Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign isn’t going how she would have hoped. The Massachusetts Democrat has underwhelmed in the first three primary contests, and she isn’t expected to do well in South Carolina this Saturday, either. Her campaign is in do-or-die mode, so her supporters are going all-out.
Now, the Boston Globe, New England’s most influential newspaper, is throwing its weight behind Warren in an attempt to keep her candidacy alive. The only problem? The paper’s editorial board makes a terribly flimsy argument for Warren in its endorsement and overlooks several of the candidate’s biggest flaws.
The Boston Globe says it would prefer any of the Democratic candidates to President Trump, but that “one candidate stands out as a leader with the qualifications, the track record, and the tenacity to defend the principles of democracy, bring fairness to an economy that is excluding too many Americans, and advance a progressive agenda. She would fight the corruption and corporate influence that distort our politics, lift up working families, and combat gun violence and climate change. That candidate is Elizabeth Warren.”
Why does it back Warren over her competitors? Well, the paper cites her promise that she would “make battling corruption her signature legislative initiative before tackling any other” and argues this is “a worthy cause — a root evil worth going to the mat for — in an era of historic dysfunction in Congress.”
So, too, the Boston Globe peddles the narrative that Warren is an ultrawonk with serious plans suited to the challenges of the presidency. “She consistently advocates for policies that have a firm backbone of empirical research and financial analysis,” the paper argues. “[Her plans] are grounded in the documented success of policies here in Massachusetts.”
It paints a fantasy image of policy wonk Warren, the anti-corruption crusader, fighting to get money out of Washington and full of detailed plans to implement in office.
In fact, Warren has no credibility when it comes to fighting corruption or money in politics. Her signature plan, to put a tax on lobbying, is blatantly unconstitutional and would restrict an explicit First Amendment right. How can a candidate be an effective anti-corruption wonk when her biggest proposal to address the issue (much like her proposed wealth tax) is both unconstitutional and unlikely ever to become law?
And Warren’s got a serious hypocrisy problem when it comes to money in politics, too.
The socialist-lite senator slammed her fellow competitor Pete Buttigieg and insisted that she doesn’t take big-money donations or host fundraisers with wealthy donors. That may be mostly true for Warren’s presidential candidacy, but she did that very same thing for years as a senator, raising much of the same money she has now transferred and used to fund her 2020 campaign.
Even the New York Times has called out Warren’s hypocrisy, publishing a piece titled “How Elizabeth Warren Raised Big Money Before She Denounced Big Money.” It reported that “Ms. Warren wooed wealthy donors for years, stockpiling money from fund-raisers, and has used $10.4 million from her 2018 Senate race to underwrite her 2020 bid.”
To top it off, Warren just last week flip-flopped on her long-standing pledge not to take super PAC money. She railed against super PACs and promised not to take “a dime of PAC money in this campaign” — until that became inconvenient, apparently.
Does the Boston Globe really think a total hypocrite like Warren can lead the way to fight money in politics?
So, too, the notion that she’s some sort of policy expert is just liberal media spin. Warren, in reality, is a fake wonk who has put out plan after plan — she’s got a plan for that! — but almost none of these plans are very well thought out. From healthcare to foreign policy to trade to taxation, Warren’s supposedly serious plans crumble when given even mildly critical examination.
Oh, and the newspaper overlooks and entirely omits mention of Warren’s biggest flaw in its glowing endorsement: her rank dishonesty. Over the course of her political career, Warren has pushed falsehoods about Bernie Sanders’s supposed sexism, lied about her father being a janitor, falsely claimed Native American heritage for years, lied about not planning on running for president, lied about her children’s education, lied about taxes, and more.
Disingenuous favorable coverage from the liberal media has propped up Warren’s entire candidacy. This Boston Globe endorsement is no exception.
