to me. An opportunity for him to have an easier life than I did. In truth, the sex of the child doesn’t matter all that much to me. I would have been happy with ten fingers and ten toes, with a healthy body ready to grow into the love of my life. But my wife wanted a girl. Like me, she is happy that we’re having a boy, but it’s different for her. She wanted the cute little things around the house, and she insists that I’d be a “girl dad,” and that she wanted to do what I wanted to do with a boy: teach her the things she felt were important but hadn’t been passed on to her. It was a small moment of grief for her when we found out Ciarán was going to be born a boy, but it’s the first boy on her side and that alone is worthy of joy. His middle name will be after her father, the first baby boy that he’ll get to hold that comes from his family. Despite small grief, despite the roadblocks, we are here and we chose to be here.
Then came the leaked Supreme Court decision about Roe v Wade’s overturn. Like many Democrats, we became apoplectic and angry. It felt particularly wrong as the news was released the day before our 20-week ultrasound. There he was, on the screen, wiggly and full of the life we hope will be with him for decades. We could see him, our son. And then a sobering, almost disgusting thought crossed both of our minds:
I’m really, really glad we’re not having a baby girl.
That thought hurt. It hurt my wife who, more than anything, wanted a little girl. It hurt me because no one should think that, especially at such a joyous moment in our lives. It was a mixture of relief, joy, and disgust that we should even have to think that. Kind of like when we found out Biden won the Presidency. Joy that Trump had lost, relief that Biden had won, and disgust that we had to deal with Trump at all. We’d both been active in politics through that election, donating money and time to campaigns.
After the 2020 election, my Twitter feed stayed active on politics. I use Twitter as a vent for myself, a place I can channel my excess rage so that it doesn’t seep into my everyday life. It’s also a way I can stay connected with friends who, like me, were inspired and volunteered for Elizabeth Warren’s primary bid for the Democratic nomination that Biden ultimately won.
I remember the moment I decided she was my candidate. I was standing on the sidewalk at Macalester College in St. Paul, in my own political wilderness. I’d left the GOP when we couldn’t stop Trump in the primary in 2016, but I’d felt like it wasn’t the right party for me for a long time prior to that. I tried libertarianism but something felt missing. Then, in April of 2019, I’d heard the Massachusetts Senator talk about her plan for education. It made sense, it seemed right, and so I decided to check her out. I’d watched the debates, and I was enamored with Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris, and Amy Klobuchar was my Senator and I’ve always liked her. But Warren hit a nerve that the others never really seemed to: I believed in her anger. That brings us back to Macalester. Erin Maye Quade, a Minnesota DFL rockstar and former legislator whom I respect with my entire heart and soul, introduced Elizabeth Warren. She spoke with passion that I needed to hear, it was like water in a desert. She spoke about how she got to where she is, the rocky road and all the setbacks, but still she fought for her Aunt Bee. Still, she fought for single mothers. Still, she fought for students and teachers. Why? Because she believed that no one made it alone, and no one should have to. I had a new thought cross my mind, for the first time. “I’m a Democrat, and this is the candidate I’m going to follow into hell.”
And then she lost. I wrote a letter to my future daughter, should I have one and the one I’m relieved will not be this fall, about how important I felt the campaign was and how much I wished that she would one day learn from Senator Elizabeth Warren. It was hard. It was a sobering reminder that politics is personal, but it’s also a larger game with other dynamics. It was a loss of hope that I’m still grieving, but I understand its past and it’s time to move on. I took the Warren magnet off of my car, but I still follow her endorsements and donate money. I wear my Warren shirts less frequently, but I still talk with the people who I connected with during that campaign. I don’t hear her speak as often, but the things I learned from her just by watching that primary campaign and taking part still ring in my ears.
I was reminded of that this week when Warren, voice quaking with anger, rose in defense of Roe v Wade with words and tone that just seemed again to strike the right note. It just seemed to echo again what I felt and what my wife felt and what every woman I’ve talked to in the last week has felt: an unbridled rage and a feeling that leaders were abandoning their duty.
It’s been hard not to feel that way over the last year. Joe Biden did his part in dispatching Trump from office, but mere days before Joe Biden was sworn into office, speaking of healing and tilting at bipartisan windmills, conservative extremists executed a plan to have their supporters break into Congress and overturn the election. Months later, conservative extremists and moneyed interests blocked critical parts of Biden’s agenda, which he quickly dropped. The pandemic still rages as money for countermeasures runs out. The economy’s faux-flation, corporate greed masquerading as inflation and leading average Americans to believe government policy is responsible, has stymied more spending on average citizens. Promises to the left of executive action on student loans and climate change have been shown to be either hollow or woefully inadequate. Conservatives, joined by a cadre of transphobic “liberals,” have begun targeting and persecuting the most vulnerable members of our society. Then, this week, the leak about Roe.
