Is Elizabeth Warren Really Moving Hillary To The Left On Something?

Last year, once Elizabeth Warren announced she would be supporting Hillary for president, my hopes for her running herself-- unless Hillary changes her mind and decides not to-- were dashed. I got over it... although I wondered why Warren didn't hold out some hope she would endorse Bernie Sanders if he ran in the Democratic primary.

The other day Warren endorsed Kamala Harris for the Senate seat being given up by Barbara Boxer. Now Harris is probably not as bad as some of the candidates Warren backed in November-- in the general election: anti-courageous conservatives like Michelle Nunn (GA), Alison Grimes (KY), Mary Landrieu (LA) and Natalie Tenant (WV). OK, they were all better than their Republican opponents (all of whom won), but... I cringed a little thinking about Warren tarnishing her brand on these weak candidates who, were they ever to win, would start voting very much on a different team than Elizabeth Warren. Kamala Harris, from California, isn't a conservative. Is she a progressive? One of her admirers and supporters told me she's sort of in between Warren and corporate shill Cory Booker, with who she is close. She may not be a bad senator but maybe Warren should have waited to see what better options presented themselves before endorsing Harris. "California Attorney General Kamala Harris is a smart, tough, and experienced prosecutor who has consistently stood up to Wall Street," she wrote to her supporters Wednesday, although Harris' vigilance against Wall Street doesn't rise to the level of Warren's own, nor of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's. "Yesterday," Warren continued, "she announced her candidacy for the United States Senate, and I’m happy to support her campaign." She made the optimal case for progressives to back Harris:

Let me take just a moment to tell you what makes Kamala Harris so special.

When the housing market crashed in 2008, California was hit hard. Home prices had shot through the roof, and families that were desperately afraid they might be priced out of housing forever took on big mortgages. But those weren’t just standard, here-are-the-payments mortgages. No, millions of people ended up with mortgages that were loaded with tricks and traps, sold by both big banks and fly-by-night mortgage lenders. When the market collapsed, these people couldn’t pay their mortgages, they couldn’t refinance, and they couldn’t sell their homes.

Attorney General Kamala Harris demanded real accountability from the lenders. She wasn’t intimidated by the big banks. When the negotiations in the National Mortgage Settlement weren’t tough enough on the banks, Kamala took a bold move. She said that her job was to protect the people of California, not help the big banks, so she pulled out of the group negotiations and later secured $20 billion in relief for struggling California homeowners. And to help prevent another crisis from happening again, she fought for a new California Homeowner Bill of Rights-- one of the most comprehensive sets of foreclosure reform laws in the country.

I worked with Kamala, and I saw up close and personal that she is tough, she is principled, and she fights hard.

We need more leaders in Washington who are willing to fight for a level playing field for working families. Kamala came to Massachusetts to help our campaign in 2012, and I’m doing what I can to make sure Kamala Harris makes it to the United States Senate in 2016.

That's not something you can ignore. But what if Xavier Becerra, Dave Jones, Jackie Speier or Hilda Solis runs? Each of them is more progressive and would probably make a better senator that Harris. I wish Warren would have waited, although I'm sure she had her reasons-- possibly to scare off billionaire mystery-meat candidate Tom Steyer. maybe so that Harris would feel significant enough love from the progressive wing of the party that she wouldn't immediately jump into a business-oriented Cory Booker position. No one, including Warren, is perfect. And only a fool, which is isn't, ever thinks they are.

Yesterday, Time, which is also well-aware Warren isn't running or president, made the case about why all the razzle-dazzle about recruiting her has been successful... even if it isn't resulting in her running. Time assistant managing editor Rana Foroohar asserts Warren is "yanking Hillary Clinton to the left." Warren, she points out has "tapped into an existential crisis on the left: namely, liberals’ belated anxiety over the capture of the Democratic Party by high finance, which began two decades ago."

Democrats, like Republicans, bear blame for the financial crisis of 2008. Jimmy Carter deregulated interest rates in 1980, a move that pacified consumers and financiers grappling with stagflation but also helped set the stage for the home-mortgage implosion. In 1999, as President Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, Rubin signed off on the Glass-Steagall banking-regulation death certificate, a move that many, Warren included, believe was a key factor in worsening the crisis. Loose accounting standards supported by many Democrats during the Clinton years also encouraged the growth of stock options as the main form of corporate compensation, a trend that French academic Thomas Piketty, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and many other economists believe exacerbated the staggering gap between rich and poor in the U.S. today. I asked Warren whether she blamed such policies for our current wage stagnation, which has persisted despite robust economic growth. “I’d lay it right at the feet of trickle-down economics, yes,” she says. “We’ve tried that experiment for 35 years, and it hasn’t worked.”

