Matt Taibbi calls for a run by Elizabeth Warren for the Presidency in 2012. Why? For these reasons. 1) Obama, who ran a wonderful campaign for the presidency isn’t doing well. He hasn’t closed Guantanamo, or stopped incursions of the Government into civil liberties. He’s done a terrible job with the banking bailout, and hasn’t done very much about implementing new regulations. He’s done badly on health care reform. 2) the Democratic Party as currently constituted is more comfortable with its Wall Street, health insurance, and pharmaceutical industry constituents than they are with their voters with whom they’ve lost touch. 3) The Democratic Party no longer has a policy that makes any sense about income distribution and the kind of country we want to be. And 4), and more generally:
”This is all a long-winded way of saying that we have problems whose solutions involve taking on powerful interests, political challenges that will necessarily involve prolonged and hard-fought conflicts, but what we have in the Democratic Party is an organization dedicated to avoiding such conflicts and resolving issues in the manner of a corporate board, in closed meetings with the chief cardholders where things get hashed out to the satisfaction of everyone present.”
To solve these problems we need to run someone:
” . . . who on the one hand is a mainstream politician and on the other is willing to embrace the notion of an open protest against the Democratic Party doctrine. We need for someone who has some legitimacy with both the media and the Democratic Party constituents themselves to come out and publicly campaign to re-seize the Party from the Wall Street interests that have come to dominate it. We need someone who understands the finance stuff (which automatically reduces the pool of possible applicants to a small handful), will know the difference between real regulatory reform and a dog-and-pony show, and will not be likely to fill a cabinet with bankers from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.”
And also:
”We need someone in there who is willing to run one this one issue: who owns the Democratic Party? Is it the voters, or is it Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and United Health Care? There are plenty of candidates out there who’d fit — Toledo’s Marcy Kaptur got a nice bounce from the Michael Moore movie, and Jan Schakowsky is another who comes to mind — but Warren to me makes the most sense for the simple reason that it will be virtually impossible for the Democratic Party hacks to dismiss her as a fringe character, given that they themselves gave her such a big public position as chief of the Congressional Oversight Panel.”
I completely agree with Matt on all of this, even right down to his choice of Elizabeth Warren as the candidate of choice. Progressives can’t keep supporting candidates who are in the pocket of Wall Street and our most prosperous and powerful industries. Frankly, it is the historical role of Republicans to do that. The Democratic Party is supposed to be about the people. Right now, it is not. It always puts Wall Street first. We need to cleanse it somehow. We may need to defeat it in order to cleanse it, even if that means opening the way for Republicans again.
Matt knows about the risk of a challenge to Obama resulting in a Republican win, but he argues, and I agree, that we really have no choice. The Party as it is now is no good to progressives or the American people. Running a candidate like Elizabeth Warren will deliver a needed shock to which the Party will either adjust or open the way for a new Party to represent the people against the interests once again. Matt Taibbi talks about the possibility of waiting two or three election cycles until we can be successful at recapturing the party. I hope it doesn’t take that long. But whether it does or not we just can’t let the corporatists run the Democratic Party any more. If we do, our democracy will become a plutocracy. And the American dream will be gone.
Let’s take back “change we can believe in” and “yes we can.” They belong to us, and not to the President. Here’s to Elizabeth Warren. She has the courage, may she also have the rest of the wherewithal needed to answer the call.
(Also posted at firedoglake.com where there may be more comments)