Summary: Elizabeth Warren has withdrawn for the Democratic contest for her Party’s nomination for President of the United States. Her parting is bittersweet, helping clear the field for a binary contest between the pragmatic Joe Biden and the doctrinaire Bernard Sanders. Liz was on the left edge of the field, but she was a happy warrior, unafraid and persistent. Had Joe Biden not been in the race, she would have been my choice, and, I expect, the choice of millions of other voters as well.
“I’ve got a plan for that.”
-Sen. Elizabeth Warren
“She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”
-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell
“Curious that the Emperor of half the world should be defied by a woman who is Queen of half an island.”
-Pope Sixtus V, expressing exasperation about the quarrel between King Philip II of Spain and Queen Elizabeth I of England, after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, 1588
“The past tempts us, the present confuses us, and the future frightens us. And our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast terrible in-between. But there is still time to seize that one last fragile moment.”
-Centauri Emperor Turhan, Babylon 5, “The Coming of Shadows”
Cathedral City, March 5, 2020 --Elizabeth Warren withdrew from the presidential race today. Her parting leaves that lolo wahine Tulsi Gabbard (she’s NAILZ!) and two white, septuagenarian men battling it out for the Democratic nomination. Putting Ms. Gabbard aside, for she has not got the slightest chance of clinching the nomination, the Democratic primary winnowing process has produced a stark choice between Joe Biden, a candidate who wants to restore the soul of America, and Bernard Sanders, an ideological, doctrinaire “revolutionary” who wants to bern it all down.
After Super Tuesday, when Joe Biden experienced his own personal Miracle of the House of Brandenburg, roaring back from what everyone thought would be the end of his campaign to retake leadership in the contest, a comeback in which Joe pwned Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, flaming the Burlington Bolshevik to a well done crisp, other Democratic candidates began to see the handwriting on the wall.
Already, prior to Super Tuesday, Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar and former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg had ended their campaigns and thrown their support behind Vice President Biden. The day after Super Tuesday, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg did the same, and it was said at that time that Elizabeth Warren and her senior campaign staff were evaluating her “way forward.” Translated, that meant that the Massachusetts Senator, who had dramatically underperformed in her efforts to seek the Democratic nomination, was considering an exit strategy.
Though, full disclosure, I have been a steadfast supporter of the quondam vice president since he announced early last year, Elizabeth Warren would have been an equally acceptable choice had Joe not been a part of the field. Her cheerful bearing, her confident affect, her upbeat assurances that “I’ve got a plan for that,” all suggested that here was a candidate who had some intellectual rigor, who had well thought out policy positions that were at significant variance from those of the other candidate on the left side of the field, the bloviating blowhard Burlington Bolshevik Bernard Sanders.
I have to admit having been somewhat disappointed at her sharp elbowed “wine cave” attack on Pete Buttigieg. I was disappointed not because I felt the attack was an appropriate, but because it seemed so out of character for the Elizabeth Warren so many of us had come to know, for the Elizabeth Warren so many of us were prepared to embrace as a president should fate smile upon her and show her to the White House. I think many of us were disappointed because we saw in that unfortunate “wine cave” attack not only a sign of early worry about the viability of her campaign, but also of a disturbing willingness to adopt the tactics of Bernard Sanders.
Now Bernard Sanders is nothing if not a documented misogynist. From a creepy rate-fantasy essay in 1972 to his insistence just last year to Elizabeth Warren, by the way, that a woman could not be elected President, with its implication that woman should not be elected President, the sad Sanders record of misogyny is plain for the entire body politic to see and to draw conclusions about.
Doubtless, champagne corks are popping in Burlington today now that Sanders’s last rival on the far left in the Democratic Party is out of the race. No doubt the prickly Vermont Senator and his acolytes will be drawing from Warren’s withdrawal whatever minute pearl of consolation they can find from the very rough oyster of the shellacking they took on Super Tuesday. Unfortunately, they will also draw the conclusion that their ugly, slash-and-bern style of campaigning is working.
Of course, this is absolutely the wrong conclusion to have drawn. The conclusion that the Sandernistas ought to have drawn delete from Super Tuesday is that the confrontational, condescending, pugilistic, pugnacious, in-your-face, my-way-or-the-highway style of campaigning of which Bernie Sanders and his redeless, cargo-shorts-communist, followers are so enamored has created for them a substantial reservoir of ill will, dislike, and disdain which has redounded to the benefit of Joseph R. Biden, Jr..
