It was unfortunate timing that brought Sen. Elizabeth Warren to speak before the AFL-CIO National Summit on Raising Wages at just the moment the world’s attention was fixed on the awful terrorist attack in Paris. But Warren’s message, even if overlooked on the day it was delivered, will resonate through the 2016 Democratic primary race and beyond.
It was the kind of speech a presidential campaign would bill as a “major address” on the economy and America’s future.
In it, Warren crafted a critique of today’s economy that distances her not only from President Obama but also from Hillary Clinton. If Warren were to run for president — and so far she is sticking to a present-tense “not running” non-denial denial — she is in a position to be the Democratic candidate who proposes to actually move forward, rather than preserve or restore some previous president’s accomplishments. That could be a very good place to be in a country apprehensive about the prospect of a backward-looking general-election contest between Clinton and Republican Jeb Bush.
At the labor meeting Wednesday, Warren warned listeners not to be fooled by the good economic news the Obama administration has been touting for months. Yes, Warren gave the president credit for GDP growth, lower unemployment, a rising stock market, and low inflation.
“But I spent most of my career studying what’s happening to America’s middle class,” Warren said. And while those measures are an important “snapshot,” she explained, they don’t “tell much about what’s happening at the ground level to tens of millions of Americans.”
“Despite these cheery numbers,” Warren declared, “America’s middle class is in deep trouble.”
What good is a rising stock market for the half of all Americans who don’t own any stocks? Warren asked. What good is an “uptick” in the GDP for workers at Walmart? And what does a falling unemployment rate really mean when what looks like good news actually reflects a significant number of out-of-work Americans who have grown so discouraged they’re dropped out of the job market altogether?
The problem, Warren said, is that recovery from the Great Recession — that would be Barack Obama’s recovery — cannot mask the fact that for nearly 40 years middle class Americans have been increasingly squeezed between flat wages on one side and higher costs for housing, healthcare and college on the other. At the same time, the top echelon of earners has taken home a greater and greater part of the nation’s wealth.
All that is pretty standard analysis in Warren’s political neighborhood. But its utility for Warren is not only that it establishes her as a even-handed critic of an unpopular president of her own party. (And in whose administration she did not serve.) Warren’s critique also includes the 1990s, when Bill Clinton was president — a time Hillary Clinton points to as golden age that can be restored if Americans elect her in 2016.
“Pretty much the whole Republican Party — and if we’re going to be honest, too many Democrats, have talked about the evils of big government and called for deregulation,” Warren said.
What that deregulation — much of it in the Clinton era — led to was the government “tying the hands of regulators” and “turning loose big banks” to “rig the market” and outsource jobs and deal in risky financial instruments, Warren argued. “In short, turning them loose to do whatever juiced short-term profit, even if it came at the expense of working families.”
Warren did not suggest that there was some wonderful time when Bill Clinton was president and those things didn’t happen. Instead, she set herself against the economic trends of not just Reagan and Bush but Clinton and Obama.
Like many a politician, Warren is stronger on analysis than prescription. Her program is standard issue stuff: a higher minimum wage, “equal pay for equal work,” more infrastructure “investment,” increased union power. Of course, Hillary Clinton wants those things, too.
But when Warren declares that “it’s time to break up the Wall Street banks,” the progressives and the populists swoon. It’s an argument that her rival — the one who’s been the subject of stories like “Hillary Clinton’s big paydays from Goldman Sachs” — cannot make and cannot win. That alone makes Warren a serious potential threat.
If Warren doesn’t run a progressive-populist campaign against Clinton, somebody else will. But watching her Wednesday, there’s no doubt Warren would be the best candidate to challenge her party’s frontrunner. And plenty of Democrats would like to see that happen.
