Tuesday, July 31, 2018

Danielle Allen Asks A Great Question In Her Dissection Of US Foreign Policy In 2018 — "But What About Us?"

Underscoring Professor Danielle Allen's brilliant dissection of what amounts to US foreign policy in 2018, the TIC (Traitor-in-Chief) tweeted (what else?) an invite Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to face-to-face meeting that would add the Iranian to all of the other world strongmen that the TIC has attempted to bamboozle: Kim Jong-un, Vladimir Putin, and the all of the other -leaders- suckers that the TIC has attempted to baffle with bull-exrement since he cannot dazzle them with brilliance, despite his own modest claims. If this is (fair & balanced) brilliant foreign policy analysis, so be it.

[x DC Fishwrap — WaPo]
Trump’s Foreign Policy Is Perfectly Coherent
By Danielle Allen



TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing

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President Trump’s foreign policy is perfectly coherent — so coherent, in fact, that we could give it a name: pure bilateralism.

Trump’s foreign policy doctrine has been staring us in the face so plainly that we’ve overlooked it. Here’s my unifying theory: He didn’t get out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear deal because he disagreed with this or that detail of the agreements. He hasn’t started up deals with Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin and sought to force Xi Jinping to the bargaining table because he has refined views of what he seeks. He got out of the former deals because they were multilateral; he’s working on the latter deals because they are bilateral.

In an interview with CNBC last week, Trump said: “I’m different than other [presidents]. I’m a dealmaker. I’ve made deals all my life. I do really well. I make great deals.”

We’ve heard that dealmaker language plenty, but we haven’t fully registered its content.

Less than seeking to disrupt the old order because he has a considered view about it, apparently Trump seeks a global order that turns around him personally, where global politics is conducted as a series of deals with Donald Trump.

Tony Abbott, former prime minister of Australia, almost saw to the bottom of things in a recent speech published in the Wall Street Journal. Abbott wrote, “What Mr. Trump is making clear . . . is what should always have been screamingly obvious: that each nation’s safety now rests in its own hands far more than in anyone else’s.” Such a view forces a pivot from cooperative multilateralism to pure bilateralism.

Abbott didn’t explicitly point out this doctrine of bilateralism but seems to have intuited it. He focused considerable attention on what sort of bilateral relationship Australia should undertake with the United States. Abbott wrote: “Being America’s partner, as well as its friend, is even more important now, given Mr. Trump’s obsession with reciprocity.”

Then Abbott made a mistake, proposing what we might think of as the Michael Cohen doctrine of foreign policy: total loyalty. “In my judgment, Australia should have upgraded its Iraq mission to ‘advise, assist and accompany’ as soon as America did, and extended it into Syria. Australia should have mounted freedom-of-navigation operations in the South China Sea. And Australia should have not only welcomed the move of the US Embassy to Jerusalem but moved ours, too.” Cohen’s current troubles tell where such total loyalty leads.

Across his business career, Trump sought to use his assets to consolidate his personal power and influence through dealmaking. He rode even the bankruptcy of his casinos into financial advantage and from their ruins drew resources that helped him redefine his development business and add to it a television career.

The important thing to recognize about Trump’s foreign policy agenda — his sequential, bilateral dealmaking — is that we, the American people, with our mammoth consumer market, are now his most valuable asset. Other countries want access to us; this is the ace in Trump’s hand. Like his erstwhile casinos, we’re a stake he can put on the dealmaking table.

Recognizing this helps make sense of how his domestic policy and foreign policy align. He cuts taxes at home; the economy revs up. VoilĂ , the world’s biggest market is even hotter, and now he can brandish the asset in trade fights to maximal effect. Many have tried to tease out why Trump should follow up his tax cuts, meant to help small businesses, with tariffs that punish many of those same people. That problem disappears when one recognizes that Trump cares about his asset — “the American people” — in a similar way to how he cared about his casinos.

He himself said this, in less coherent language, in his CNBC interview. Given “all this work that we are putting in to the economy,” he asserted, the economy is “maybe as good as it’s ever been ever.” As a result, he said, in reference to his tariffs, “This is the time.” He continued, “You know the expression ‘We’re playing with the bank’s money,’ right?”

The purpose of Trump’s bilateralist foreign policy is not some overarching vision about world peace or democracy’s role in global order. The purpose is simply to maximize Trump’s personal power, to make him personally great, by proving his dealmaking prowess and making himself necessary to the world’s economy. I think that he himself believes that when he is great on his own terms, America is great. That, with him in the White House, his interest is the national interest.

But what about for us? Is pure bilateralism good for the American people? Is Trump’s interest the same as the national interest? A thousand times no. A democratic republic cannot afford to become dependent on the bilateral relationships a single individual has with the other countries of the world. We need to secure and preserve institutional relationships, both multilateral and bilateral, that we the people can control and steer over time through temporary representatives.

Trump is not merely disrupting NATO and other multilateral relationships. He is disrupting the institutional power, durability and sovereignty of the American people. # # #

[Danielle Allen is the James Bryant Conant University Professor (Harvard's highest faculty honor) of Government and Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University and a contributing columnist for The Washington Post. Her most recent book (a family memoir), is Cuz: The Life and Times of Michael A. (2017). See other Allen books here. Allen received an AM (classics), Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton University (NJ), an MPhil. and PhD (both in classics) from Cambridge University (UK), as well as an AM and PhD (classics and government) from Harvard University (MA). She also received a MacArthur Foundation "Genus Grant" in 2001.]

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Monday, July 30, 2018

Roll Over, Garry C. Myers — "Goofus & Gallant" Make Way For "Goofball & Galahad"

Something was off yesterday — the e-mail containing today's TMW 'toon was 3 hours later than usual. And things got even stranger when a second e-mail arrived less than an hour later. Tom/Dan had made an egregious error in the 7th panel that attacks the fiscal policies of the current administration in stating that the tax cuts and other budgetary nonsense would result in a National Debt increase to $1.9 -billion- trillion. The revised 'toon was sparked by discerning readers of This Modern World and Tom/Dan quickly redrew the panel and sent out the revision in less than an hour. However, there was a critical difference in the two e-mail versions. Tom/Dan supplied a single sentence explaining the correction, but did not include his original accompanying message. This frustrated blogger deleted the earlier e-mail containing the erroneous 7th panel. And, to further the compounding errors, the blogger deleted the contents of the Trash folder when the second e-mail arrived without careful scrutiny of the contents. Alas, once a deleted e-mail is deleted from the Trash folder, that e-mail is vaporized. To reprise the original accompanying e-mail, Tom/Dan explained the premise of the 'toon and the debt owed to Highlights for Children which carried the inspiring 'toon, "Goofus and Gallant" which offered graphic lessons in civility and etiquette to young readers. The message also contained personal news that Dan/Tom would be on vacation with his son and that would likely mean reruns of earlier 'toons. If this is (fair & balanced) incoherent e-mail management, so be it.

[x TMW]
Goofball And Galahad (Updated)
By Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)


Tom Tomorrow/Dan Perkins

[Dan Perkins is an editorial cartoonist better known by the pen name "Tom Tomorrow." His weekly comic strip, "This Modern World," which comments on current events from a strong liberal perspective, appears regularly in approximately 150 papers across the U.S., as well as on Daily Kos. The strip debuted in 1990 in SF Weekly. Perkins received the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Excellence in Journalism in both 1998 and 2002. When he is not working on projects related to his comic strip, Perkins writes a daily political blog, also entitled "This Modern World," which he began in December 2001. More recently, Dan Perkins, pen name Tom Tomorrow, was named the winner of the 2013 Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning. Even more recently, Dan Perkins was a runner-up for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.]

