The Trump era has been tough on Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and no one has been tougher on her than President Trump himself, with his references to her as “Pocahontas.”
With the nickname, the president is playing brass-knuckles politics to remind voters of her undocumented claim to Cherokee Indian heritage. To be politically correct, Warren says she is “part Native American” through her mother’s side of the family.
Warren says she’ll fight back against Trump. “I went to speak to Native American leaders, and I made a promise to them,” she said in a TV interview. “Every time President Trump wants to throw out some kind of racial slur, he wants to try to attack me, I’m going to try to use it as a chance to lift up their stories.”
That won’t petrify Trump. He’s clever, relentless, and enjoys verbal brawls. He usually prevails. And he doesn’t mind taking gratuitous shots. At a recent rally in Pennsylvania, he advised the news media they’d face low TV ratings if he’s not reelected in 2020. “Can you imagine covering Bernie or Pocahontas?” he said.
While Trump is an irritant to Warren, she has bigger problems. The most serious is what appears to be an openness by her party to lean a bit toward the center. This is not unusual before a midterm election. But Warren is bound to view it as a weakening of both her influence on Capitol Hill and her prospects of winning the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020.
That Democrats have the upper hand in 2018 is undisputed (except by Trump), and they want to maximize their gains. They’ve held on tightly to liberal positions on immigration and social issues, but other policies adopted in the Obama years are no longer sacrosanct.
Politico headlined a recent story “Warren at war with fellow Dems.” Indeed she is, and what’s noteworthy is she’s losing the most serious of the battles.
It involves a bipartisan measure to ease the sweeping banking regulations—the Dodd-Frank Act—passed after the 2008 financial crisis. Sixteen Democrats joined Republicans to push the new bill ahead. Warren, along with her left-wing allies, was furious.
And guess what? She’s a poor loser. At the Congressional Progressive Caucus, she said the vote by the 16 defectors “felt like a stab in the heart—not for me, but for all the homeowners who were cheated and the taxpayers who bailed out those banks.”
That wasn’t all. “It’s so hard to fight against all the money and all the lobbying, so hard when we fight and lose,” she said. “But, yeah, it’s worse when some of our teammates don’t even show up for the fight.” That moderate Democrats might vote for deregulation to aid their reelection in Trump states didn’t appear to cross her mind.
But it’s not just Democrats who find themselves on Warren’s enemies list. Her pride and joy in the nation’s capital is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). It was her idea, and it’s an extraordinary piece of work—an agency free from congressional accountability or significant oversight by anyone in Washington except the president, who only gets to name a new CFPB head once every five years.
When Richard Cordray, the first director, departed to run for governor of Ohio, White House budget director Mick Mulvaney stepped in as acting boss. As Warren saw her creation coming apart, Republicans rejoiced. She tweeted that Mulvaney would have to answer her queries or he’d be hauled before the Senate Banking Committee and made to testify under oath.
This episode was dubbed “Elizabeth Warren’s Boomerang” by the Wall Street Journal. Warren had forgotten that she’d constructed CFPB so it wouldn’t have to answer to Congress. Mulvaney was free to ignore her tweets. Under Cordray, the CFPB was anti-business. In Mulvaney’s hands, it’s not.
Nor was Warren’s vision of a new America reflected in Democrat Conor Lamb’s election to the House seat in Pennsylvania’s 18th District, which Trump won in 2016 by 20 percentage points. Lamb, 33, won by 627 votes, enough for him to he anointed as a model Democratic candidate.
An ex-Marine, Lamb is not a Warren acolyte. He will not be joining the Democratic “resistance,” which opposes everything associated with the president. “I will work with anyone to protect our people and bring good jobs here,” he says on his website.
He’s a centrist, pro-union, and likable. Given these traits, Lamb was called a “Trump Democrat” by a few folks on the left. “Sounds like a Republican to me,” Trump said. Lamb’s district is in western Pennsylvania.
A candidate Trump likes won’t be Warren’s favorite. My assumption is Lamb won’t rush to sign up for Warren’s presidential campaign, or Bernie Sanders’s either. Warren is insistent she won’t have one, though her speech last month to the National Congress of American Indians defending her claim to an Indian heritage suggested otherwise.
It’s not that political events since Trump entered the White House stand in the way of a Warren candidacy. But she’s hardly on a winning streak. She needs one.
