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.
No.
Thanks for proving my point.
Inshallah she’ll be a very important player in Bernie’s cabinet.
Keep dreaming…
I love her. She’s bold and brilliant.
I would love to sit in that chamber and watch her grill some of the crooked bank CEOs
We live in a nation where 40% of the population things a crude, mean reality show carnival barker who communicates with inane misspelled tweets and brags about sexual assault is somehow good leadership. we’re freaking doomed
She may be even more stiff and unlikeable than the Hilldawg. Quite the achievement.
And she really handled the Pocahontas thing well.
I agree that handled the Pocahontas thing well, but disagree that she is more stiff than Hillary.
Scared of strong smart women?
What Alby is pointing out is a problem that has beset the American electorate every decade that I’ve been aware of political, social, and economic issues and I suspect it has been multigenerational. It’s not that the American public, by and large, is unable to get into some of the weeds of these issues. As Chomsky has pointed out numerous times before, notice how Americans are expert about the details of the sports they follow. They show real expertise. The problem is that the system doesn’t encourage Americans to become expert on matters of policy because then it would be difficult to conceal how public policy is geared to primarily serve the interests of elites. Even the news media contributes to this political dumbing down of the American public. It doesn’t get into the details of problems much less proposed solutions. Instead it concentrates on how a general proposal will play politically, making it a register of electability instead of a viable solution for a real problem.
Thanks, Dana. I’m going to hire you as my translator.
Yeah, this is a line liberals have been peddling since Adlai Stevenson. “Damn these rubes for not understanding how even more and more government is good for them”. It didn’t help then and it isn’t helping now. The attitude is a big part of the reason rumpled losers like Bernard Sanders will always be on the outside looking in.
Conditions are such now that he might not stay on the outside.
Regulation isn’t government. It’s a necessary curb on the tendency of capitalism towards monopoly.
But I think you’re missing the point. They aren’t dumb. They’re just encouraged to not think about this stuff in any depth, and to study football instead.
“Conditions are such” – Such as what? Unemployment is as low as it’s been in 30 years. Wages are finally going up. Business and consumer confidence are at their highest levels in a decade or more. The stock market is still pretty good despite flattening a bit at the end of 2018.
What on earth makes you think we are ready to remake our entire economy based on the harebrained theories of a 77 year old socialist with a really bad haircut?
Political conditions. He could win the Democratic nomination, which means he could win the election. It’s not probable, but it’s far from impossible.
Unemployment is low because boomers are retiring at the rates we expected. Wages aren’t going up all that much. The stock market doesn’t matter to most people’s vote; those invested already vote Republican.
But why would you rather speculate on that stuff rather than talk about how media encourages disengagement? I’m not really interested in predicting who’s going to do what in the race. That’s the kind of shit the sports channels use to fill the week between football games.
Again with the hyperbole. “Remake our entire economy” is a little strong when we can’t yet get people to overcome their fear of single-payer health insurance. You’re talking the way Southrons talked about the looming Lincoln presidency.
I hope Trump runs on the great economy he created. It is every bit as real as the factories he has reopened, or the wall he built.
The personal saving rate is down to about 2.4 percent. 40 percent of U.S. adults don’t have enough savings to cover a $400 emergency, and 4 in 5 American workers live paycheck to paycheck.
The middle class hasn’t taken part in the economic growth of the past 20 years. When xyz says the economy is great, he is right. It is great for millionaires like him. (I assume he is a millionaire given his politics.) For everybody else, it blows.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/video-flashback-time-when-bernie-sanders-really-was-fringe-character-n981031
Hahahaha.
You dumbfuck. Full employment! Hahaha.
She’s been an awful candidate so far. Some aren’t meant for the National spotlight of a campaign. She do more good in the senate
What’s she done that’s awful?