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Sunday, July 29, 2018

Roll Over, Mario Puzo — The White House Has Become "This Thing Of Ours"

Today's post was written by Maureen "The Cobra" Dowd and it is ironic that her sobriquet, bestowed by POTUS 43 uring the 2000 presidential campaign, could easily pass for a a Mafia-inspired nickname. However, The Cobra is not mobbed up. She is a fearless journalist who calls the mob-boss in the White House exactly what he is. Mario Puzo, the author of several novels about a NY crime family, was the co-adapter of those books into the screenplays for "The Godfather," "The Godfather Part II," and "The Godfather Part III." Puzo died in 1999, so a new author/film-maker will need to update the saga of the mob takeover of the US government in 2016. When the Traitor-in-Chief asked then-FBI Director James Comey if he would be "loyal" in a 2017 meeting, the FBI agent, who had dealt with mobsters in real life, wrote the behavior he witnessed in that meeting was that of a "mob-boss." If this is (fair & balanced) crime reporting, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
The Don And His Badfellas
By Cobra (Maureen Dowd)


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I saw Robert De Niro at a party in New York recently and approached him gingerly. I wanted some insight into gangsters.

What did an actor who has brilliantly portrayed mobsters make of a president who was doing a two-bit imitation of a mobster?

De Niro, leaning against a wall and looking cool, took the question under advisement. I got my answer three days later when he took the stage at the Tony Awards and offered a succinct obscenity aimed at the president.

The Trumps have often been compared to a mob family. Certainly, in the White House, they have created a dark alternative universe with an inverted ethical code, where the main value is loyalty to the godfather above all else.

An anti-Trump group called Mad Dog PAC has a billboard reading: “MAGA, Mobsters Are Governing America.”

Now the treacherous arias are getting louder and the long knives are coming out. Our classy president is tweeting about Michael Cohen’s taxi medallion tomfoolery. After months of Trump distancing himself from Cohen, his ex-lawyer resorted to playing the role of Sammy the Bull. Cohen secretly taped an incriminating call with the Don featuring a staccato exchange about paying off a Playboy playmate — and an aside by Trump to someone to “Get me a Coke, please!”

As Michael Daly noted in The Daily Beast, “Traditionally, rats begin wearing a wire after they get jammed up.”

And as in “The Untouchables,” a bespectacled accountant is now at the center of the action. In the taped call, Cohen tells Trump that he has talked to the mogul’s trusted money manager and “Apprentice” guest star, Allen Weisselberg, about how to set up a company to reimburse David Pecker, the National Enquirer owner, for buying off Trump goomah Karen McDougal. Federal investigators in Manhattan now want to interview Weisselberg.

“Long term, this could be the most damaging,” Trump biographer Tim O’Brien told me, “because it gets into Trump’s wallet.”

CNN reported that Cohen the Fixer claims Trump knew about the Russian meeting during the campaign with his son and Paul Manafort. The president hit the mattresses on Twitter, denying it all.

This could be the ballgame, says David Corn of Mother Jones, who wrote: “This ex-consigliere poses a triple threat to the godfather he once ruthlessly served.”

Given that this is Trump, however, it’s possible that there could be a twist. Rhona Graff, the Don’s capo at Trump Tower, could come sit in the back of the courtroom and stare at Cohen until the wannabe wise guy suddenly recants, “Godfather”-style: “Look, the F.B.I. guys promised me a deal. So I made up a lot of stuff about Donald Trump 'cause that’s what they wanted. But it was all lies.”

Rudy Giuliani has somersaulted from a RICO-happy prosecutor to a man acting like a Mafia lawyer, telling Chris Cuomo that Cohen is an “incredible liar” when only three months ago he pronounced him “an honest, honorable lawyer.”

If the White House seems more and more like “Goodfellas,” it is not an accident.

“Trump has a very cinematic sense of himself,” O’Brien said. Like many on social media, he is driven to be the star of his own movie. He even considered going to film school in LA before he settled into his father’s business.

O’Brien recalled that Trump told him that he thought Clint Eastwood was the greatest movie star. “He and Melania model their squints on Eastwood,” the biographer noted. Trump also remarked, while they were watching “Sunset Boulevard” on the Trump plane, that a particular scene was amazing: the one where Norma Desmond obsessively watches her silent films and cries: “Have they forgotten what a star looks like? I’ll show them!”

Trump is drawn to people who know how to dominate a room and exaggerated displays of macho, citing three of his top five movies as “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” “Goodfellas” [see link above] and “The Godfather.”

As a young real estate developer, he would hang out at Yankee Stadium and study the larger-than-life figures in the VIP box: George Steinbrenner, Lee Iacocca, Frank Sinatra, Roy Cohn, Rupert Murdoch, Gary Grant. He was intent on learning how they grabbed the limelight.

“In his first big apartment project, Trump’s father had a partner connected to the Genovese and Gambino crime families,” said Michael D’Antonio, another Trump biographer. “He dealt with mobbed-up suppliers and union guys for decades.

“When Trump was a little boy, wandering around job sites with his dad — which was the only time he got to spend with him — he saw a lot of guys with broken noses and rough accents. And I think he is really enchanted by base male displays of strength. Think about ‘Goodfellas’ — people who prevail by cheating and fixing and lying. Trump doesn’t have the baseline intellect and experience to be proficient at governing. His proficiency is this mob style of bullying and tough-guy talk.”

As Steve Bannon noted approvingly, Trump has a Rat Pack air, and as O’Brien said, Trump was the sort of guy who kept gold bullion in his office.

Trump’s like a mobster, D’Antonio said, in the sense that he “does not believe that anyone is honest. He doesn’t believe that your motivations have anything to do with right and wrong and public service. It’s all about self-interest and a war of all against all. He’s turning America into Mulberry Street in the ’20s, where you meet your co-conspirators in the back of the candy store.” # # #

[Maureen Dowd received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1999, with the Pulitzer committee particularly citing her columns on the impeachment of Bill Clinton after his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Dowd joined The New York Times as a reporter in 1983, after writing for Time magazine and the now-defunct Washington Star. At The Times, Dowd was nominated for a 1992 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, then became a columnist for the paper's editorial page in 1995. Dowd's first book was a collection of columns entitled Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk (2004). Most recently Dowd has written The Year of Voting Dangerously: The Derangement of American Politics (2017). See all of Dowd's books here. She received a BA (English) from Catholic University (DC).]

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Saturday, July 28, 2018

Roll Over, Lucy Van Pelt — There's A New Shrink In The Booth & His Advice Worth A Helluva Lot More Than A 5¢

The reference for the header of today's blog-post is

And, today's shrink in a box is Andrew Bacevich who draws upon the prescience of St. Hofstadter (the late Richard Hofstadter) who coined the catchwords — the paranoid style of US politics — and Bacevich uses "paranoid style" to offer a plausible explanation of the Great Disaster of 2016. If this is (fair & balanced) historical interpretation, so be it.

[x Boston Fishwrap]
Curb The Paranoia, Anti-Trumpers
By Andrew J. Bacevich


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Few histories age well. Fewer are said to retain relevance decades after they first appeared. Yet Richard Hofstadter’s famous rumination on “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” first published in 1964, has of late become something akin to essential reading. Hofstadter’s essay seemingly offers a persuasive explanation for what happened in November 2016: Incited by Donald Trump, mass paranoia triumphed over reason and enlightenment.

I am not persuaded that Trump’s election signified the triumph of paranoia. Trump did not create the contempt for establishment politics that accounts for the rise of Trumpism. He merely exploited the opportunity presented to him.