Speculation has been rife that Warren might consider a presidential run of her own, taking on front runner Hillary Clinton just to make sure the same trickle-down team doesn’t end up in office again. When I ask her flatly if she’d run if she thought a Rubin or Summers would be making economic policy for the next four years, she paused. “I tell you … I’m going to do everything I can. I’m going to fight as hard as I have to. This has to change.”

Change won’t come easily. Resetting the economic table is not just about breaking up big banks or raising the minimum wage. Real change would mean grappling with a deep, multidecade shift from a society in which the state, the private sector and the individual all shared responsibility for economic risks to one in which individuals are now increasingly left on their own to pay for the trappings of a middle-class life-- health care, education and retirement-- while corporations capture a record share of the country’s prosperity without necessarily reinvesting in the common good. Complaining about too-big-to-fail banks, sleazy lobbyists and the 1% is easier than crafting an entirely new, inclusive growth policy.

Warren is likely to conjure more change by being a progressive foil to Clinton than by running herself. Her sway has old economists scrambling to learn new tricks. The Center for American Progress, a think tank with close ties to the Clintons, is releasing a new report on wages and the plight of the middle classes on Jan. 15. Its chief author: none other than Summers. Meanwhile, Clinton recently took an ideas meeting with Stiglitz, once considered too far left to touch. In politics, stars may rise, but the moon is constant.

In her most recent book, A Fighting Chance Warren recounts an incident with then First Lady Hillary Clinton that I think had a tremendous impact on her at the time. Long before she decided to run for office, Warren, a Harvard professor at the time, never stopped fighting for a fair bankruptcy bill... but the banksters never have up either. Their financial self-interest wasn't dependent on fleeting partisan coalitions, elections, not even on deaths. They never give up, just like the GOP never gives up trying to destroy Social Security, Medicare, public education, the right for working people to organize and bargain collectively, the environment, and, ultimately, democracy itself-- all on behalf of the self-entitled multimillionaires and billionaires who claim their wealth gives them the right to run the country, in a kind of symbiotic partnership with the corrupt politicians they buy (on both sides of the aisle). Here's how Warren puts it in her book in terms of Hillary:

The banking industry bought everything; they even bought their own facts. The industry commissioned three different studies, each of which was touted as "independent." Each explained the urgent need to change the law-- exactly the way the banking industry wanted it changed. One particularly damaging result of these bogus studies was a claim that bankruptcy cost every hardworking, bill-paying American family a $550 "hidden tax." The number was entirely made up, fabricated out of thin air, but the press reported it as "fact" for years.

This one hit me hard. I'd spent nearly twenty years sweating over every detail in a string of serious academic studies, agonizing over sample sizes and statistical significance to make certain that whatever I reported was exactly right. Now the banks just wrote a check, commissioned a friendly study, and purchased their own facts. They had their own press people distribute the facts and lobbyists hand the facts to congressional staffers. From the halls of Congress to the front pages of newspapers all over the country, these new "facts" became reality.

This strategy-- and the cynicism behind it-- made me furious. It also scared me. If the facts about bankruptcy could be purchased, then who knew what they could claim next?

...[T]he president [Bill Clinton] was under enormous pressure from the banks to sign the bill, but in the last days of his presidency, urged on by his wife, President Clinton stood strong with struggling families. With no public fanfare, he vetoed the industry's bill.

...The banks lost in 2000, but they didn't quit-- they just spent more money on lobbying and campaign contributions. Soon the banking industry was outspending everybody else-- tobacco, pharmaceuticals, even Big Oil. Credit card companies lined up to boost George W. Bush's presidential campaign.

In 2001, the bill looked sure to pass Congress again, and now George W. Bush was in the White House, promising to sign it into law. The recent election kept the House in Republican control, and every single Republican was ready to support the bill. The Senate was evenly split between the two parties, but one of the bill's lead sponsors was Democratic powerhouse Joe Biden, and right behind him were plenty of Democrats offering to help... The baking industry had lost for a second time, but it came back once again, bringing even more money and more lobbyists. It was like fighting some kind of mythical creature-- cut off one head and two grow back.

Many New York Democrats Plan To Hold Their Noses When They Vote For Cuomo In November-- Or Will They?

On Sunday, Steve Kornacki took a little look at the expanding rift between New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and much of the Democratic base. It's worth looking at the video above. Salon's Joan Walsh did a particularly excellent job straightening out Beltway political entrepreneur Ann Lewis, who actually defended Cuomo by quoting Ronald Reagan. I'm not going to get into speculating about what the Working Families Party may or may not do, beyond saying that with the union leadership telling them they;re on their own, they probably won't do much. Still, good segment from Kornacki.

