“People across this country — Republicans, independents, and Democrats — agree that our top priority has to be fighting corruption in Washington,” Massachusets Sen. Elizabeth Warren said in an ad broadcast thousands of times in Iowa ahead of the Feb. 3 caucuses. “I’m not doing big-dollar fundraisers. I’m not selling ambassadorships to donors. I’m not cozying up to super PACs.”
For rank-and-file Democrats, who take it as a matter of faith that “corrupt” campaign finance is the root of all evil in U.S. politics, this is a powerful message because recent history has proven that no amount of facts or evidence can dissuade them from this dogma.
They cannot be persuaded by the persistent inability of wealthy Democrats to buy elections, nor by the failure of the best-funded Democratic candidates. They cannot even be persuaded after 2016 when Hillary Clinton’s campaign outspent Donald Trump’s 2-to-1, and pro-Clinton super PACs outspent pro-Trump super PACs 3-to-1.
The Democratic superstition that money buys elections is so powerful that you can see why Warren would spend so much time and money driving it home. It won her votes in Iowa that she could never have won otherwise.
And that makes it an even bigger deal now that she is completely going back on her promise.
Warren, having derived the benefits of being the “no super PACs” candidate, is now “cozying up” to the biggest super PAC in the Democratic 2020 race. Persist PAC, whose name refers to a confrontation Warren had on the Senate floor in 2017, is in the process of spending $9 million in television and online ads ahead of March 3 — that is, Super Tuesday. And no, it’s not a coincidence. Warren has tacitly admitted that she supports the super PAC’s activities and that it comprises part of her electoral strategy, even if she is not allowed to collude with it formally.
It isn’t hard to see what’s going on here. Voters have now rejected Warren in four consecutive nominating contests, and she trails Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in her own state of Massachusetts. So you could say that without this infusion of super PAC money, Warren is dead in the water.
But with this infusion of super PAC money, Warren is also dead in the water. She is about to prove once again with her own example (not that it will convince Democrats) that money can’t buy elections.
Even before this, the hectoring, lecturing, self-righteous Warren was already the biggest campaign finance hypocrite of the 2020 election cycle. Her glass house was first shattered in December when she attacked South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg for holding a fundraiser in a “wine cave.” With his typical smirk, Buttigieg replied that Warren had used exactly such high-dollar fundraisers to rake in the 2018 Senate campaign money that seeded her presidential campaign.
And it gets even worse. At that time, Warren offered an excuse. She claimed she had given up her big-money ways between her second election campaign for U.S. Senate (which ended in November 2018) and her presidential race (which began in February 2019). It was a curiously timed conversion, given that she could have easily forgone big money in her noncompetitive 2018 race.
But more to the point, what happens to this disingenuous explanation, now that Warren has again planted her snout in the big-money political trough? How has she fallen off the wagon so soon? And most importantly, who will she blame and lecture next for her own personal moral failings?