Yet I am increasingly persuaded that Trump’s election has induced a paranoid response, one that, unless curbed, may well pose a greater danger to the country than Trump himself. This paranoid response finds expression in obsessive attention given to just about anything Trump says, along with equally obsessive speculation about what he might do next — this despite the fact that most of what he says is nonsense and much of what he does is reversed, contradicted, or watered down within the span of a single news cycle.

Note, for example, the events of the past couple of weeks, which have featured an endless sequence of Henny Penny prognostications about the sky falling. Yet today the G-7 still exists (and won’t be readmitting Russia anytime soon). The United States remains committed to NATO. And international sanctions imposed on the Kremlin for offenses real and alleged are still firmly in place. For all of Trump’s bluster, insults, and diplomatic gaffes, in other words, nothing much has changed.

Remember when Trump’s revival of “America First” was going to lead directly to outright isolationism? Try telling that to the US troops still deployed to Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, and dozens of other places around the world.

Trump is not, to quote Hofstadter, “a free, active demonic agent” who “deflects the course of history in an evil way.” He is a clownishly incompetent and willfully ignorant buffoon. The sooner he leaves office, the better. But he is not a precursor of fascism. He does not endanger our democracy. Nor does he pose a threat to the rights enumerated in the Constitution. As for deflecting history, he lacks even a rudimentary understanding of the term.

So if there is a paranoid style in evidence in American politics today, it is proliferating like kudzu among anti-Trumpers who have allowed their understandable dismay with the president to become an all-consuming mania. Notably guilty of indulging this tendency are the very institutions we count on to set the terms of the national conversation, starting with our most important newspapers, but also including television networks and talk radio.

Trump decries what he calls “fake” news. A greater problem is allowing the sensationalistic ephemera that Trump himself regularly provides to crowd out news that actually matters.

Foremost among those issues are the very matters that paved the way for Trump’s election in the first place: egregious economic inequality, radical changes in the nation’s moral landscape, purposeless wars that never end, and an increasingly unsustainable relationship between the human species and the rest of nature.

The likelihood of Trump himself addressing any of these problems is nil. But unless we get on with the process of identifying solutions, there will likely be more Trumps in our future.

The paranoid style, Hofstadter wrote, finds expression in “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.” We don’t have time for any such nonsense. # # #

[[Andrew J. Bacevich is professor emeritus of history and international relations at Boston University. Bacevitch received a BS (history) from the United States Military Academy as well as a PhD (history) from Princeton University. He retired from Army active duty as a colonel in a career that spanned Vietnam to the Persian Gulf. Bacevich is the author of Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country (2013), among other works. His newest book is America’s War for the Greater Middle East (2016). See all books by Andrew Bacevich here. Currently, he is writing a book on Donald Trump.]

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Friday, July 27, 2018

Roll Over, Thomas Paine — We Are In The Crisis That Equals 1776 Nearly Two-Hundred-Forty-Two Years Later

The Great Wikipedia tells us that...

a podcast, or generically netcast, is an episodic series of digital audio or video files which a user can download and listen to. It is often available for subscription, so that new episodes are automatically downloaded via web syndication to the user's own local computer, mobile application, or portable media player.

The word was originally suggested by Ben Hammersley as a portmanteau of "iPod" (a brand of media player) and "broadcast."

In the dim dark ages of media history, The Bloviator (R. Limbaugh) began yammering and, over time, gained a national audience. Now, facing disaster, the Opposition Party & the Resistance are turning their lonely eyes to a podcast program that is poignantly titled "The Wilderness" because the Opposition Party & the Resistance must wage a grassroots to turn the current political narrative by 180° by November 2018 or sooner. This effort depends on the whiz kids who crafted speeches and developed campaign strategy from 2007 through 2016 for the previous presidential (POTUS 44) administration. Our souls (whether real or not) are being tried. If you tired of this horrible mess, go to Cooked Media and subscribe to "The Wilderness." And, if you have the chutzpah of The Dittoheads, ask you favorite noontime establishment to play "The Wilderness" on its sound system at lunch time. If this is a (fair & balanced) call to action for The Resistance, so be it.

[x The New Yorker]
“The Wilderness” Reviewed — Can A Partisan Podcast Save The Democratic Party?
By Sarah Larson


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For years, progressives have dreamed of a forum that matches the influence of Fox News and right-wing talk radio. The radio network Air America, which fostered the career of Rachel Maddow, made a valiant effort more than a decade ago. Today, the best hope seems to be the world of podcasts, where liberal shows, catering to eager audiences, have flourished since the election of Donald Trump. Chief among them is “Pod Save America,” hosted by the Obama Administration alums Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, Dan Pfeiffer, and Tommy Vietor, and produced by Crooked Media, which Favreau, Lovett, and Vietor formed in 2016. Now that they no longer work at the White House, the hosts are free to curse, opine, and mock—it’s “basically like our text chain come to life,” Favreau told me. Listening to their conversations, we feel like we’re teaming up with these know-it-alls, rolling up our sleeves, and getting some work done, goddammit. Their popular live shows, where the wild fandom that podcasts can inspire meets the urgency of this historical moment, have the energy of political rallies. In May, “Pod Tours America” filled Radio City Music Hall, like a rock concert that featured not drums and guitars but yellow leather easy chairs and a massive image of George Washington wearing earbuds. “This is ridiculous!” Lovett cried out as the show began, to a roar. Then Favreau took over, and the crowd was cheering at the mention of Robert Mueller.

So much oxygen is consumed by Trump that it can be hard, for Democrats, to focus on that other problem: the Democratic Party. Democrats lost not only the 2016 Presidential election but, in the past six to eight years, some nine hundred seats nationwide. “The Wilderness,” Favreau’s ambitious new podcast about the Democratic Party, seeks to address that problem. It’s a fifteen-part series, narrative and documentary in form (it’s co-produced by Two-Up, of “36 Questions” and “Limetown”), that provides context about the Party and soul-searching about what Democrats should do next. It will conclude a few weeks before the midterms, giving newly motivated door-knockers and phone-bankers ample time to absorb its lessons. “It’s a show about us, about being honest with ourselves as Democrats,” Favreau says in an episode. “We have a lot to learn and a shitload of work to do.”

Favreau, who is thirty-seven, served as Obama’s head speechwriter from 2005 to 2013; Obama called him his “mind reader.” He makes for a trustworthy guide, narrating with authority, humility, and profanity. “November 8, 2016, was a fucking nightmare,” Favreau says, five minutes into the series. We hear a montage of clips referring to familiar horrors, some faded from headlines but still freshly toxic: the Muslim ban, Charlottesville and “good people on both sides,” the DACA repeal, the Paris-climate-accord pullout, child separations, trade wars, and so on. To wake up from the nightmare, Favreau tells us, Democrats need to self-assess. “Because, if you think we’re fucked now, just imagine how much worse things could get if we lose again, in 2018, or, God help us, 2020,” he says.

The show’s first three episodes trace the story of the Democratic Party, from Andrew Jackson (and the unflattering origin of the Party’s donkey symbol) through FDR, JFK., Obama, and the Clintons, with an emphasis on economics, race, and evolving ideas about who “the people” in a democracy are. It’s an impressively efficient, if selective, history—hardly a college course, but useful to newer voters and those of us whose attentions have been focussed elsewhere. (A decent portion of “Pod Save America” ’s audience, Favreau told me, consists of “people who were not necessarily interested in politics or who didn’t pay close attention to politics before Trump won.” The chief demographic is “twenty-five to thirty-four, slightly more women than men.”) It’s brisk but not dumbed down: the Party’s sins and errors are acknowledged, and we’re reminded of how far we’ve come as a country from the relatively recent exclusions of women, the working class, and people of color from the basic rights insured by the Constitution.