As Sanders finds his path to the nomination of a party of which he is not a member narrowing as he himself is more thoroughly vetted by Democratic partisans, we may expect his campaign to begin decompensating in real time. In psychology, decompensation “refers to the inability to maintain defense mechanisms in response to stress, resulting in personality disturbance or psychological imbalance. Some who suffer from narcissistic personality disorder or borderline personality disorder may decompensate into persecutory delusions to defend against a troubling reality.” (Wikipedia)
Sanders’s interview yesterday evening with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow demonstrated how quickly and how badly the Vermont Senator is decompensating. What we expect on a regular basis from Donald Trump we are now witnessing on an equally regular basis from Bernard Sanders.
Sanders has prided himself on being an irascible curmudgeon, and an awful lot of people have latched on to his irascible curmudgeonliness as if he were some kind of lovable, if difficult, uncle or grandfather. Others see Senator Sanders as not the lovable curmudgeon, but as the crazy uncle who crashes the family Thanksgiving after having been specifically disinvited. But, what is known about the Independent senator is that he is in fact a doctrinaire ideologue whose ability, and that of his acolytes, to tolerate differing views is every bit as limited as Donald Trump’s.
Elizabeth Warren, on the other hand, always came across as a fighter, but never as a bully. Her ability to yield with grace when confronted by bullies on the Senate floor earned her a great moral victory over Mitch McConnell. His exasperated attempt to put this uppity woman in her place, expressed in his ill considered statement “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.” may very well have helped start the Aotsunami, the blue Tidal Wave of Democratic victories of 2018.
Elizabeth Warren met Mitch McConnell with the calm defiance with which Elizabeth Tudor met Philip v. Habsburg, Philip II of Spain. And as the Massachusetts Senator stood up to the Grim Reaper, there were echoes of the annoyance with which Pope Sixtus V demanded to know how “the Emperor of half the world should be defied by a woman who is Queen of half an island.”
As Elizabeth Warren leaves the campaign, to return to the Senate, where she can be warned, where she can have explanations proffered to her, and, most importantly, where she can persist, the far left of the Democratic Party finds itself pinning its hopes on a man who, as Republican strategist Karl Rove observed in this morning’s Wall Street Journal, bears a disturbing resemblance to Henry Wallace, the vice president whom Franklin Roosevelt dropped in 1944 in favor of Harry S. Truman. Wallace ran for President in 1948 and came away with all of 2 1/2% of the vote.
As Winston Churchill wrote in The World Crisis, “the terrible ifs accumulate. If Elizabeth Warren had been able to make a go of her presidential campaign. If after having been beaten by nearly 4 million votes in the 2016 primary, Bernard Sanders had been purged from the Democratic Party. If, if, if.
Babylon 5's J. Michael Straczynski, who wrote some of the best teleplays of the 1990s, expressed the difficulty of our national condition in a line from the Babylon 5 episode “The Coming of Shadows:” “The past tempts us, the present confuses us, and the future frightens us. And our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast terrible in-between. But there is still time to seize that one last fragile moment.”
We find ourselves lost in a terrible in between. We are in danger of losing the America in which we have all been raised, and which in our own ways, we all cherish. All of us understand that there is still time to seize that “one last fragile moment,” to reclaim all that is good, and true, and noble about what Abraham Lincoln once called this “last, best hope of earth.” But we dare not choose either Donald Trump’s authoritarian, crypto-Nazi authoritarianism or the doctrinaire Marxist my-way-or-the-highway, Fidel Castro-adulating approach offered to us by Bernard Sanders. Liz understood that. Joe understands that.
In the binary choice that follows, in which the past tempts us, the present confuses us, and the future frightens us, Joe Biden has emerged as the man to seize that one last fragile moment. Hopefully his cabinet, if God vouchsafes him this election, will be composed of the superabundantly talented men and women, from every race and nation, every rank and station, every gender and orientation, who made up the most diverse field of Democratic contenders ever to seek the Presidency of the United States.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is a dyspeptic Democratic attorney who lives in Cathedral city, where he served two terms on the city Council, and practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. The views expressed herein are his own.
No comments:
Post a Comment