What would make this interesting would be if, for whatever reason, Hillary decides not to run. Were that to happen-- which I don't expect-- there are a whole bunch of centrists, Cuomo being the worst of them, but also Joe Biden, Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, and-- a little more right of center--Virginia Senator Mark Warner, who have signaled they are eager to run. And then there's progressive icon Elizabeth Warren, who says she doesn't want to run, but who's new book, A Fighting Chance sounds like she'd be completely prepared to make a rip-roaring' declaration speech. Her supporters really want her to run. Unlike the other candidates, her supporters are real people.

This is the book's prologue:

I’m Elizabeth Warren. I’m a wife, a mother, and a grandmother. For nearly all my life, I would have said I’m a teacher, but I guess I really can’t say that anymore. Now I’d have to introduce myself as a United States senator, though I still feel a small jolt of surprise whenever I say that.

This is my story, and it’s a story born of gratitude.

My daddy was a maintenance man and my mother worked the phones at Sears. More than anything, my parents wanted to give my three older brothers and me a future. And all four of us have lived good lives. My oldest brother, Don Reed, served twenty years in the military, with 288 combat missions in Vietnam to his credit. In good years, my brother John had a union job operating a crane, and in leaner years he took whatever construction work he could get. My brother David had a special spark; he started his own business, and when that didn’t work out, he started another business, because he couldn’t imagine a world where he wasn’t living by his wits every day. I went to college and became a teacher, first for special-needs kids and then for law students; only much later did I get involved in politics. My brothers and I all married and had children, and my parents plastered their walls, their refrigerator, and their tabletops with pictures of their much-loved grandchildren.

I will be grateful to my mother and daddy until the day I die. They worked hard-- really hard-- to help my brothers and me along. But we also succeeded, at least in part, because we were lucky enough to grow up in an America that invested in kids like us and helped build a future where we could flourish.

Here’s the hard truth: America isn’t building that kind of future any longer.

Today the game is rigged-- rigged to work for those who have money and power. Big corporations hire armies of lobbyists to get billion-dollar loopholes into the tax system and persuade their friends in Congress to support laws that keep the playing field tilted in their favor. Meanwhile, hardworking families are told that they’ll just have to live with smaller dreams for their children.

Over the past generation, America’s determination to give every kid access to affordable college or technical training has faded. The basic infrastructure that helps us build thriving businesses and jobs-- the roads, bridges, and power grids-- has crumbled. The scientific and medical research that has sparked miraculous cures and inventions from the Internet to nanotechnology is starved for funding, and the research pipeline is shrinking. The optimism that defines us as a people has been beaten and bruised.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

I am determined-- fiercely determined-- to do everything I can to help us once again be the America that creates opportunities for anyone who works hard and plays by the rules. An America of accountability and fair play. An America that builds a future for not just some of our children but for all of our children. An America where everyone gets what I got: a fighting chance.

My story seems pretty unlikely, even to me. I never expected to run for office-- but then again, I never expected to do a lot of things in my life. I never expected to climb a mountain. I never expected to meet the president of the United States. I never expected to be a blonde. But here I am.

The story starts in Oklahoma, where I grew up, and it tumbles through a life built around husbands and babies and setting the kitchen on fire. I made my way to a commuter college, a teaching job, a public law school, and, eventually, a professorship. As I started weaving in academic research, I became more and more worried about what was happening to America’s families, and the story shifted to Washington, where I picked my first public fight. In 1995, I agreed to take on what I thought would be some part-time public service for a couple of years, and I quickly got caught up in a battle over our nation’s bankruptcy law. I know that sounds a little obscure, but underneath it was a clash about whether our government exists to serve giant banks or struggling families.

The battle lasted much longer than I’d expected-- a full ten years, in fact. My own life threaded through, of course, with graduations and funerals and grandchildren of my own. When that battle ended, I picked up another, and then another and another-- a total of five big fights in all. They ranged from fighting for a fresh start for families who had suffered a job loss or a serious illness, to trying to force the government to be transparent about what was really going on with the bank bailout, to tangling with the big banks over dishonest mortgages. But the way I see it, even as they took me this way and that, all five battles were about a single, deeper threat: America’s middle class is under attack. Worse, it’s not under attack by some unstoppable force of nature. It’s in trouble because the game is deliberately rigged.

This book tells a very public story about fraud and bailouts and elections. It also tells a very personal story about mothers and daughters, day care and dogs, aging parents and cranky toddlers. It’s not meant to be a definitive account of any historical event-- it’s just what I saw and what I lived. It’s also a story about losing, learning, and getting stronger along the way. It’s a story about what’s worth fighting for, and how sometimes, even when we fight against very powerful opponents, we can win.

I never expected to go to Washington. Heck, for the most part I never even wanted to go. But I’m here to fight for something that I believe is worth absolutely everything: to give each one of our kids a fighting chance to build a future full of promise and discovery.

She was on This Week with George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, explaining why she left the Republican Party. Her explanation (below) will probably make a lot of sense, not just to Democrats and independents, but to more than a few Republicans as well… though probably not to Andrew Cuomo.