I worried that the show’s structure, which shifts to a topic-by-topic focus after the third episode, would turn away from that kind of historical richness. But those episodes begin with related historical material. The series’ fifth episode, out this week, is the first of two episodes on race; it’s fully documentary in style, and is the most moving episode so far. Providing historical context is part of what Favreau calls an effort to “center people.” “We sort of learned this strategy from Obama, when we would write speeches together,” he told me. “He would be very focussed on making sure we had a couple of paragraphs, maybe even half a page, on how we got here.” In the contemporary news climate, he said, “It can feel like every morning, when you wake up, history starts anew, right? I mean, Kavanaugh’s nomination feels like it was four years ago.” If we’re reminded that the challenges Democrats face are often new versions of old problems, we can, perhaps, figure out what the hell to do next.

As for what to do now, “The Wilderness” itself seems like part of the answer, both for listeners and for journalism. For traditional news organizations, for whom truth should be the primary objective, balance has become “a fetish,” Favreau said, “because the right has done such a successful job over the years of screaming about liberal bias.” Crooked Media’s approach is what Favreau calls “honest partisanship.” “We’re very explicit in that we want to help Democrats take back the House and the Senate and governorships and state legislatures,” he said. Crooked’s success also raises an interesting prospect: if blunt, earthy “straight talk” helped elect Donald Trump, then another kind of straight talk—wonkish, profane, and highly strategic—might help get us out of this mess. (The one area of “The Wilderness” where the straight talk feels dissonant is the commercials: aggressive odysseys of ads that sound exactly like “Pod Save America,” except that Favreau and Lovett’s testosterone-fuelled chumminess is deployed in praise of coupon apps and home-security systems.)

Favreau has his mentor’s thoroughness and optimism—he interviewed more than a hundred professors, politicians, and others for the show, and believes that persuasion is best accomplished through good conversation. In the fourth episode, “The Voters,” we hear voice messages from “Pod Save America” listeners weighing in on what’s wrong with the Party: “it’s a party of centrist neocon squishes”; Democrats “don’t show backbone, they don’t show balls”; it’s too far to the left; it’s too close to the center; and so on. But Favreau also talks to focus groups of potential swing voters, including people in Michigan who voted for Obama and then Trump. He’s determined to understand them and, ultimately, to figure out how they can be persuaded. I’m curious as to whether he can guide us through another morass—the Bernie-Hillary divide—in a way that feels productive, ideally without making us nuts. For now, like him, I’m choosing to be optimistic.

It’s too soon to tell how effective “The Wilderness” will be, but it’s welcome at a time when Democratic leadership is amorphous and diffuse. The third episode, “The Nightmare,” ends with a conversation between Favreau and the writer Rebecca Traister. Favreau talks about Obama’s second Inaugural Address and its centering idea: that “the entire story of America” is of each generation trying to realize the ideals laid out in the Declaration of Independence. He laughs. “Back in the hopeful days before Trump.”

“He was right to have that hope,” Traister says. The “punishing pushback that we’re living through right now,” she continues, has come precisely because “it’s within our grasp to make another huge set of steps toward inclusion and equality and toward the promises, the unfulfilled promises, of our founding.” It’s the kind of message, clear and forthright, that the Democratic Party could use. # # #

[Sarah Larson is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her column, Podcast Dept., appears weekly in the online version of the magazine. Larson received a BA (English and film studies) from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.]

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Thursday, July 26, 2018

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) Is Both Optimistic And Furious

This blogger is a friend of women (as a father and a grandfather) and he held his nose to cast a vote for the first woman (with a lot of baggage) to seek the presidency and this blogger says here and now that he will vote — if possible — for Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. The blogger was hooked by the title of this essay — Leader Of The Resistance — because this blogger is nothing else but a Resistor. If this is a (fair & balanced) answer to savage brutality and greed, so be it.

PS: give this blogger "Pocahontas" any time over a Scalped Man (with an elaborate hairdo covering his billiard-ball head) any day of the coming weeks. Remember, we don't have "Fake-News" — we have a Fake-POTUS.

[x NY 'Zine]
Leader Of The Persistence
By Rebecca Traister


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It was unremittingly hot at the farm in Natick, Massachusetts, where 1,500 people had gathered on the Sunday after the Fourth of July. Remarkably, this crowd had assembled under a blistering sun not for a free concert, or outdoor theater, or even a protest, exactly. They’d come for an open-air town hall with their sitting senator, a 69-year-old woman widely expected to win reelection to her second term this fall. Standing at the back of the sweaty throng, I’d seen her introduced from the stage, then heard cheers greeting her entrance, but couldn’t for the life of me lay eyes on her. Not until I climbed onto the seat of my folding chair in the press section. There she was, jogging 75 yards down a hill in open-toed mules, her aqua cardigan flying behind her.

Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren is in constant motion. She often takes stages at a run, zigzagging around the edges of crowds, waving and giving high fives like Bruce Springsteen. Speaking to groups of supporters, she rocks on her feet, or rises to her tiptoes, with feeling; occasionally she tucks her mic under her arm to clap for herself or cuts the air in front of her with her flat palm. She’ll beat her chest for emphasis, speak so passionately that she gets winded, and throw a fist in the air as a symbol of defiance and determination. One afternoon in Nevada, perched on a punishingly high stool in front of several hundred people at a brewery, she kicked her feet out in front of her with such force that I feared she’d tip over backward.

Watching Warren this steamy summer as she works to move her party through the perilous wilderness of the Donald Trump administration, through the midterms and her own reelection to the Senate, and then perhaps toward a run for the presidency, she appears to have committed her whole body to the effort. Like if she stops moving, the whole world will end.

In recent months, she has hopped not just between Washington, DC, and her home state but also to Reno and Las Vegas to campaign alongside a slate of Nevadan candidates; to Denver and Salt Lake City to fund-raise; to the Texas border to visit family-detention centers; to Iraq with Senator Lindsey Graham. Within an hour of Trump’s announcing his nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to replace retiring justice Anthony Kennedy, she was striding purposefully toward the Supreme Court steps, where a knot of furious protesters gathered in the dark were bellowing, “Hell no, Kavanaugh! Hell no, Kavanaugh!”

“We are in the fight of our lives,” Warren repeated — twice — when she got to the microphone.

All of the movement, the travel, the nervous animal energy, is in service of this idea: We’re in a fight. She is in a fight.

In the absence of a clear favorite to challenge Trump and the Republicans, Warren has emerged in just the past few weeks as the de facto leader of the Democratic Party, and accordingly, the candidate-of-the-moment for 2020. It should have been obvious: She has the progressive vision and drive, the willingness to go tweet-to-tweet with the president, and that boundless stamina. Perhaps it was hard in the wake of 2016 to imagine pinning Democratic hopes on another woman. But sometimes you need a crisis (or five) to see the obvious, and this summer’s cascade of them has brought Warren’s role into sharper relief.


It’s a shame that perhaps the fakest and most clichĂ©d pose a politician can try to strike is that of the outsider. It’s a shame because Warren isn’t just another silver-haired pol braying about bringing Main Street to K Street — she actually is an outsider, despite the considerable power she’s amassed during her nearly six years as a senator.

An Oklahoma native, commuter-college graduate, Harvard law professor, and bankruptcy expert, Warren came to national consciousness about a decade ago. Having written The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are (Still) Going Broke (2003) with her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi, she’d visit Jon Stewart’s Daily Show to unspool deft yarns that helped Americans see how profoundly they were getting screwed: by the banks, by credit-card companies, by wealthy corporations, and by the government enabling all those entities. As a civilian, Warren chaired the 2008 Congressional Oversight Panel on TARP, during which she memorably disemboweled Obama Treasury secretary Tim Geithner and proposed a consumer-protection agency that Barack Obama made a reality. But Obama passed on her to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau precisely because she was too outsider-y, too challenging a figure for some Democrats, let alone Republicans.

