2020 hopeful Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., drew a connection between herself and the late President John F. Kennedy at a speech this week.
“Fifty-five years ago, when President John F. Kennedy spoke right here at American University, he said that ‘[o]ur problems are man-made, and therefore, they can be solved by man,'” Warren said. “The same is true today. OK, I’d add they can be solved by women as well.”
Warren occupies the seat that Kennedy, and later his younger brother Edward Kennedy, once held in the U.S. Senate.
President Kennedy uttered the phrase during a commencement speech at American University in June 1963 in which he went on to say “no problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.” He was assassinated in Dallas some five months later.
Evoking Kennedy can be perilous. During a 1988 vice presidential debate, then vice-presidential candidate Dan Quayle said he had as much congressional experience as Kennedy did when he sought the presidency and used it as evidence as to why he was fit to serve as vice president in the George H.W. Bush administration.
“I have far more experience than many others that sought the office of vice president of this country. I have as much experience in the Congress as Jack Kennedy did when he sought the presidency. I will be prepared to deal with the people in the Bush administration, if that unfortunate event would ever occur,” Quayle said.
His opponent, former Democratic Sen. Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, pounced. “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy, I knew Jack Kennedy, Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine,” Bentsen said. “Senator, you are no Jack Kennedy.”
Quayle became vice-president and served for four years before he and Bush lost the 1992 general election but he never shook off his reputation as a callow blunderer.
Warren is one of the front-runners for the Democratic nomination for president in 2020. The Democratic senator is already among the top fundraisers for her party in Congress, has widespread name recognition, and has a history of taking on the president in the public arena. President Trump often refers to the senator as “Pocahontas,” a reference to Warren’s history of repeatedly claiming she has Native American ancestry.
In her speech Warren outlined a foreign policy and trade vision for the U.S. that hit on some of the same populist tones that helped Trump win the White House in 2016. Warren repeatedly hit back at the “elites” in the U.S. and abroad who have struck trade deals, waged wars, and governed for their own benefit at the expense of “working people.”
“In the 1980s, Washington’s focus shifted from policies that benefit everyone to policies that benefit a handful of wealthy elites both here at home and around the world,” she said. “Mistakes piled on mistakes — reckless, endless wars in the Middle East, trade deals rammed through with callous disregard for working people, extraordinary expansion of risk in the global financial system. And why? Mostly to serve the interests of big corporations, while ignoring the interests of American workers.”
On trade, the senator, like Trump has argued, said that “elites” have for too long made trade agreements that helped their own pocketbooks at the expense of the American worker.
Warren also took the opportunity to hit back against the president’s newly struck U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement on trade, which all three world leader’s signed at a ceremony in Argentina Friday morning. The senator previously said the USMCA deal “won’t stop outsourcing, it won’t raise wages, and it won’t create jobs.”
The Massachusetts senator drew stark contrasts between herself and the president over foreign policy. Specifically, Warren pointed to the administration’s policies toward Saudi Arabia following the disappearance and murder of Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi.
“If you’re skeptical that this is a problem, consider this: The president of the United States has refused to halt arms sales to Saudi Arabia in part because he is more interested in appeasing U.S. defense contractors than holding the Saudis accountable for the murder of a Washington Post journalist or for the thousands of Yemeni civilians killed by those weapons,” Warren said.
