Will Caring About the Issues Help Elizabeth Warren?

People always say they wished campaigns would focus on serious issues and media should cover those issues rather than highlighting candidates’ missteps and updating the tote board. Elizabeth Warren is trying, and it’s instructive to see where that’s getting her.

Today Warren laid out a proposal to break up the big tech giants so they can’t use their clout to eliminate competition. This isn’t just a concept; she released a fairly detailed plan, exactly the sort of thing people always say they want. Check this New York Times coverage. It actually spends as many words weighing the political impact of being “the ideas candidate” as dwelling on the details. It leaves the “analysis” to competing quotes from somebody for such a plan and someone (from George Mason U., naturally) against it.

This isn’t Warren’s first bold policy proposal. A couple of weeks ago she released a plan to provide federally supported universal child care. An analysis of the Warren plan from the financial services company Moody’s estimates that the program would cost $1.7 billion over the course of a decade, with 12 million children receiving care under the new program. Have you heard much about it since? Me neither.

Here’s the thing about these “socialist” policy proposals: They’re already in use in dozens of countries, throughout most of the industrialized world. It’s not as if we’d be jumping into the abyss of the unknown. We’d just be catching up with those countries that have found this to be the most efficient way to handle broad societal problems.

But that’s not how newspapers, let alone cable news, frame these things. Unless I badly miss my guess, they will prefer to talk about the proposal’s impact on Warren’s campaign rather than seriously consider the possibility and implications of implementing Warren’s plan, or any others that seek to limit the political influence of concentrated Big Tech wealth.

I don’t know enough about Big Tech to judge Warren’s plan, so I’m interested in reading as many takes on it as the media will produce. Now let’s see how much of that discussion is real analysis, versus how much is self-interested pushback, and how much of it cuts through the next episode of The Trumpoviches.