Then, in 2011, Warren, who’d never run for office, decided to pursue the Massachusetts Senate seat that, after Ted Kennedy died, went in a special election to frat-boy Republican Scott Brown, who boasted high favorability ratings and a pickup truck. Warren ran an unwieldy campaign, in which she was tagged by the press as an awkward, hard-to-love candidate, and took the seat by only seven points — the spread that year in Massachusetts between Obama and Mitt Romney was 23. Nonetheless, Warren’s defeat of a popular Republican incumbent offered evidence — back before Bernie Sanders’s 2016 showing, before the growth of the Democratic Socialists of America, before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — that, after years mired in Wall Street–boosted centrism, Democrats could prevail by embracing a populist strain of economic progressivism.

But being in power is different from railing against it. In 2014, Warren was elected to party leadership and assumed a role that had been created for her as strategic adviser to the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee. Many saw the move as coming with costs: binding her to colleagues with whom she might naturally be at odds, including now–Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, whose ascension in the 1990s coincided with the finance-industry-aligned era of the party.

In 2016, Warren disappointed legions of her supporters by deciding not to challenge Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. She provoked further ire in some quarters of the left by refusing to endorse the man who did run against Clinton, Vermont’s senator Bernie Sanders, sitting out the primaries until the race had been decided, at which point she threw her support to Clinton. In the days after Trump’s inauguration, Warren annoyed progressives once more when, as a member of the Banking Committee, she dutifully voted for Ben Carson as secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Accepting a president’s nominees except in the rarest circumstances had just been the way of things, until New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand contested nearly all of Trump’s Cabinet picks last winter. By the time of the full Senate vote on Carson, Warren had gotten the memo: She voted not to confirm him.

The ongoing parade of horribles offered up by the Trump administration has given Warren an opening to showcase anew her prickly pugilism, starting with the moment in February 2017 when Majority Leader Mitch McConnell ordered her off the Senate floor for refusing to stop reading a letter from Coretta Scott King objecting to Jeff Sessions’s nomination for attorney general. During a March Senate hearing, she tore into Carson on how housing policy has expanded the wealth gap between blacks and whites: “It is HUD’s job to help end housing discrimination. That’s what the law said. You said you would enforce these laws. You haven’t, and I think that’s the scandal that should get you fired.”

The battles have burned hottest with Trump himself; it’s clear that Warren scares the president nearly as much as that other 60-something white grandma did, and he devotes an inordinate amount of energy to insulting her. He’s built one of his reliably racist shticks around his nickname for her, “Pocahontas” — deploying it at least 26 times between 2014 and 2017 — in reference to her claim as a young law professor from Oklahoma that she was part Cherokee. A former college debater, Warren has been assiduous in her commitment to bark back at him, riling him further with tweets about his “trash talk” and “incompetence,” calling him “creepy” and a “thin-skinned bully who thinks humiliating women at 3 AM qualifies him to be President.”

Warren’s willingness to sink her teeth into the president’s ankles has turned out to be a smart tactical move. It puts her in the news cycle right along with him, while most Democrats struggle to get a spot of media time in a landscape dominated by Trump. The day after his Helsinki performance, Warren is aghast. “It was a fictional moment, only it was reality,” she exclaims. “Never before have I seen a president attack America at the same time he’s doing a public display of affection for a dictator.”

Warren has in these past two years stoked and fed off grassroots rage, especially that of resistance women. She cheered on hundreds of female activists occupying her Senate Office Building in June to protest family separations, and during a fiery speech at an immigration rally in Boston, she called for “replacing ICE with something that reflects our morality and that works.” That the Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh is not simply a Federalist Society–approved conservative but a man who publicly labeled Warren’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau a “threat to individual liberty” might be the closest Trump has come to hanging raw meat in front of a hungry bear. While Schumer speaks with toothless pragmatism about which strategy his caucus might choose to block Kavanaugh, Warren has hit the judge at every rally, on every cable-news show, and via every social-media platform she can lay her fists on, portraying him as someone who’ll overturn Roe v. Wade, take away health care, and protect Trump should he be indicted.


In the very near past, much of Warren’s agenda would have been considered untenably far left, but now it’s practically standard for serious Democratic contenders. She wants to reverse the new corporate tax benefits and invest in stemming the opioid crisis, bring college costs down, institute single-payer health care, alleviate consumer debt, strenuously regulate financial institutions. She talks about passing the Dream Act and enacting humane immigration reform, shrinking the race and gender wage gaps, remaking the criminal-justice system — “instead of jailing some kid who gets caught with a few ounces of pot, let’s put the banker who financed the drug deals in jail” — and passing a constitutional amendment to establish the unfettered right of eligible Americans to vote.

But first she has to train this puppy.

Warren and her husband, Bruce Mann, greet me at the door of their Cambridge house on a morning in early July. Mann, whom Warren met soon after the end of her first marriage, and whom she proposed to and wed in 1980, appears (at least to an outsider’s eye) to be one of those Good Husbands™, in the Marty Ginsburg mold. A Harvard law professor and historian of bankruptcy, Mann radiates both adoration and admiration for his wife. He stands still while she’s in motion; he smiles as she talks; he commutes to D.C. whenever his class schedule permits. Last summer, for their anniversary, he installed shelving in their DC home because he knows how much Warren likes organized closets and also that she has no time to hang shelves. This summer, he gave her a different kind of gift.

As we speak near the front door, a small crash echoes from the back of the house, as if perhaps a piece of furniture were being dragged across a stone floor.

“Is that — ” I ask.

“Yup,” Warren replies. “That’s the puppy.”

Ten days before, Warren had returned home from Washington to find a baby golden retriever waiting for her. Their last golden, Otis, died of cancer five days before her 2012 election. Warren says she didn’t tell people at the time for fear that saying it aloud would lead her to start crying and never stop. And then suddenly she was a senator, with an office in another state; the logistics of a dog seemed impossible. Recently, in these darkest of weeks, Warren says, she and Mann decided it was time to stop fretting over why it was impractical and just do it. She beams at her husband. “It’s all thanks to Bruce and his willingness to make it work. It’s the three of us in it together.”

And so we head to the side porch to meet Bailey, named after Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey, the community building-and-loan officer from "It’s a Wonderful Life," whose adversary is the cruel corporate banker Mr. Potter. In the movie, Bailey calls his foe a “warped, frustrated old man” and asks him, “Do you know how long it takes a workingman to save $5,000? Just remember … this rabble you’re talking about, they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath?”

The dog’s name is an unsubtle hint at the part Warren wants to play: the person who stands up for the rabble and against the warped and frustrated old men whose refusal to loosen their grip on power has been made disturbingly apparent in these past few years.

Opposing corruption, Warren tells me, “is becoming a much more defining part of my work,” and in September, she plans to introduce a big legislative package to combat it. She’s not just talking about the Citizens United–style influence of billionaires in elections, though the Mercer family has already funded a super-PAC devoted to attacking her. She’s obsessed with the revolving-door corruption of lobbyists, the influence-peddling that gunks up the legislative process. “But boy, does it pay off,” she says. “The rich get richer, and everybody else eats dirt.”


“I really didn’t think that would happen,” Warren tells me, as we settle down to talk, in reference to Donald Trump’s victory, coming as it did after a campaign that openly cultivated sexist and racist resentments. Warren says she’s been shocked into a new relationship with feminism and is “more worried than ever before” about the erosion of women’s rights. She’d long cared about reproductive justice, sexual assault, and equal pay — but gender just hadn’t been her thing. Back when I’d first interviewed her on this porch in the fall of 2011, as she was kicking off her Senate campaign, she’d even been a little dismissive of the discrimination she’d face in a state that had, as I wrote then, elected fewer women to the House or Senate than had been put to death for practicing witchcraft.