The Biden Administration’s response to all of this has been simple: stay the course. Stay in the middle. Make no enemies. Throw no punches. Don’t rock the boat.
This milquetoast response has resulted in major legislation being sidelined or drowned out. Pandemic funding, the childhood tax credit, student debt reform, climate action, voting rights, and now codifying the law of Roe v Wade and the right to not only seek an abortion in the United States but also the right to privacy in the walls of a doctor’s office, are all seemingly unreachable. Executive action has been sparsely used. Messaging falls flat, Congressional leaders like Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, and Jim Clyburn are campaigning against their biggest issue in the midterms this fall, and any momentum the party has goes flat in an instant because our leaders are either willfully ignorant of the necessary actions to take in defense of their base or they’re completely and totally incompetent in that defense.
The notable exception to this has been Elizabeth Warren. Where the Biden administration and Democratic leadership has taken their insipid and spineless approach of simply asking people for money and votes, Warren has been barnstorming in defense of the law. For many who supported her the first time around, this spawned a new thought.
How much would be different if we had chosen Warren, not Biden, to be the Democratic nominee? If she were President, what could the situation look like?
The answer is unknowable, and answers range from hypotheticals to complete fantasy, but the question lingers. So much so that calls for her to run for President again have reached the lips of some, both in and out of media. I’ve been hesitant to support the idea.
The facts are clear. Warren will be 75 in the 2024 election cycle, already one of the oldest potential candidates in the list of potentials. Kamala Harris, if Biden isn’t running, would be the likeliest frontrunner and though she didn’t make it to the voting primaries in 2020 that would likely not be the case in 2024. Then you have her own words, that she will be seeking reelection to the Senate from Massachusetts in 2024 and that Biden is running and she intends on supporting him.
But again… the question lingers. I didn’t like Bernie running in 2020 after the 2016 debacle, and I have my doubts about Warren running in 2024, but the voice sits in the back of my head and says “Dream Big, Fight Hard.” I really don’t want to feel the pain of watching her lose again, but seeing her rise out in the rage she’s so clearly feeling in the wake of the leaked decision has me ready to paint my child’s room liberty green again.
These ideas are likely little more than nostalgic fantasy, and Warren herself has publicly ruled out the idea. But it’s easy to find yourself wondering again…
What if Elizabeth Warren were President?
If Elizabeth Warren were President, we wouldn’t go to bed every night wishing we had someone in government doing everything they could to muster a response to the dangers of Republican overreach and creeping fascism. We wouldn’t still be talking about student loans, or that nothing has been done to halt the coming climate crisis. We know that the CFPB and the NLRB would be working overtime, and that the Justice Department's focus would be on multitasking between January 6th and breaking up businesses like Facebook, Amazon, and Wells Fargo. We know that she would not rest until every mechanism of government was in motion. We know that her team would not be rewarding men like Larry Summers and Rahm Emmanuel. We know the Democratic Party under her watch would not be supporting candidates that are openly corrupt and against the Democratic agenda like Henry Cuellar. We know that the actions that require Congress would be called out consistently and constantly, talking about who is blocking legislation and how the filibuster must be removed.
We know because she told us that the entire power of the executive should be used, not a tepid and measured response to a grand crisis that faces our nation. She accurately predicted the student debt crisis, she was the first to release a pandemic plan when the Trump administration wouldn’t, and it’s her staffers and ex-Warren campaign folks that spread all across the federal government. Her record is undeniable since the end of the primary, and her ability to have a plan for every eventuality remains a spot of soreness for those of us who continue to ponder the possibilities her Presidency would have produced.
Just for contrast, Joe Biden said the fight was for the soul of America, but he has shown little motivation to win that fight beyond the 2020 election, and Democratic leaders have followed him on that. Biden may have expelled Trump from office, but he has completely and totally failed to take necessary steps to limit the impact of the Trump administration’s actions beyond its reign. He may have won the initial battle for the soul of America, but in the war, he is undeniably being pushed back on all fronts.
In this way we can see that Joe Biden’s politics as usual, and the American desire for normalcy, were fleeting trends that needed a stronger hand to draw more from the public. Even as I write this, Nancy Pelosi is again railing to the media about how we need a “strong Republican Party.” For the last year and a half, Democratic leadership has again and again shown themselves to be not just unable but unwilling to challenge politics as usual. There have been no Democratic leaders willing to stand and truly fight.
The lesson I took from the Warren campaign was that hope is in the fight. You may lose, you may win, but hope always comes from the fact that someone is fighting even if it’s just you. There’s hope in every bill, in every amendment, in every candidate, in every election, in every punch. You might not win, but you’ll always have the hope that you’re standing to punch back.
Maybe now, now that they’ve been punched in the mouth after they had been told they’d won, the Democratic electorate will be ready for some blood and teeth on the floor.