In his first race, Brown had beaten another woman, Martha Coakley, who’d been Massachusetts’s first female attorney general and had badly bobbled her campaign, losing to a guy no one thought had a chance. A lot of people in Democratic politics were wary about gambling the party’s future on another untested female candidate. The calls that gutted Warren the most, she tells me, were from her friends who said, “You can run, but you better understand: Massachusetts will not elect a woman to an office this big.”

At this point, Warren’s eldest granddaughter, 17-year-old Octavia, traipses by in jean shorts and bare feet, looking like summer. “Where’s the puppy?” she asks. “Granddad’s got him upstairs,” Warren replies, and Octavia zips off to find them.

Warren and I are ostensibly addressing the anxieties about her 2012 race, but we could just as easily be considering a more current set of anxieties. I ask her if some people told her specifically not to run in the wake of Coakley’s loss, and she nods her head yes. “It wasn’t only, ‘Don’t do this; look at Martha Coakley.’ It was, ‘Don’t do this; we’ve already been forced back enough, don’t push us back farther.’ ” What she took from this, she says, was the realization that “the losses [of women] are so personal that they make it harder for the woman after that and the woman after that.” We’re definitely not talking about Martha Coakley anymore.

Warren holds my gaze as she continues: “At the end of the day, you just can’t let that [stop you]. You could’ve said to me, ‘You’re going to get all your skin burnt off,’ and my answer would have been, ‘That’s going to be part of the prize.’ Every person who said to me, ‘Massachusetts won’t elect a woman,’ or, worse, ‘When you lose, it will set back the cause of women here in Massachusetts,’ made me lean harder into the decision to run.”

The question of whether Warren will run for president hangs around her not like a cloud but like a glittery bubble — she’s a special figure because she’s a leader, and she might be the leader. Traveling in Nevada alongside her Senate colleague from that state, Catherine Cortez Masto, Warren is the one who’s recognized in the airport, in the hotel. Everyone I speak to in the weeks I’m reporting this story excitedly asks the same question: “Is she going to run?,” before telling me whether they think she should.

The opinions reliably fall into three categories. There are those — often political reporters and longtime Democratic denizens — who remind me that she was a weak candidate in 2012, that her politics are too far left, and that she’d activate the Trump base; an early 2017 poll showed Trump losing to a generic Dem but winning against Warren. Some others, many of them older feminists, tell me regretfully that they love her but Clinton’s loss showed that America hates women too much, especially older ones. Warren would be over 70 when she ran, and there’s simply too much on the line to risk it.

It’s younger people, along with women recently awakened to activism and some experts who’ve been tracking the unprecedented wave of female candidates winning Democratic primaries, who aren’t just optimistic but enthusiastic about her potential. They say that she is a brawler and thus the candidate that this historical moment demands, that she’s the perfect person — left, female, and furious — to avenge the loss of Hillary while also bringing to the White House a politics far more progressive than Clinton ever would have.

“What I find especially interesting,” says Kelly Dittmar of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, “is that critics will push back against any claims that gender was the cause, or even part of the cause, for Clinton’s defeat, but will then question whether Democrats should nominate a woman again in 2020.” Of course, she says, gender — not just women’s but men’s — will be part of the puzzle of future presidential politics; it always has been. “But it would be naĂŻve to assume that a candidate’s gender will alone be the ticket to success or the death knell.”

Though early polling is a fool’s errand, Warren is regularly named, along with Sanders and Joe Biden, as one of the top three candidates for 2020, with other presumed possibilities — Gillibrand, California senator Kamala Harris, New Jersey senator Cory Booker, Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti — trailing behind them. One June Harvard-Harris poll put Warren fourth, behind Biden and Sanders and Clinton (who Will. Not. Be. Running. Again). But a May Suffolk University poll of New Hampshire Democrats had Warren well ahead of the others, with 26 percent over Biden’s 20 and Sanders’s 13.

Warren is up for reelection in Massachusetts in November. She can’t say that she is running for president. So officially, it is accurate to say that she is not.

But of course she’s running. Even if she doesn’t really want to be president, she should run — as should several of her female colleagues — to help normalize women’s campaigning for president and finally correct the conversation about whether a woman can win and make it instead about which woman will win. She should run to give voters a choice, to push the field to the left, and to leverage her history of lambasting corrupt capitalist excess to properly shame the Trump kakistocracy. And, for what it’s worth, I think she does really want to be president.

“I’m going up that hill,” Warren tells Nevada Democrats in June, supposedly describing her ongoing struggle against Trump and the right. “I need you with me. We must change the face of power.”


Assuming Warren declares, she’ll have to reckon with the fact that she’ll be depicted as the reanimation of Hillary Clinton, no matter the stark differences between the two. Warren is perhaps the national political figure who first harnessed the energies of post–Occupy Wall Street American progressivism and served as a rebuke to the center-left politics that defined Clinton. But in declining to run in 2016, she ceded some of that symbolic claim to Sanders. In retrospect, it was likely a mistake for her to have sat it out, as it had been for Clinton to decline to challenge George W. Bush in 2004. Women talking themselves out of running has always been a problem, one that too often winds up biting them in the ass later, when they do step up.

Many of Sanders’s staunchest fans still hold it against Warren that she didn’t endorse him. At a speech at the ACLU convention in Washington in June, Warren laid out a progressive vision to a wildly enthusiastic crowd, but one woman at my table looked dubious. “She all but announced her candidacy,” Coretta McKinney, a 46-year-old real-estate broker in Virginia, told me, probably referring to Warren’s line about the need to put “more women in positions of power, from committee rooms to boardrooms, to that really nice oval-shaped room at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.” McKinney said that she was impressed by the content of Warren’s speech but that she’d never vote for her in a Democratic primary. Warren hadn’t “atoned” for campaigning with Clinton, McKinney went on, citing Cenk Uygur’s leftist media network the Young Turks as her go-to source for political analysis.

“I endorsed Hillary after she was the Democrats’ nominee and Bernie had withdrawn,” Warren protests when I tell her this story (it is not quite true that Bernie had withdrawn, but it had become impossible for him to win). But then she tries to put a good face on how harshly she’s judged by some Sanders diehards (see the “#JudasWarrenSellout” spray-painted beside a highway in Northampton, in 2016): “There’s a part of me that smiles when I hear this. We’re Democrats. We don’t fight to get our taxes cut or for some loophole in government regulations. We fight from the heart for what we believe in — I wouldn’t change this if I could.” Then she repeats something I’ve heard her say before, which is that the 2016 election is in the rearview mirror and “all we can do now is try to bring this family together and move it forward.”

Which is not to say that moving forward will be easy. Warren’s style — her competence, precision, and practicality — combined with the apparently endless thrill of hating Hillary Clinton, along with (dubious) stories pushed by the right to maximally alienate the left about her purportedly cozy private relationships with the bankers she publicly assails, plus the fact that she is the same age, race, and gender as the former Democratic candidate, mean that Elizabeth Warren basically is Hillary Clinton — or could be cast as smudgily indistinguishable from her within about five minutes of entering a presidential contest.

It’s ridiculous. Warren is the woman who famously called out Clinton for caving on bankruptcy reform. Yes, like Clinton, she’s ascended to elite status within her party, but, she says, it gives her a chance “to push harder on the issues I care about. I’m an outsider who now has a lot more leverage.” Soon after accepting her post, Warren persuaded her fellow party leaders that it was time for a vote to commit to grow Social Security, getting out of the defensive crouch of merely arguing about how much or how little to cut from the bedrock program.

“Democrats never again as a group in the Senate have had the conversation that starts with ‘Let’s figure out how much to cut from Social Security,’ ” Warren says. “I remind people: ‘If you were here, you signed up to expand Social Security.” Sometimes, she says, they quaver: “ ‘Did we do that?’ ” Warren grins and nods vigorously. “Oh, yes we did!” It matters, Warren says, because when Democrats return to the majority, they’ll be prepared with a “policy piece that we all agreed to.”

As more proof of how she’s successfully pushed progressive approaches, she cites the now broad acceptance of a bill that would set student-loan interest at the same (lower) rate offered to banks by the Federal Reserve. In 2015, she used her clout to publicly rap Obama-appointed Securities and Exchange Commission chair Mary Jo White for slow-rolling the enforcement of the Dodd-Frank rule requiring corporations to release CEO-worker pay ratios. As a result, we now know, for example, that the CEO of the conglomerate Honeywell makes $16.8 million a year, when the median worker makes $50,296 — a 333-to-1 ratio. And just this spring, thanks to pressure Warren applied to her caucus, the progressive stalwart Rohit Chopra was tapped to serve on the Federal Trade Commission.

Notwithstanding all this, Warren has already been described, in her 2012 race, as “hectoring” and “schoolmarmish”; in 2016, Mika Brzezinski, that great advocate for women’s “value,” suggested that Warren was “shrill … unmeasured and almost unhinged.” In a 2016 story about the senator, the New York Times characterized Warren as “imperious” and “never short on confidence” as she swept through congressional hallways in her “jewel-toned jacket” — a frame absolutely chilling in its familiarity. Last week, after Warren called herself at a New England Council breakfast a “capitalist to [her] bones,” a handful of left-wing media figures slammed her for what they saw was selling out to the donor class in advance of a presidential run. No matter that Warren has, throughout her career, described herself as a capitalist and a fan of regulated markets, at the same time as she has gone after banks and corporations for maximizing profits on the backs of the working and middle classes — those are just details. It can all happen again.

And yet. It may also be different this time. Maybe not enough to land us with a lady president, or maybe exactly that different. After all, in part in reaction to Clinton’s loss, and to Trump’s victory, millions of America’s women — and at least some of its men — have been energized and have educated themselves about a slew of progressive issues. Many of them crave leftist leadership, at least when it’s presented as a call for affordable college and health care, higher wages, and humane immigration and gun policies. At least some are in it for something blunter: female leadership. They see in this era of Women’s Marches and a female-led resistance, with Roe at stake and the #MeToo movement having exposed the rot at the core of patriarchal power structures, a chance to replace disappointing and abusive men with competent women.

During her first Senate race, when Warren met little girls on the campaign trail, she began a practice of kneeling down to say: “My name is Elizabeth and I’m running for the United States Senate because that’s what girls do.” She figured, she tells me, “that if nothing else comes of this race other than that, there will have been some good.” It became a thing, with fathers bringing baby daughters to her, mothers and grandmothers asking for pinkie swears and multigenerational photos. “It’s one of the pieces for me that makes me so glad to have run for office,” Warren says. “And so glad to have won.”

Warren speaks with assertive pride about what a tough law professor she was. “My classes were routinely regarded as the hardest in the law school,” she says, explaining that it was important for both her male and female students to see that being demanding and “excellent” was “a part of who women are.” She knows this sounds obvious, but the obvious can evaporate when “time after time, a young woman goes into a room and there’s nobody there but men.”

Warren’s willingness to present herself as a hard-ass teacher is something to behold. After the indictment of 12 Russian nationals for hacking the DNC server in an attempt to interfere with the 2016 election, Warren tweeted to Trump that he should “cancel your ridiculous Putin summit and get your butt on a plane back to the United States.” In a pep talk with her state campaign staff in June, Warren baldly declared, “This is an administration that is rife with corruption, with favoritism, and with just outright stupidity.”

Women who openly admonish men as if they’re children, who are frank about men’s intellectual shortcomings, don’t tend to be beloved; in this climate, they’re vulnerable to charges of elitism and worse. Feminists have long noted how some men rear back from women who remind them of the mothers and teachers who had authority over them in their youth, and so I blanch a bit when I hear Warren, on the road, saying how as a second-grader she used to line up her dolls and reprimand them for not handing in their homework on time, or crowing to a Girl Scout leader about how she herself had been not only a troop leader but a “cookie chair.” Not once, she says, with a dramatic pause.
“Twice.”

But the woman who insisted on modeling female excellence and toughness as a law professor isn’t backing away from that now. In Reno in June, she told the familiar tale of her childhood spent at “the ragged edges of the middle class,” but this time lingered not on her janitor dad and three older military brothers, but rather on her mother, whom she heard one day after her father’s heart attack weeping and vowing, “We will not lose this house, we will not lose this house.” As Warren told the crowd, her mama then “blew her nose and walked to the Sears” to get a job, and indeed wound up saving the house.

This narrative is key to Warren’s brand: to the spirit of persistence, a meme gifted her by McConnell when she tried to read Coretta Scott King’s letter. McConnell told her to stop; she kept going; he threw her off the floor. Then he explained that he’d had to silence her because she’d been warned, she’d been given an explanation, but nevertheless she persisted.

Warren loves it. She embraces the memes, relishes being a piece of resistance merch, plays to the crowd, hollering, “Nevertheless…” and waiting for the “She persisted!” In part, this may be because she understands sound-bitten American politics in a way that she didn’t when she had trouble on the stump in 2012: It’s about the line, the sell, the MAGA hats, and the $27 average donations. This is what smart and capable female candidates actually need to learn, if they’re not to get written off as stilted and boring — how to draw a crowd, get them to their feet, lead a rowdy call-and-response. Ideally, your signature line pithily captures what you stand for, and in Warren’s case, persistence neatly embodies many of the dynamics of 2018: a vile white guy silencing the white woman contesting the nomination of another vile white guy by reading the letter of a black woman who’d warned of these monsters years earlier. The line also points to the larger hope: that American women on the right side of history may yet prevail. McConnell’s words offered a blueprint for a kind of mass women’s rebellion. Elizabeth Warren gets that.

At the Nevada convention, two women — one a former Hillary supporter, one a former Bernie supporter — wearing jackets with the message WE REALLY CARE! DO U? affixed in white tape are there for Warren, as well as Cortez Masto and Representative Jacky Rosen, who, after winning her first-ever race in 2016, has a chance to unseat Republican senator Dean Heller in 2018. “Yeah, we’re activists,” Denise Quon says to me when I ask about her motivation for being there. “But mostly we’re just pissed off!”

It’s Warren’s willingness to be pissed off alongside them that attracts many women to her. When in the fall she told her own #MeToo story on "Meet the Press," about back when she was a “baby law professor” and a senior faculty member chased her around his desk trying to grab her, she recalled thinking, “If he gets hold of me, I’m going to punch him right in the face.” And Warren is so proud of her Twitter takedowns of our president that she actually published many of them, in Twitter format, in her recent book, This Fight Is Our Fight (2017).


Warren is on a short flight between Reno and Vegas that turns out to be pretty turbulent. It already feels like passengers are jumpy as we descend into McCarran airport when a kid yells, “Hey, there’s Air Force One!” The man by the window in my row opens the shade, looks out, and matter-of-factly affirms, “Trump’s here.”

The plane is buzzing with the sudden awareness that the president is in town and that onboard with us is his nemesis. As soon as we stop taxiing, a young woman sitting behind Warren asks the senator to make a video message for her roommate. She immediately complies: “Stay in the fight, Allison!” Warren exhorts over the back of her headrest, straight into an iPhone.

As Warren deplanes, a diminutive middle-aged stewardess embraces her, pulling her down to plant a big kiss on her cheek. Stepping into the airport, with phones and news alerts revved back up post-flight, we’re all reading the same headlines: Trump has gone on a tirade about the senator in advance of her visit to the city, calling her Pocahontas. He’s joked about how he’s been pressured to apologize to her for his racism, and the crowd has chanted back at him: “Don’t!” (In the line to board the plane in Reno, an older man behind her remarked to his wife with a smirk, “Maybe I’ll get to sit next to Pocahontas.”)

In the cab to my hotel, the driver is playing conservative radio, and I learn about the building frenzy over Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s ejection from the Red Hen restaurant. San Francisco right-winger Michael Savage reads a passage from his upcoming book on “liberal hysteria,” predicting that we’re heading into a civil war.

Two hours later, Warren — who has made a pit stop to pay her regards to the ailing Harry Reid — is in the brewery in Henderson in front of several hundred supporters, four out of five of them women, many in persist T-shirts, one waving a persist bumper sticker.

“This is a dark time,” Warren begins, meditating on Trump’s having recently referred to human beings as “animals.” Her painted blue toenails peek out of black pumps, a navy-blue cardigan is shedding thread in the back. She mentions the Pocahontas speech from earlier that afternoon. “He thinks he’s gonna shut me up?” she says. “That’s not gonna happen, baby, no, no, no.”

A woman stands and asks Warren, “Does the Democratic Party have a plan for the next time they repeal Obamacare?” Warren’s answer begins with Trump’s inauguration. She sat close to him as he was sworn in, she says, “burning [the moment] on the back of my eyeballs,” which turned out be useful for those times when she gets worn out or demoralized and wants to rest. As soon as she closes her eyes, she jokes, “I see Donald Trump being sworn in, and I’m back!”

Continuing to recount the inaugural day, she recalls how she felt close to despair returning to Boston in the evening: Republicans now held the White House, the Senate, the House, and the state legislatures; Obamacare and Planned Parenthood funding would likely be rolled back by Monday, Tuesday, Friday of the coming week. The next morning, things didn’t seem much better, but she got out of bed, threw on some clothes, and started toward the Boston Common. That’s when the army came into view. “Women,” she says reverentially. “And friends of women — that’s what we’re now calling you guys. It was the biggest protest rally in the history of the world. And it wasn’t organized by some fancy group of professional organizers in Washington, DC. It was women who’d come off the sidelines.”

Another attendee inquires about top-down party strategy with regard to the proposed merger of the Labor and Education departments — can Democrats stop it? Warren pauses and gets quiet. “I think we can,” she says, “for another four and a half months.” That’s it. Then it’s up to the people, at the polls.

Her answer to both these questions is the same: There is no magic formula from on high, from her position in the upper echelons of political leadership. Now there is only the power of the masses, which is why Warren vibrates with intensity as she tries to express to these eager people that they, not she, are the answer to what will happen next, the only real tool the left has left.


After we talk on her sun porch, Warren has to rush to that big outdoor town hall in Natick. But before she goes, she has an alteration to make. She’s ordered a bunch of gauzy open-front cardigans to put over her uniform of black pants and a black tank top. They cost about $13 each, she says, but they’re too long, hit her too far down the thigh, so she’s planning to cut the bottom off the aqua one she’s about to wear.

I point out that if she just chops it with scissors, the knit will come unraveled. She shoots me a slightly withering look: “Well of course it will unravel, but it will just roll up at the bottom.” Fair enough, and as I stand watching this operation, I mention that I’ve just come from a weekend in Maine, where I’d turned away from the news for a couple of days and briefly felt the relief of disengagement. Warren cuts the sweater methodically, using the first scrap to measure how much to take off all around.

“You know what I love to do?” she offers. “I love to go to Target with Amelia and just spend the day there.” Her daughter, Amelia, is the mother of Octavia and Warren’s two younger grandchildren; she lives in LA “We just wander around in there, look at the patio furniture, the pajama section. It’s like six hours of tuning out.” You spend six hours at Target? asks a staffer who’s there to accompany us to Natick. Warren looks up, surprised. “Well, not just at Target. We go to BJ’s; we each have things we like to eat there. Then I get the socks I like at Macy’s.” Warren’s voice gets softer. She’s talking mostly to the sweater now. “It’s just a few hours, six hours that I don’t have to think about Mitch McConnell. That’s all I need.”

Here is a 69-year-old woman, scissoring the bottom off a cheap sweater at her kitchen island as a lunatic white patriarch of a president rages against her, using his tiny thumbs and a social-media platform. On some level, it feels absurd — the contrast between the enormously consequential political fights and the people waging them, each small in his or her own way. There’s a muffled crash from upstairs, where Bailey is playing, perhaps with Granddad and Octavia.

What happens next? Who can get us out of this? This is the current condition, the endless stream of questions we ask ourselves on our trips to Macy’s, as the pets we count on to repair our hearts chew on our furniture. On cable news, pundits and politicians pontificate and predict with performed authority — and we create the market for their assuredness because it’s so hard not to know. Nobody wants to have to fight all the time, to shake and shimmy with the effort of it, so we seek a leader who’ll vow to take us forward, reassure us so we don’t have to worry and work and argue and stay up all night scared.

The problem is that it was the assured predictions, the 85 percent chance of victory, the promises of inevitability, that landed us in this fucking mess to begin with. It will be tempting to have a million conversations over the next few years in which we stroke our chins and ask wise questions about Elizabeth Warren’s chances. Those who are used to being called upon as consultants and political gurus will wonder, like Beltway Carrie Bradshaws, whether America is ready for a female president. Experts will run the numbers, talk to focus groups, tally up the probabilities, and churn through the losses we’ve already sustained. They’ll tell us to stay safe and center, or to bank left because that’s the trend, or that Warren isn’t left enough to be on trend. They’ll argue about whether the way to win is to attack Trump or talk health care. Some will contend that turning to another woman — another older white blonde who can be portrayed as imperious and shrill — will mean doom; others will insist she’s our only hope.

But the fact is that none of us — not one of the people who’s going to try to answer this question with authority — actually knows what’s possible, what’s impossible, what’s going to happen next. Because everything is different now. We are different too.

That afternoon, Warren will stand in front of 1,500 people in a sun-blasted field. The people in the crowd have interrupted their own holiday weekends, their getaways from the news, to come listen to this woman in her chopped-up aqua sweater answer questions and sweat and clap for them and for herself. The first man who stands to ask a question will tell Warren that she met his daughter back when she ran for the Senate in 2012, and that she pinkie-swore to that little girl that she could become a senator one day too.

Warren will remind this crowd that their very presence, that such a mob would show up on this holiday weekend, is a sign of the uncharted political territory we’re in.

“We are a changed people,” she says. “And that means we are a changed democracy.” We must change, we must imagine that it’s possible.

“We’ve got to throw it to democracy” is what Warren said to me over our first lunch in May. This is her solution, not some tricked-out plan devised by a highly paid Democratic consultant, while the volunteers and protesters pound the pavement all day. Warren is looking past the consultants and party leaders to the women — and the men — who are out there like her moving, fidgeting, throwing punches in the air.

“I’m optimistic,” she said to me over that lunch. “But I’m furious.” # # #

[Rebecca Traister is currently a writer-at-large for New York magazine and The Cut, and a contributing editor at Elle magazine. She also has contributed to Salon, The New York Times, GQ, Allure, and Mademoiselle. Traister's has written two books — Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women (2010). and All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (2016), She received a BA (American studies) from Northwestern University (IL).]

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